ManyRoads is pleased to announce that June 2010 was our busiest month ever.
We had 4341 unique site visits in June of 2010. By large site standards, this is not even a good day, for us it is both exciting and pleasing. We hope that you will continue to visit our site and if possible link to us from yours (if you have one).
Should you have ideas on how we might further improve our sote, please use our contact page.
Again thank you!
Quite a bit has been added to the site since my last missive. Rather than bore you with a lot of details, I will simply outline the changes. The major items or changes to ManyRoads include: 
Additionally I have upgraded the entire site to the newest version of WordPress and everything seems to be running fine. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.
Best regards!
…mark
ManyRoads has just completed a rather extensive software upgrade. We moved from version 2.9.2 of WordPress to version 3.0.
So far as I can tell things are working just fine, however…
If you notice any problems I would greatly appreciate a message regarding the problem(s) so I can track them down and fix them. Feel free to use our Contact page to let me know.
On this page you will find presentations I have created/delivered to a wonderful group in Parker, Colorado- The Parker Genealogical Society. Presentations are available here for anyone to view and/or download.
I hope you find them useful.
What's in a name?- Delivered 12 June 2010 Quebec Genealogy- Delivered 09 October 2010A recent posting I placed on ManyRoads has provided me with some new insights into life, progress and accommodating the past. As an old adage notes, you can not control the problems life presents you with, but you can choose how you react to them. And, this is true.
The following historical facts are true:
Given the above facts, the current residents of region could readily have chosen to continue to deny the past, excuse the pain, and work to erase the area’s German history. However, over the past several years (probably since the demise of Communism and with Poland’s entry into the EU) there are notable changes in spirit and behavior including:
As a person whose forebears were from Zeyer and Kreis Elbing, I appreciate the thoughtfulness and difficulties associated with taking this broader approach. Hopefully tolerance and peace are finally finding a home in this long troubled area.
Yesterday was a high water mark for our readership numbers. We had 218 unique visits; our previously most active readership day was with 206.
Thank you to everyone of you who spend time with us on ManyRoads. We are immensely pleased that you take the time to visit us. If you have comments or information you would like to share or augment, please feel free to use our contact page to let me know.
Again, thank you!
There are a fairly astonishing number of hidden and nearly hidden functions on good websites.
In communities communication between members is essential. The same is true of the internet. Good websites speak with one another and need to be known to each other. To accomplish these objectives ManyRoads employs additional hidden and not quite hidden functions, including:
One of the great strengths of using an open source (or I suppose for fee) web development toolkit like WordPress is the wealth of add-ons that are available for you to employ to augment your site’s functionality and reach.
As I noted in an earlier posting, I am going to attempt to highlight several adjunctive software components which are employed on ManyRoads and how they help make the site a better and easier tool to use. In this post I will focus on Plugins that are largely invisible to the end user… or so they might seem.
As you hopefully are aware, there are lots of people on the web who would use your work for their own purposes. The most common class of these are spammers. Yes, websites can be spammed and almost always are. To prevent your site from accumulating undesired Comments, Posts, emails you need ‘weapons’, you need protection. The plugins, as well as other software functions, I find extremely helpful in this realm are:
We are seeking to complete our collection of all known Elbing Prussia (Kreis Elbing Westpreussen) Address and Telephone Books. 
Please note we are only interested in obtaining copies of texts which were printed before 1945 prior to the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of the German population after the end of World War 2.
A complete inventory of the texts in our possession are freely available and accessible on this site. If you know of additional texts, texts we do not currently list, please let us know and we will make very effort to identify and/or create an electronic copy to make available on ManyRoads.
Once we have a completed collection, we will place copies of all of our texts in the public domain on a site other than ManyRoads for redundancy and preservation purposes. It is our hope to preserve this piece of Elbing history for genealogical and historical purposes. Rest assured a copy of these documents as well as other Kreis Elbing documents will remain on ManyRoads for as long as I am able to keep the site operational.
Everyone one needs a good home. Your family website is no exception.
database
There are lots of reasons to choose one method over another, we have settled on having a company ISP- Internet Service Provider) run our web-site operations (data center and network) for us.
