Paternal: Richmond, Bacon, Trewhitt, Hutcheson, Kuykendall, more...
Maternal: Horton, Hazlet, McCutchan, Nelson, Arbuckle, Madison, more...
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Statistical and Descriptive Overviews

First - this website is driven by a database application called TNG (for The Next Generation of Genealogy Software"). Some of the terminology I'll use is specific to TNG, and some is general genealogy jargon, so some terms I use may not have the exact meaning you'd expect in general English conversation.

  Who is in my database

GenCountEarlyLate
-41 2014 2014
-338 1977 2014
-2347 1956 2020
-11032 1913 2015
01403 1888 1987
11815 1866 1964
21752 1808 1959
31604 1790 1948
4941 1786 1931
5583 1758 1859
6359 1728 1858
7274 1699 1880
8161 1665 1752
9192 1643 1717
10125 1593 1681
1177 1584 1670
1227 1547 1621
132 1595 1598
10733 1547 2019

A statistics page provides several tabular and graphical overview of my data, broken out by place, family names, and century.

The snapshot to the right shows the range of birth dates for each generation of family members. (I'm in generation 0.) The most recent birth is of a great niece, two generations below me. The births in lower-numbered generations are from remote corners of the family.

Other statistics:
  1. I have over 260 known direct ancestors.
  2. 200 of them are immigrants (not counting those who immigrated with their parents).
  3. That number of immigants is surprising given that I have ancestral lines going back to Plymouth Colony (see Plymouth County and Barnstable Colony, Jamestown, and New Netherlands before 1650. My most recent immigrant ancestor was a great, great grandmother, Margaret Graham, who arrived from Ireland with her parents in about 1845.
  4. Number of descendants in some of my ancestral lines:
    Me: Richmond - 1472 people in 10 generations.
    I only have meaningful information back to my great-great grandfather William Rogers Richmond and his brother Samuel David. I have good evidence that their father's and/or grandfather's name was John, and that he was born around 1770, but I don't know who their mother was, or where they all came from, beyond "somewhere in Virginia".
    Curiously, Samuel and his progeny were much more prolific than William and his family. Back when I thought that I had captured every single one of William's descendants through about 2000, there were only about 150, whereas, without trying to capture everyone, I had over 1100 of Samuel's descendants.
    M: Horton - 1148 people in 8 generation. Horton was my mother's maiden name. I only have information back to my great, great grandfather Azre Horton, and I don't know when and where he was born. Shoot, I'm not even completely sure of his first name. A Horton family reunion in 1976 is where my interest in family history started. My mother and I talked to the patriarchs and matriarchs at that event, and sketched family trees on a big white-paper tablecloth. At the end of the day, my mother saved it, then gave it to me and said, "Do something with this." So I entered the into a mainframe computer data file and launched my computer-based genealogy hobby, too. There were 636 names on that tablecloth - and I still have it.
    FM: Hutcheson 1341 people in 11 generations
    My paternal grandmother's paternal line goes back to my 5*great grandfather Charles Hutcheson, Sr. A good bit of this data came from my grandmother and other Hutcheson relatives with whom I corresponded back in the 1980's.
    MM: Hazlet 331 people in 8 generations.
    My maternal grandmother's paternal line goes back to my 3*great grandfather James Hazlet. I can't really explain why I have relatively few Hazlets, compared to Hortons and Hutchesons, other than that I know fewer Hazlets personally, and none of my Hazlet cousins captured their branches of the family for me.
    FFM: Bacon 1313 people in 10 generations.
    My father's paternal grandmother's was Sarah Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bacon, and my Bacon line goes back to my great*5 grandfather Jeremiah.
    FMM: Kuykendall 1846 people in 14 generations.
    My great-grandmother's Kuykendall line goes back to my 8xgreat grandfather, immigrant Jacob Luurszen. The Dutch did not used surnames in the 17th century. "Luursen" is a patronym that means "son of Luur". (Jacob's son Luur, was simply Luur Jacobsen). When the British took over New Netherlands and required the Dutch immigrants to choose surnames, Luur Jacobsen chose "van Kuykendall". The surname prefix "van" was dropped within the next couple of generations.
    MMM: McCutchan 521 people in 10 generations.
    My McCutchan line goes back to my great*5 grandfather William McCutcheon, who was probably the son of one of five immigrand McCutcheon brothers, but researchers just haven't decided which one was his father.
    FFFM: Wattenbarger 690 people in 11 generations.
    My great*5 grandfather Johann Adam Wuertemberger immigrated to Pennsylvania from Wuertemberg (now part of Germany) in 1751. His grandson John Adam took on the name Wattenbarger
    FFMM: Trewhitt 705 people in 9 generations.
    This one is a bit of a problem. The Trewhitt ancestry beyond my great*3 grandfather, Judge Levi Trewhitt is not documented, but there sure are a lot of people out there who have identified ancestors without documentation. I've tentatively taken the Trewhitt line back to a purported father of Judge Trewhitt, immigrant Levi Trewhitt, Jr, from England.
    FMFM: Billingsley 1164 people in 17 generations.
    At least 4 sons of my great*11 grandfather John Billingsley immigrated to America. Some reports say that John also came to America and returned to England. In any case, two of John's sons, Francis and William, are my direct ancestors, because Francis's son William marriaged Williams's daughter Sarah.
    FMMM: Myers 995 people in 13 generations
    My 6th great grandfather George Moyers immigrated from Germany in 1717. The name Moyers persisted for at least 5 generations, but it was Myers by the time my 3rd great grandparents Narcissa Ann Myers and Flavius Josephus Hutcheson married in 1852.
    MMMM: Nelson 553 people in 10 generations.
    As with many, if not most of the progenitors of my ancestral lines, almost nothing about my 5th great grandfather Richard Nelson is known other than his name. My grandmother was sure that we were descended from Admiral Horatio Nelson but I can say with confidence that we are not.
    Remember that there is a great deal of overlap among the families above. For example, the Hutcheson (1341) and Myers (995) families share the 835 descendants (including spouses) of Flavius Joephus Hutcheson and Narcissa Ann Myers.

