Well, I've been
spending my free time over the last couple days mapping out some further family
history for a reader. She had caught my January 31 post mentioning the source-book for the
translations, charts, and casual research I've been doing for (and on) my dad's
side of the family. The author of that book, a Felix von Schroeder, was a
cousin of my dad's, a couple notches over, so the he and Dad had a quarter of
their ancestry in common. That quarter of the book is quite a lot of data!
And so, based mostly
on his thorough work of many years, I've been able to map out just about every
line that descends from the fourteenth or fifteenth century to the present –
me, that is, and my siblings and our kids. However, since the reader is
descended from Schroeders, she asked for more information on what von Schroeder
had written specific to his own family. And the two Schroeder-lines – one
directly to cousin Felix, and another that married into his line in the 1870s –
do not descend to my immediate family, so I never worked with that much larger
group, and had nothing to offer her.
But some snow this
morning, and the prospect of ice and a horrendous drive back from work this
afternoon, kept me at home today, and I was able to complete a first-pass
spreadsheet showing those two lines. While I added popup comments to detail
dates and places, I did not expand the work (as I had with my family's lines)
beyond its straight son-of or daughter-of structure – i.e., no brother/sisters
(and their descendants) of his ancestors.
The reason is twofold:
to save time, and give her a basic lineup as quickly as I could; and also
because it's likely she's not descended from either of these Schroeder lines.
How can I tell? One group seems to have stuck largely around Dresden (hope they
got out ahead of the firebombing in 1945), and the other around what's now Kaliningrad, Russia.
I'm going to post the
spreadsheet here for a couple further reasons: to show you what a basic,
slimmed-down line looks like… and to experiment further with WordPress and see
if I can figure out how to embed an actual spreadsheet; if need be, I'll wimp
out and convert to a Word table, and paste. But I'm more ambitious than that.
Ultimately, I want to be able (possibly under a side-blog) to put up a number
of my own family's charts – and some of those are really extensive!!
Okay, it says here
that I can import only DOC, GIF, JP(E)G, PDF, PNG, and PPT formats. Dag. But I
can work with that; there are at least three ways (varying difficulty) to
convert an XLS to a JPG. Give me a moment…
Pity, that I can't do
this (yet) in a format that would allow rollovers and popups. But, oh, well –
it's a start. In fact, it doesn't look all that bad... especially once I fixed
the usual chopping-up of the paragraphs above, uneven breaks, etc. Getting better!
But there's plenty more for me to learn, and more that can be learned, before this bog starts getting that especially
professional look some of them on WordPress have.
Must take up XML
coding next...
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