We tried running our own server in our home for several years before arriving at this junction. What we learned is:
Given these factors we ultimately elected to have ManyRoads hosted on 
Hostpapa is a good (but not perfect) choice for us for numerous reasons including their provision of:
Whatever you choose, you need to find a safe home for your family genealogy materials, somplace secure, reliable, and offering good ethical values. Hostpapa works well for us and a $5.00 USD per month we find it to be a comfortable and affordable home.
If you were watching closely, you probably noticed a new logo at the bottom on the ManyRoads web pages.
Although the image links to the single most popular piece of open source software that I use on ManyRoads, there are numerous additional tools employed in the creation and management of our website and family history.
Included among these are the following:
Obviously, I use software in addition to the aforementioned but these are among the tools most used in delivering, creating and maintaining the ManyRoads web presence.
Sometimes you just want a copy of a text. If that text is published using DJVU, here’s a fairly quick method for capturing and downloading a copy. By the way, this should work on all the ManyRoads DJVU files as well.
DJVU files can best and most predictably be downloaded from within the DJVU document itself. Unlikle PDF, DJVU publishers have the option of preserving and presenting their materials as many files not just a single large file (Bundled versus unbundled). As a result, what you are reading may simply be the initial link to a DJVU directory not a single bundled file.
To achieve your objective of copying a DJVU document, do the following:
That should get you a copy, this of course assumes your are using version 4 of DJVU or newer. DJVU version 3 and earlier is a lot more difficult (at least for me).
This post contains the content of the ManyRoads Newsletter:
Welcome to the first ManyRoads Newsletter!
First let me thank everyone for signing up to our little ‘news’ service. I promise not to over crowd your email with tons of messages. My intention is to write one or two of these per month. Each will attempt to provide a brief synopsis of the recent happenings at ManyRoads.
Since this is the first of these messages I would also encourage you to tell me what changes, additions, deletions, or modifications you might like to see in either the newsletter or on ManyRoads. Without your thoughts and input things tend to get a bit one-sided! Anyway, here’s the news…
Areas where I am a bit stuck include:
ManyRoads most active areas of research:
I think that covers the highlights. Again please let me know if this newsletter seems useful and what you’d like to see both here and on ManyRoads.
Best regards!
…mark
There are genealogy thieves out there!
Because of certain circumstances as well as the nature of our information, we have taken the drastic action of providing copy protection for all data and images on the WordPress side of ManyRoads.
Believe me, we do enjoy sharing our information, we truly do.
We just want to know where it goes and who is using it.
If you’d like any of our information, please use our contact form to request it. We are happy to be generous.
For those of you who use WordPress (and I recommend you do if you have need for a web-based version of your genealogy materials), I am using the Wp-PreventCopyBlogs WordPress Plugin to protect our materials. This plugin provides the following features:
Over the past approximately 70,000 page reads on ManyRoads, the following pages have been most viewed by our readers:
This is a copy of my genealogical presentation I delivered on 12 June 2010 in Parker, CO. You may download it here.
What's in a name?- Delivered 12 June 2010
Many search but few find…
I think that old quote pretty much sums up what happens when searching for the right genealogical toolset.
Too often, people believe that their hardware or operating platform defines their selection choices. In truth, it rarely does. Almost any tool can be run on any platform. Certainly a bit of technical prowess may be required in order to achieve interoperability but it is very doable.
No, the reasons for picking a genealogical toolset should be based on your genealogy management needs not operating or hardware systems. What follows, in no particular order, are most of the factors that I personally see as being important (and I used for my choice of GRAMPS):
To me, these factors are much more important in determining whether or not any software package is going to do the job you want. Do not confine yourself to the narrow realms of your operating system or hardware platform. Pick the tool you think best satisfies your actual needs and find out how to make it work on the hardware or OS you have.
Here are a couple of examples of my tools at work
With the latest release of GRAMPS (version 3.2.2) I have been able to more tightly integrate the WebSite output of GRAMPS with the ManyRoads site. With this most recent release I have the flexibility of generating html pages- YAY! I am now able to provide the following functions quite easily:
All in all this additional functionality makes the total site function more smoorthly and in a more integrated fashion. There remain several ‘intergration’ features/ items that would be helpful to GRAMPS -IMHO. These include:
Excepting the ugly display of html, each of the remaining tasks can be performed manually; it just would be nicer if they we a more standard function within GRAMPS.