  People, Places, Families, and other stuff

  • People - People and their "Person Profiles" are, in a very practical sense, the core of the application. There is a Person Profile for each of the roughly 11,000 people in my database. The Person Profiles tell you pretty much everything I know about that person, and provide links to parents, siblings, and children, and to various types of dynamic genealogical charts that illustrate or describe the person's extended family.
  • Families - In TNG, a "family" is a nuclear family (a couple and their children), not extended families.
  • Events - The things that happen to or describe a person or family are "events", which can all occur multiple times for a person. For example:
    • Even when people live in the same place their entire lives, "Residence" events occur when something (such as a census or a city directory) documents where that person lived.
    • Each person is born just once, but there can be multiple birth events resulting from different opinions about when that person was born.
    • Education events describe when and where a person went to school.
    • Even "Occupation" is an event, since
      1. A person can have different occupations at different times, and
      2. One occupation can be documented (e.g. in cesnsuses, etc.) more than once.
    • Note that since genealogical databases consider a person's life span, and don't focus on one point in time, "Age" is not an event, or really, a data value at all. "Age" is just something that is calculated based on a person's date of birth (well, or "most likely" date of birth) and the date of an event, or maybe the current date.
  • Places both are and are not the same thing as "places" in the real world. "Miami, Florida" is a place in the real world, but in a genealogical application like Robin's Roots, placenames are expressed more formally, with a city/county/state/country structure such as "Miami, Dade County, Florida, USA". And places really only exist in genealogy databases if an event has happened at that place. Thus, in my database, "Calcutta, India" just doesn't exist. On the other hand, with about 4500 places in my database, most recognizable city names in the USA are present, though a whole lot of towns and counties are not.

    By the way, Robin's Roots is very USA-centric. It just turns out that essentially all of my ancestral lines go back a long way in America - some to Plymouth Colony, Jamestown, and New Netherlands, all before 1650. Consequently, you'll sometimes see placenames expressed with abbreviations familiar to Americans, such as "Cleveland, Bradley, TN" rather than "Cleveland, Bradley County, Tennessee, USA". But TNG cannot really deal with abbreviated placenames everywhere, so in some pages on this site,such as the Places search page, you'll see placenames expressed in the longer format.

  • Media items, Sources, Citations, Repositories, Cemeteries and others are described elsehwere in my documentation.

  Types of Pages - Charts, Reports, Searches, etc.

This section breaks out categories of web pages on the site in a pretty arbitrary way. It doesn't paint the whole picture, but it covers most pages:
  • The Home Page - the one you are on. It is distinct both in its layout and in its tabs. (Not that other pages don't have tabs; they just don't have these tabs.)
    • A 'Welcome' tab,
    • A tab ("People to start with") that provides navigation to significant people in the database, and
    • Four tabs (including the one you are reading) that describe the site and its data.
  • All other pages on the site share a template-driven layout that is described in below, in the section titled "Page Layout & Navigational Menus".
    • Search Pages that are used to find various "objects" in the database such as people, families, sources, media items, places, and so on. Links to the search pages are at the top of the home page. On all other pages, they are in three drop-down menus (Find, Media, Info). (The main menu bar and its drop-down menus are illustrated below, in the section "Page Layout & Navigational Menus".

      Most of the search forms have options that affect which records are included in the search results, and that affect which fields are displayed in the search results. Search results are typically shown on the same page as the search form and are represented as a table, where rows represent records, and columns represent data fields.

    • Profiles describe objects (people, families, places, media items, etc.) in some detail. They are usually displayed through searches, but, for example, little spyglass links next to placenames in Person Profile (and elsewhere) link to the Place Profile page.
      By the way, none of the "Profile" pages are labeled as such, they just have headings that identify the specific object they are profiling.
    • Reports are similar to Search Pages, except that they are based on custom queries that have been defined and saved by an analyst or programmer, and typically don't have run-time options.
    • Charts are - in most cases - representations of the ancestors or descendants of a particular person. Charts are accessible through navigation tabs labeled "Ancestors", "Descendants", and "Relationships" in the Person Profile.

