Genealogy |
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9 März 2024 - Adetswil
The first thing I wrote and posted on the internet was in 1997. It was an article for the Presbyterian College Net Publication on the recent creation of the Nunavut Territory in Canada. At the same time I was introdueced to Unix and became the editor of the publication in 1998 when the two founders graduated. But for a variety of reasons I transferred from Presbyterian after the Summer of 1998, and so the Publication died. So much for the internet being forever...
At GA Tech I took Intro to Computer Science my first quarter and as part of the class set up the webpage that has evolved into what you see here. My personal website. Before MySpace & Facebook came along and made it easy for anyone to post things about themselves for everone to see. The internet was kind of niche at the time. It was 1998 - before the dotcom boom and bust.
When my third child, Maxwell, was born in 2003 I decided to take my internet skills and create a genealogy website for my kids to learn about our history. I'd taken over my grandfather's genealogy work when he died in the 90's and had created a giant family tree on the wall in our hallway. Thus was born Wogsland.org, which was a labor of love and over the years connected me to many different cousins across the world. In 2016 I finally made it to Norway and visited the memorial to my rebellious ancestor, Hallvard Graatop, and the farm we Wogslands came from in 1850. And in 2019 I made it to the German town of Prießnitz, from whence one of my German ancestors came. But I stopped keeping up with the genealogy site very well almost immediately. There was just too much family history to keep up with.
Every now and then I get an email from a distant cousin with additional information or corrections. I'm embarassed to say I have a folder of these todo items that stretches back to when I first opened my Gmail account in 2006. Life is a balance between living it and recording it for posterity, and I have tended to err on the side of living over recording for the most part. Although my proclivity for cataloging information has, of course, not died as my current kanji obsession no doubt shows. When building the Wogsland.org genealogy site I released that keeping up with it would be to much for me eventually though, and toyed with the idea of making it like Wikipedia, which was fairly new at the time. That was sadly beyond my skills in 2004 though. Now anyone can find the code for the site on Github an open a PR, but in practice no one does. But how would they know? My email is linked at the bottom of every page, but Github is nowhere. Although I'm not sure changing that would really make a difference. It's probably worth a try though.
So, in the end, I guess this is an apology blog to all of you who've sent me information I haven't updated yet. Mea culpa.