The bottom line is that I am VERY happy with GRAMPS. It is easier to use than most commecially available genealogy tool sets, and the support from the GRAMPS team is exceptional! Kudos to GRAMPS.
As I uncover (learn) more I’ll share it here.
Merging branches (also known as cutting and pruning) is something you will most certainly need to do; unless you never make mistakes! I just encountered a situation like that with my Deyo Branch (I seem to enjoy making mistakes in this line…).
By way of providing background, a newly discovered relative was kind enough to point out that I might have made an error in selecting Joseph Dion’s parentage. The good news and bad news is, he was correct. I had Joseph linked to an incorrect branch of the Guyon family tree. It was a very nice branch, just not the right one… Well after much panic and research, I built a new branch of the Deyo Family Tree. It joined up with the old male line about three generations out; had a completely different matrilineal line.
With paper I’m guessing you’d just need a big eraser and a newly sharpened pencil… ‘unfortunately’ software is much more robust and requires a lot more planning. I could not leave my genealogy database as it was, so here’s what I did (oh and you can do this too with your genealogy software). Before going too much further I think you should know that I recommend doing everything ‘the hard way’ by that I mean without pushing a button to delete and then merge branches and the following process description reflects this approach.
You should now be done and hopefully things will work like you had hoped. You can see my efforts on the Deyo Branch of our family tree. This method will leave the old branches in your main tree, should you wish to reconnect to them. In my case the branch started with 447 people; I added 201 new people from new family sections and after clean-up have 591 individuals.
Numerous excellent FREE genealogy sites are available- probably too many to mention. Beyond the sites listed below from LovetoKnow, I suggest the following exceptional sites (obviously these relate heavily to my areas of research):
Roots Web
Huge database of ancestry data. Be sure to check out the information on how to get started. Also offers many tools and resources in addition to information such as charts and forms for tracking your family tree. Also find related mailing lists and message boards. [This site is owned and operated by Ancestry.com these days.]USGen Web Project
Volunteers and researchers work to provide free genealogy resources to those searching for the roots to their family tree. Easy to search by state or name. The site has several genealogy projects going in addition to this website. One of the projects is a census project.Family Search
Many of the resources at this are free, although there are some paid resources. Check out the handy research guides and find out how to get the most from your efforts. Also offers Jewish family history resources and African American resources. Register for free for further access to records. [This site is owned and operated by the LDS Church and is under-going a major renovation and expansion.]Ancestral Findings
Request a free lookup (up to 2 per day). Many different articles on how to find your ancestors, including how to make sure you’ve found the right person. Tons of free databases on this site, including Irish Ancestry, Native American, Mexican and United Kingdom.Gen Graphics
Clipart for creating a family tree or genealogy website. Includes family tree graphics and layouts as well as other graphics and forms. For an example of how to lay out an ancestry page on your own website, check out the site owner’s layout. Obsolete Site 28 Jul 2010Search for Ancestors
In addition to free searches for family members on your tree, you can also try out the tombstone birthday calculator. Be sure to visit the freebies page for goodies such as free charts, databases, research guidance, lessons, free trial offers and free articles and tips. [Appears to be another Ancestry.com affiliated site.]Family History Circle
Blog detailing many of the latest news in the genealogy world. Includes an Ancestral Weekly Journal. Categories cover topics such as journal articles, a weekly planner, tips from the pros, quick tips from visitors, quote of the day and what happened in different years.Genealogy.com
Biography assistant allows people to post notes on people in their family and draw from what other users have written. The “Genealogy How-To” section covers topics such as getting started in genealogy, getting organized, and developing research skills.Footnote
Unique site allows users to post different types of documents and records for others to peruse. For example, there is an area on Revolutionary War documents, and another on Pennsylvania archives from 1664-1880. Don’t miss the spotlights page for feature item.FamilyLink.com
Sign up for free at Family Link and upload your personal profile. Fill in the information you know about your family tree and then seek the advice of local genealogists in your area or the area from which your family hails. You can also do a quick search by surname or areas in the world.Copyright © 2004 – 2010 LoveToKnow Corp All Rights Reserved.