      TNG Charts are "dynamic" in the senses that they are created as a user requests them, and that, in most cases, they can by adjusted by the user. For instance, in Ancestor and Descendant charts, the user can select how many generation are to be included in the chart.

      There are several types of ancestor charts and several types of descendant charts.

      Charts vary in the way they organize data and in how much detail (especially dates and places of birth and death) they display. Some charts are graphical; others are presented as text. The graphical charts are "prettier", but the so-called "TextPlus" charts contain the most data, and, in particular, are narrow enough (even with well over a dozen generations) that they fit within the width of one printed page, albeit they can sometimes require landscape orientation on legal-length paper.

    • The Media Page - a single page which, not surprisingly, displays a media items. Media items are attached to people, families, places, or cemeteries, or are sometimes grouped in albums that are attached to people or families. Media items are categorized into "Collections" (also sometimes confusingly called "media types"):
      • Photos (of people and families), most of which are .jpg images.
      • Documents (that is legal and civic documents), which can be scanned .jpg images, pdf documents, HTML representation of documents, etc.)
      • Histories (stories, genealogies, many book excerpts, etc.), which, like Documents, can be scanned .jpg images, pdf documents, HTML representation of documents, etc.)
      • Censuses (census worksheet images). These could be considered "Documents", but are broken out in a separate collection because I have so many of them.

  Page Layout and Navigational Menus

Essentially all pages on this site - - other than the home page (which you are reading now) - use a template that provides a consistent layout of content and navigational menus.

The "Person Profile" is perhaps the best example of a templated page. (The Welcome tab here on the home page tells you about the Person Profile, and how to find people.)

To see both this documentation and a simple Person Profile on the screen at the same time,
  1. Make sure that your web browser is not filling the entire screen.
    (If it is, you can click on the square "resize" icon, which, on Windows PCs, is between the "minimize" (a dash) and "close" (an X) icons at the upper right.)
  2. Hit shift-click on this link to a Person Profile
    (FWIW, a shift-click will act this way on almost any link on almost any web page in the world)
On template-driven pages such as the Person Profile, look for these menus and links near the top of the page:
  1. The top horizontal menu
    1. A link to the home page,
    2. A slide-down People Search form,
    3. A login (or logout) link,
    4. Three drop-down menus (Find, Media, Info), with 8-10 links each, including
      • Lists of names (as illustrated in this screen clip),
      • Searches for just about everything in the application, such as People, Families, Places, Cemeteries, Photos, Histories, Documents, and Photo Albums (etc.)
      • Anniversaries and Events occurring on a given date
      • A statistics page that presents several overviews of the data.
      • (Frankly, I'm not at all sure why some links landed in the Info menu rather than the 'Find' menu, other than to balance the length of the two menus.)
      • and so on.
    5. A drop-down menu that allows users to select the language for the text - not the data - on many pages. (Not that I have many international visitors, but it's a handy feature on many sites.)
  2. A "Print" button near the upper right, which doesn't actually print the page, but rather very helpfully displays the data in a more printer-friendly way - without the graphical header, the navigation menus, and the footer.
On most pages, you'll find additional navigation components just below the menus show above. For example, on the Person Profile and related pages, you can see these menus that focus the person being profiled:
  1. The mostly white-on-brown tab menu just below the person's name, where you can (among other things):
    • View Ancestor & Descendant Charts that link to additional members of the family. (Look for the "Print" button near the upper right of the page before actually printing a chart. The "Print" button makes sure that the chart is formatted for printing rather than for viewing on a screen.)
    • View the relationship between the person you are looking at and any other accessible person (possibly including yourself, if you have an account and are logged in).
    • Submit a Photo or Document associated with that person, or
    • Suggest a change to that person's data (or anything else, for that matter).
  2. The white-on-slate-blue links just below the tab menu, where you'll find options for the current page.
    For instance, on the Person Profile, you can use those links to limit the Person Profile to
    • Just the personal information including parents and spouses and children
    • Media - that is,
      • Photos,
      • Scanned and photographed documents (death certificates, county birth & death indexes, marriage certificates, etc.),
      • "Histories" (short biographies, family histories, and anecdotes),
      • Gravestone Photos, and
      • Scanned census worksheets.
    • Sources & Citation, where you can see where my data came from, or
    • The Event Map, which shows you a map that identifies where that person's life events occurred
    The Person Profile loads with all of this data.
Finally, there are a few links at the bottom of most pages:
These links also appear in the menus described above.
  • Detailed Person Profiles for every person in my database form the core of Robin's Roots. You can you can find Person Profiles through various search forms and via hyperlinks
  • Search forms and results for
    • Cemeteries,
    • Places where events have occurred,
    • Sources that have supplied information to my database,
    • Media Items attached to people, families, and events,
    • and many other objects.
  • Surnames - A list of family names in the database, and then a list of all of the people with that family name
  • Dates Report - People who were born, died, married, etc. on any given day.
End of Page Layout and Navigational Menus

If you have any questions or comments about the information on this site, please feel free to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you.
-Robin Richmond