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Unlike the well-known giants of genealogy this web site is the work of one person, aimed at a small selection of families and contains plenty of unproven content.
Not the best opening introduction - but there is nothing to gain by spinning an attractive story set against some eye-candy graphics.
It all started around 1997 with a PC, a copy of Family Tree Maker and a few names of relatives from my parents. If I had known then what I know now I probably would not have started. But a simple search for grand-parents and their families soon moved to be an accumulation of anything and everything with a Townsley connection.
So what you see here today is just the latest version of a Townsley scrap book that has changed to cope with volume increases and technological changes.
The current version of the site relies on these software apps -
- Family Tree Maker 2005 - used to hold the database of names on my local PC. Newer versions have been tried but failed to cope. The 2005 version is used to help generate the static web pages that are used in, for example, the Locations section. It has been announced that FTM will cease to be sold from the end of 2015. However the requirements for family historians have changed little and even the 2005 version of FTM works fine with Windows 10 - so the software should keep working for some time yet.
- Ancestral Quest 15 - eventually replaced FTM and is now used for all the collected data.
- NetObjects Fusion 2015 - used to design, edit and publish the web pages.
- GED2WWW - was used to create the original Townsley Family History Database. This software was a part of PC history being a program that ran in a replica of MS-DOS as white text on a black background under Windows 10. Development stopped in 1999. However it earned its kept up to 2016 by creating a complete new web version of the database in just a few seconds - from a GEDCOM file.
- Webtrees - claimed to be the web's leading on-line collaborative genealogy application. This open source software is based upon PHP, MySQL and standard GEDCOM files. It a modern replacement for the much simpler GED2WWW software
- Gedsite 3 - converts GEDCOM files into web pages much like GED2WWW - but with better formatting and with larger volumes. Used for the Nobility & Landed Gentry data.
The same collection of records has been used to create three other web sites - one aimed at residents of the village of Brotherton in Yorkshire and the two covering linked surnames - Sheeky and Strangeway.
Finally there is second database of records that link various famous families - including Strangways and Towneley - but are unlinked to the commoners covered here. It is also available online - but using the Gedsite database to web page converter.
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