Share your information! It’s a really good idea. Almost certainly someone out there is looking for a family member or two of yours.
The corollary is: you know how hard it has been for you to find reliable information, why not make it easier for everyone by generously making your work shareable. Of course, you want to protect your living relatives. You also want to be acknowledged for your efforts. Each of these objectives are easily achieved.
I make my publicly viewable data available on FamilySeekeer and GenealogyToday. I also plan on making it available at TNG.
For those of you who are not familiar with GENDEX here’s a brief write-up on what it is as described by GenealogyToday.com:
The gendex.txt concept was developed by Eugene W. Stark who included the feature in his GEDCOM to HTML translator software, GED2HTML, which helped people publish their family trees on the Internet.
GED2HTML is a program that inputs genealogical data in GEDCOM format, and outputs a collection of HTML files suitable for presentation on the World Wide Web. The output produced consists of HTML files containing the individual data, an index suitable for quickly locating an individual by name and an auxiliary surname index with links to the first individual with each surname.
The gendex.txt files were originally accepted by Stark’s GENDEX site, but since that site was retired in 2004, other sites (including ours) have begun supporting the format.
We have added the following items to ManyRoads over the last few weeks:
Integrating GRAMPS and WordPress is a very straightforward activity. Not a lot of special skills or tools are required in order to make this integration work smoothly. I have to say it is one of the things I like best about GRAMPS.
A couple of points worth remembering (knowing?) first:
So on to the integration… there are basically 5 major steps:
If you want to see this in action you may view it at:
People fear the past… they fear their history. I have had countless conversations with family genealogists who have problems bringing unwanted, or bad news to their families. The bad news is ‘how you say???’ — rarely well received.
Bad news is a term I use loosely. More precisely I am referring to the news that family members don’t want to hear. Or in my case, they have other tales and myths that they really want you to re-enforce, not deny.
If you have looked closely at this site (ManyRoads), you have noticed news like that. Every family has undesireables, be they facts, people or circumstances. However the truth is always the best policy!
What I tell people when they encounter genealogical resistence is to have their recalcitrants stand in front of a mirror; look closely at what they see; and thank all those people and stories they want to know nothing about. Were it not for those predecessors they would not be there. The reflection would be someone else. We are our accumulated past. The interesting people, the boring people, the successful people, the failures… we are all of that and more.
We are interesting! And the truth of who we are is essential.
Today we have published three (3) branches of our genealogy; two (2) are available for public access.
I have customized the output of GRAMPS standard web generation tools (NAVWEB) to create a look & feel that is consistent with the ManyRoads website. Please be aware that there remain bugs in the tooling (such as the web links from GRAMPS outward do not display or work correctly). Also, and more importantly, the data continues to be a work in progress. As with most family genealogies you will notice that ours is not balanaced in terms of distance in time or breadth of known ancestry. I guess that’s all part of the fun!
We hope you find the information useful, informative and easy to follow.
Should you have information that you’d like to share with us please use our Contact page.
The first of our on-line family trees is now available- The Deyo Family Line.
It is readily accessible from our Menus simply by selecting Genealogy and then Deyo Family (Branch). Using the GRAMPS integration approach, there are no user/ password requirements for gaining access to and open family line.
This portion of our tree is by no means finished or complete. I have numerous documents (meaning hundreds) that remain to be added and linked to the appropriate family member records. However, should you wish to receive a copy of the GEDCOM for this section of our genealogy, simply contact me to request a copy; I’ll send my most recent file your way. Eventually, I will post a file for user download; when things get closer to the finish line!
Based upon my decision to use GRAMPS as our primary genealogical database management environment, I have begun the transfer of family branches (both public and private) into our new format. If you look closely, you should notice the appearance of new page links from our various menus…
As I undertake this transition, I will be going through quite a bit of re-entry and re-building of our data. Today I placed a private file online. In the next week or so I hope to transfer the Deyo Family materials from TNG into the new GRAMPS format. Each of these efforts will be incremental, meaning as soon as I have useful data, it will go on-line.
Wish me luck!
Ancestry files require a lot of clean-up before they are really useful or accurate. As I noted earlier, the files themselves need to be scrubbed of duplicates, overlapping records and more.
