For thirty-four years I was a train dispatcher in Altoona, Pennsylvania. I hired out on the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1963 and retired in 1997, and in between I spent my working life keeping trains apart on a stretch of mountain railroad that includes the Horseshoe Curve. A dispatcher lives by three things: the timetable, the checklist, and one rule above all the others. Clear the block before you proceed. You do not let a train into a piece of track until you know for certain that the track is empty. You don't think it's empty. You know.

I have been tracing my family and my wife Flora's since 1981, when an aunt handed me the family Bible at my grandmother's sister's funeral and I realized I couldn't name half the people written in the front of it. In 1998 I put 2,300 of our people on the Web. Since then I have had letters from cousins in eleven states, a man in County Kilkenny, and a woman in Ontario who turned out to be Flora's third cousin twice removed and now sends us a card at Christmas.

People write and ask how I did it. This is how, in the order I'd do it again, with the check I make before each step is cleared. It is the same way I'd run a train over the mountain.

Every genealogy program can save your work in a plain text file called a GEDCOM (it stands for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, and it was worked out by the Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the same people who make PAF). The file ends in .ged, and any other program can read it. Here is what my grandfather looks like in mine, opened in Notepad:

0 @I14@ INDI
1 NAME Thomas /Mayon/
1 SEX M
1 BIRT
2 DATE 12 MAR 1882
2 PLAC Altoona, Blair, PA
2 SOUR @S31@
1 DEAT
2 DATE 3 FEB 1950
2 PLAC Altoona, Blair, PA
2 SOUR @S88@
1 FAMC @F6@
1 FAMS @F9@

The number at the start of each line says what it belongs to. INDI is a person, the surname goes between slashes, BIRT and DEAT are birth and death, SOUR points to where I found it, FAMC is the family he was a child in, and FAMS is the family he started. You never have to write this yourself. But it helps to have looked at it once, the way it helps to have walked the track once before you dispatch it.

And here is the same man where he sits in the line, drawn the old way, with a pencil and a ruler (well, with the space bar):

 THE MAYON LINE, BLAIR COUNTY

 Michael Mayon = Bridget Phelan
 1851-1919       1855-1932
        |
 Thomas Mayon  = Anna Leonhardt
 1882-1950       1886-1971
        |
 Francis Mayon = Helen Bechtold
 1911-1984       1915-1990
        |
     [Living]

That [Living] at the bottom is me. On my Web pages, that's all I am, and the same goes for Flora, our children, our grandchildren and every cousin still drawing breath. You'll see why in Station 2.

One more thing the tree taught me. The family story was that our name was cut short by a clerk at Ellis Island. Michael's father came over in 1847, forty-five years before Ellis Island opened, and he spelled it Mayon on the 1850 census. Family stories are worth writing down. They are not worth believing until you've found the paper.

Seven stations. Don't run past any of them.

In PAF or Family Tree Maker, look in the File menu for Export, or for GEDCOM. The program asks a few questions and writes one .ged file. Mine is about 1.4 MB for 2,300 people with their sources. Save it somewhere you can find it, and give it a name with the date in it: mayon-0915.ged, not tree.ged. You will make a great many of these over the years.

Block clear when: you can open the .ged file in Notepad and find your great-grandfather in it.

This is the most important station on the line, and it's the one people run through.

My rule: anyone born in the last hundred years who has no death date in my file is treated as living. This year that means anyone born in 1899 or later. They come out of the copy that goes on the Web, or they go in as [Living] with no dates and no places. Not their birthday, not their town, not their mother's maiden name. That last one is what the bank asks you on the telephone to prove who you are, and you'd be posting it for every stranger on the Internet.

And relatives get upset, rightly. A man I corresponded with posted his whole file in 1998 without thinking, and his sister found her divorce date on the Internet before she'd told their mother. He took the pages down that night. He told me he'd have given a good deal to take the evening back.

Do it on a copy. Never on your master file. Some programs and converters have a setting that hides the living for you. Use it if you have it, but don't trust a setting you haven't checked. A dispatcher doesn't trust a signal he hasn't seen.

