When I first started publishing my ancestors' genealogy on the web I was restricted in two ways – limited space on the web site and the actual format in which I presented the information. Originally, I was publishing my information in a format that is known as a Descendency Register. This is a standard genealogy report that lists all of the descendants of a particular progenitor in a long, winding format, indented at each generation. A lengthy descendency register can be quite tedious to read.

For a long time I struggled with both the data entry and the data presentation problems. My main goal all along was to get something down on paper regarding these research efforts that would be understandable by folks close to me and who were not involved in genealogical research, but who were definitely interested in the work. Each time I got deeper and deeper into finding more information I kept coming up and asking: "How am I going to explain all of this to anyone else?"

This website was one of my answers to this question and my goal all along has been to eventually put the contents of the website on a genealogy CD ROM for future preservation, but the more that I looked at electronic publishing I could see all sorts of problems. For one thing, I was having trouble seeing the day when the computer would replace the printed page. I think that most people prefer to read a book rather than stare at a computer screen. They want to hold a piece of paper in their hands and not have to sit in front of a monitor if they have a lot of information to absorb; hence, my decision to compromise and to write Gathering Leaves - the book.

After a few years, I had switched from using Family Tree Maker and was using another genealogy software package produced by FamilySearch.org. Personal Ancestral File (PAF) was free and had a number of features that Family Tree Maker did not have. One such feature was the ability to produce reports in the HTML format. At first, I thought that I had found exactly what I was looking for. I did prefer the data entry interface in PAF over the one offered by FTM, but I found that the HTML output produced by PAF was lacking in a number regards. After searching the web, I found a few programs out there designed specifically for reading a GEDCOM file and producing output in HTML format. After trying out a couple of them I decided that I would just go ahead and write my own GEDCOM-to-HTML genealogy tool. The result of this was a program that I titled UncleGED. I used UncleGED as my publishing tool for nearly five years and I think that it served me very well. Since UncleGED worked well for me, I thought why not offer it on my website and let others use it. Over the years the application has been downloaded by thousands of users. One of the very first people who downloaded UncleGED has been using my product to produce his website, Don Knibbs' - Our Knibbs Family, since the year 2000. Both his website and my product received a mention in a how-to book for people wanting to create their own family history web site (see Planting Your Family Tree Online by Cyndi Howells).

Around 2003 I switched genealogy software once more and started using The Master Genealogist (TMG) produced by Wholly Genes, Inc. The learning curve for TMG was quite steep and it took me about a year before I was fully comfortable with it. As far as publishing went, I continued to export my data out to GEDCOM and then use UncleGED to generate the web pages. This ended when I discovered, SecondSite, a companion product for TMG produced by John Cardinal. SecondSite interfaces directly with the TMG database and produces HTML output in a variety of styles and formats.

Using SecondSite (see left sidebar for links), I have divided my genealogy research data into four sections: