Choice of software: doesn’t matter as long as it includes GEDitCOM data (I want to call it GENDATA, but it is usually called a GEDCOM file). It looks as though a GEDCOM file can be quite easily converted to html and uploaded that way. I’m using – when writing this– an Apple G4 (big enough to go under a desk, not on it) using OS X 10.7.x (Lion, not Mountain Lion) and is an dual-core Intel machine; I use dual 23” screens.
How to display this stuff? We will see what happens as I work through one of the Mac-based s/w packages – I’m looking at what is offered as free download, but most of those turned out to be demo packages.
Heredis(Mac) [free download turns out to be not supported, new version (Lion) not yet released]
Reunion [looks quite good and flexible, but $100 and $60 for upgrades]
(Mac)Family Tree [$60].
I refused to pay that sort of money and went for Gramps from SourceForge. Some of the input techniques are a bit irritating, but:
• it costs nothing
• it works
• it allows a lot of input possibilities
• it allows many input & output transfers, with only a little likely loss of info.
Problem of security: no living family members can be included in stuff for general access. That requires sensible suggestions to be made as to how—as a family—we can record additions. Supplying someone’s mother’s maiden name to outsiders is not a good idea (thinking of security questions for other systems’ access). Sharing should be within the family. Obviously, any Scoins should have access; it seems to me that most non-Scoins shouldn’t have access. I don’t know how to do that sensibly and I’d like some helpful suggestions. What I’m going to do is leave out a lot of data for the live (dates, addresses, jobs, etc) and only supply names and (implied) relationships.
I have, in 2014, two suggestions to include thumbnail photos.
I have no suggestions what to do about the living, yet there is interest within the (very much) extended family. Perhaps the problem only arises when publishing?
Files: label by oldest relative with birth year. Runs up to but not including those still alive. I show below the separated stubs of the tree:
John 1789 showing 4/8 generations John 1789
Richard 1799 showing 5/9 generations Richard 1799
Robert 1820 showing 4/7 generations Robert 1820
In the middle of 2015, while the spouse was in China, I had a bit of a blitz on the data, with huge help from the family Scoins FB group page. This makes my mass of collected data rather firmer and I report that it is a great assist to have people to ask and to share questions. Sometimes they’ve answered this, sometimes you raise a question that resolves an issue they have been having. I have a very much larger database than I am prepared to show on here, in line with the issues raised above.
However, the wider we confirms belief that Onesimus Skoines (Onn-EE-sih-muss) is as far back as we can go with any reliability, and that the others pooh-pooh my suggestion of Huguenot escape, pointing to the large numbers of Skoines around when Onesimus left traces.
So I could publish that earliest part….
Sources of information:
1 mostly the extensive work Eric Stanley Scoins [ESS] did in the period 1975-1990 while we corresponded together.
2 other members of the extended family who are interested, met via facebook
2.1 Mabel Scoins, Redcar, Cleveland, 1982 (the family came to visit)
2.2 Oh, I wish people would communicate.
DJS 20120824
Picture is of ESS and DJS; 1988
Minor edits 20141105
Repost with minimal edits 20171113
Interaction with the Facebook group has enlarged the information, denying some points I had held to and confirming others I had disregarded. So there is the link back to Onesimus to declare here, not yet done.