Site Information

This site was developed using the vim text editor. Originally written to the HTML 4.01 transitional standard, I first converted the html to use Cascading Style Sheets and have now converted the main pages to xhtml.

The computer is a homebuilt one based around a QDI Advance 9 motherboard with a Celeron 633 processor and 512 Mb of memory. The video card is a Matrox G400 with 32 Mb of video RAM. This has now been retired and replaced by a much faster system I use an Epson GT-7000 scanner attached via a scsi interface.

The operating system is Debian GNU/Linux. and I use the Debian Sid, aka unstable, distribution. Despite its name I have found it fairly stable in everyday use.

Originally photographs were taken with an Olympus C990 Zoom digital camera at high resolution and reduced for web reproduction with ImageMagick. This camera has been replaced by a FinePix S5600. The banner heading for the pages was designed by Peter Goff and slightly modified for this site using 'The Gimp'

I am slowly building my collection of Parish Register, etc. fiche and would like to say a big thank you to Hampshire Records Office for copying their large collection of Parish Registers to fiche and making them available at modest cost. I use an Eyecon 3000 fiche reader to access these. The Hampshire GS and Berkshire FHS publications are also invaluable. The FreeBMD website is fast becoming an extremly valuable resource. Ancestry.Com and its collection of Census images has been very usefull in helping to correct errors made when working only from Census indexesI

I use Geneweb for recording all the family history data. This program is available for the Linux, MacOSX and MS Windows platforms. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence and can be downloaded free of charge. There is much information about the program and demonstration databases on the GeneWeb website.

The Picture Gallery uses another Linux application called 'Gallery2'. it can be downloaded from Gallery

Thanks are due to Mark Lewis (no relation) who gave me the 'startx.co.uk' domain name. 'startx' is the command used in Linux to start the grapical user interface.

The website is now hosted on a Private Virtual Server provided by Bitfolk Ltd