In order to accomplish these repairs, I use numerous tools to address the requisite tasks including:
The clean-up of a 500 person tree took me about three days (25 hours) of effort. Each of the tools alone would not have done the job by themselves. Numerous tools were required to repair the problems both introduced and allowed by Ancestry.com.
In a subsequent article, I’ll cover additional pointers to watch-out for when you embark on a conversion and clean-up effort.
We are very pleased to announce that our genealogical data is finally coming online!
Due to family concerns, not everything will be made available. However, the information which can be, will be, provided to our readership. Initially, the information will be through public access username/password combinations which we will provide. Ultimately, we hope to set things up such that the access will be even easier and more direct. We intend to provide GEDCOM files for all of our publicly available data as well. However, that may also take a while as we really don’t want to provide partially completed work. If you want early releases of any of our files, please contact me directly.
Our information will be made accessible on our Genealogy page, as it becomes available. Our first dataset is the Deyo Family Branch!
I apologize for any inconvenience but ManyRoads may experience performance problems due to server maintenance planned by our web host provider. Time frames for the maintenance are 2300-0500 on both Saturday and Sunday (Eastern US time).
Norway offers exceptional internet research facilities for genealogy.
Although we have not been working in the Sivertsen family line very long we have uncovered some very helpful web-tools. Thus far we have unearthed several excellent, dare I say indispensable, tools:
There are other sites worth using to help get the ball rolling such as those assisting with Nowegian Gothic script, naming conventions, etc. Some of those links may be found on our links page under Scandinavia Genealogy.
I have begun in earnest working on Becky’s side of the family. This means research in both Norway and Sweden has started for me. As one might expect the available references and information are a ‘tad’ difficult for non-native language speakers; and my German is not really very close to either Norwegian or Swedish!
Having said that I must say that the available resources are quite exceptional. I find those from Norway to be a bit more advanced and easier to use (not to mention free!). Sweden’s are less complete, more awkward technologically and they cost money; unless you go to your local LDS Family History Center for free access.
I will be posting what I believe are the most useful links (in my humble? opinion-IMHO) on ManyRoads. If you have some excellent links and pointers to share, please contact me so I can post them -or- just write a comment here.
Tell your friends! It’s now official.
I will be speaking at two separate meetings of the Parker (Colorado) Genealogical Society.
Meeting Location:
Stroh Ranch Fire Station (New Location)
19310 Stroh Ranch Road
Parker, Colorado
2nd Saturday of each month (except December will be the 1st Saturday)
Business Meeting: 1:30pm – 2pm
Speaker: 2pm – 3:30pm
My sessions will take place on 12 June 2010 and 9 October 2010. As might guess from the above, if you can make it, plan on being there at 1330 or 1:30pm. The subjects I will speak on are:
We found that our old website theme was getting a bit long in the tooth so we have made a change. Obviously though we are not the only people reading the site. To that end…
We would greatly appreciate your comments on our new site layout, fonts, etc. We also would like to hear of any problems that you might encounter with the theme, so we can fix them.
Today our 10,000 visitor since 13 December stopped by- December 13 2009 is the day we began tracking our visitors. During that same time, we have had more than 40,000 page reads on ManyRoads from all of you.
THANK YOU everyone!
We truly appreciate your interest and visits. We hope you find our site to be of value and enjoy the information we offer. Please do not hesitate to let us know what you find useful. If you have a few minutes we also would appreciate hearing from you either directly or in our Guestbook.
Mark & Becky Rabideau
database
Today we added a dozen+ new texts in our Quebec library.
I hope you find them helpful. Please feel free to let me know if there are other texts you’d like to see online, or if you encounter difficulties with ours.
Books offer some of the best information! Personally, I find history texts and map books to especially helpful in doing my genealogy work. So if you are like me and are always looking for good places to obtain free textbooks, I highly recommend the following web locations:
If you have places you’d like to contribute to this little list, please feel free to send them along or add them via a comment.
Some of the most useful genealogy sites and locations, often are not genealogical in nature, include the following:
I am working at providing and easier more direct method of getting to our pages, posts, maps, links, and downloads. If you want to check things out please visit our Topics page to see what I am up to these days.