Block clear when: you have searched the copy for every birth after 1898, and every one of those people either has a death date or is gone. I check by hand. It took me two evenings for 2,300 people, and I found eleven the setting had missed.

If you can't say where you got it, it's a rumor. Every birth, marriage and death in my file says where it came from: a census page, a church register, a death certificate (in Pennsylvania the state kept them from 1906 on), the family Bible, an obituary, a cemetery stone. The genealogy programs all have a place to enter a source, and the converter prints them on your pages as notes.

This matters more on the Web than anywhere. There are family pages out there with no sources at all, and they copy each other's mistakes from page to page like a bad order passed down the line. When somebody copies from mine, I want them to copy where it came from too, so the next person can check it.

A few things every beginner should know. The 1890 census is nearly all gone, burned in 1921, so expect a twenty-year gap between 1880 and 1900. The census indexes go by sound, not spelling, so Mayon and Main can land side by side. And the Family History Center at your nearest LDS meetinghouse will order microfilm from Salt Lake City for a small fee. Ours is twenty minutes from the house, and the volunteers there have been better to me than I deserve.

Block clear when: every person in the copy has at least one source. I don't post anybody I can't cite.

You do not type 2,300 Web pages. A converter program does it. I use GED2HTML, which is shareware: you feed it your GEDCOM, and it writes out pages for all your people, each with links to parents, husbands and wives, and children, plus an index of every name and an index of surnames. It has a handful of settings, and the instructions that come with it are clear if you read them through, twice. There are other converters, and some genealogy programs will make pages on their own. Use what you like. What matters is that a program does the typing and you do the checking.

Run it on the copy from Station 2, never the master. Then, before anything goes up, open the pages in your own browser from your own disk and walk them.

Block clear when: you can start at the oldest person in a line and click down, generation by generation, to [Living] without hitting a dead end or a name that shouldn't be there.

A GeoCities.us home page gets 11 MB. My 2,300 people made 1,190 files, with two or three people to a page plus the indexes, and they came to 10.4 MB. That's 2,300 people in 11 MB, barely, with no pictures at all. The 140 new people will fit after I shorten the notes on the index pages. After that I'll have to start thinking.

Don't upload a thousand files through the File Manager. It takes ten at a time, which is 119 trips for me. Use an FTP program. Send the pages as ASCII, the way the File Manager page says, and keep the converter's folders exactly as it made them, or the links between pages will break. My last full upload ran a little under three hours on a Sunday night, over a 33.6 modem, and I watched every minute of it the way I used to watch a heavy train over the mountain.

Block clear when: the File Manager shows how much of your 11 MB you've used, and there's still room for next year's work.

Nobody searches the Web for "family tree." They search for their own name. So make a page that lists every surname you have, with the county and state (or country) where each family lived and the years you have them there. "Englert, Blair County, Pennsylvania, 1803 to 1931" tells a stranger in ten seconds whether you might be kin. Put your main surnames in the page's title, too, because that's what the search engines show.

Mine is here. Most of my cousin letters started with it.

Block clear when: a stranger could tell from your list, without writing to you, whether you have their people.

Everybody wants the pictures up first. I have a shoebox of them, and the best one is Michael Mayon and his sons in front of the Juniata shops about 1895. But I don't own a scanner, a scanned photograph can run 30K to 60K, and a hundred of them would eat half my space. Names, dates, places and sources first. Those are what cousins write to you about. My son-in-law has promised me the use of his scanner at Christmas, and the pictures will go up then, with the names of everybody in them on the back where they belong, and on the page too.

Whatever you do, write the names on the backs of your photographs tonight, in pencil. The box that started all this for me was full of people nobody alive could name.

Questions
Write to me. I'm retired, I keep regular hours, and I answer every letter, usually within the week. If you're writing about a family on my surname list, the note at the bottom of that page tells you what to send.

visitors since March 1998

Patrick Mayon · [email protected]
Last updated Monday, September 20, 1999