I am hoping to make “all” of our content reachable by no more that two clicks from the Topics page.
Currently the page is incomplete and in flux as I attempt various design and link paradigms. I think I am getting close to a good design but I could greatly benefit from your insights as site users. If you have comments or suggestions that you would like to share please use our contact page to let me know.
Over the weekend I have made a few changes that “are supposed” to help make our site more accessible. I would appreciate any feedback that you might have with respect to these new tools.
On each page you should notice a button to access and use Google Buzz. Assuming you are a user of this new toolset, I would love to hear about the usefulness of the new plugin I installed.
I have installed a new feature that should allow easier access to ManyRoads from an Android or iPod phone. Again, please let me know how this seems to work.
Please feel free to use our contact page to send me any comments.
During the past few months, I have been honored by my friends at the Parker Family History Center; they have expressed interest in having me speak at numerous genealogy groups with which they are involved including the Parker Genealogy Group, the Colorado Genealogical Society and the Parker LDS Family History Center.
Here are excerpts of the comments I have received on my presentations thus far:
Thank you so much. I will take your information to our next meeting and ask the members what they would most like to learn. The Colorado Genealogical Council has a speaker’s list available for all the genealogical societies and I would like to add your name and information to that list. [...] I’m very excited about what you have to offer. [...]thanks again.
Thank you very much for your program June 12th and PGS is looking forward to Oct 9th. I would love to see any programs you give wherever they are and to the Colorado Genealogical Council and Parker Family History center. The [people] who are in charge of the Family History Center will be in touch with you about your programs and when they might be. I was asked by the Colorado Genealogical Council to give them names of people I knew who are great speakers. I gave them your name. [...] Thank you for your interest and for just being you.
Chrome, to my knowledge, does not ‘yet’ support reading DJVU files. I have looked up and down for a plugin without any success. If you are using Chrome on this site this deficiency will make reading documents difficult. Should you know of a way to read DJVU files in Chrome please share that with us either via comment or using our contact page.
On another note, you may have noticed that I replaced the Tweet/retweet function on this site. The previous Tweet plugin stopped working in Firefox after a software upgrade. Hopefully the new Tweet plugin will continue to work.
I apologize for the Database Connection Errors you may have been getting. The problem is with our site control panel. Our host is working to fix the problem. I appreciate your patience and understanding.
The Deyos- 1800-1982 [written by Wilfred Frank Deyo circa 1982]
The writer, Wilfred Frank Deyo will incorporate -the following information available as of October 8, 1982 into the “Deyo Family History”- 1800-1982-From Canada to the United States of America which he hopes to put together in the not too distant future. More
Based on data and input I have received from various people, I believe I have traced and documented a “plausible” genealogy for the Joseph Deo family leading back to France in the late 1600s.
If anyone is interested in reviewing the tree and commenting on what I have pieced together, please contact me.
Numerous photo galleries on our site have recently been either created or updated. These galleries will continue to be reworked and reorganized; however, they represent a reasonable start to my organizing ‘things’. More
In addition to Luise Senger who joined the Deutsche Luftwaffe towards the end of World War 2, numerous friends and family members of the Senger family were either inducted into or volunteered for German military service.
Below are the photos of those we have in our collection. If you happen to know any of these individuals, please contact us. We’d love to hear from you.
Tommy was an English war prisoner who spent most of World War 2 working on the Senger family farm in Zeyervorderkampen. He was originally captured by German forces at Dunkirk in 1940 and he spent more than 4 years of the war working on and about the Senger farm. As you might gather from the photo, he was a good looking young man in town with few during a time of total war and mobilization.
We would love to hear from him or his family.
Click on the to see a full-size image.
Getting a good picture from an aged image is crucial to developing and maintaining a good family history. Unfortunately as you look around ManyRoads, you’ll notice countless images that ought to be fixed. Aside from being a tad lazy, the skills required to accomplish this effort are significant and confusing. More
I’d like to take a brief opportunity to thank the many people who have sent me information, pictures, and data to place on ManyRoads.
It is my hope to keep this list up to date. So if you have sent me materials and through an error of omission (not commission) I somehow have neglected to add your name to the list, please remind me via our Contact page. More
 circa 1942.jpg)
 circa 1940.jpg)
