Assembling a family history is a task to which there is no clear end, and indeed no obvious point at which it appears worthwhile to make the results available to others. Towards the end of 2002 I put together some of the material which I had collected and sent it off to my immediate family, but found the resulting document almost immediately being added to. As the editing, printing and copying were of themselves quite time-consuming, it seemed to me that the material would perhaps be better kept as a website. This could be updated as and when new information came to light, and others could look at it if they were interested rather than me trying to decide who might be interested.
This website is the result of that decision. I apologise for its rather basic presentation style, but I decided against using someone else's template, and to write the pages from scratch, having first learnt some elementary HTML. Although I keep the information within a set of computer files using the software The Master Genealogist Silver UK edition, and this will output stuff in GEDCOM format, I also decided against simply turning the GEDCOM files into web pages.
The general arrangement of web pages that I have adopted is pages dealing with individual branches of my family, so that each branch has its own page, some quite long and many very short. Thus there is a page for the Stowells, my and my father's name, one for the Briggs branch which was my mother's maiden name, and so on branching out at each generation back in time. Not every name has its own page yet, as for some of the branches I have no information to present.
Within each page I have adopted a broadly similar format, which first lists the various generations of direct ancestors of that name, and then has a narrative section for each generation. Within the narrative section I have put, or am putting, most of what I have found out about that ancestor, often not very much, together with a table of their known or probable offspring. These sections progress back in time to the earliest known ancestor of that name.
Gradually also I shall add pages looking at descendants rather than ancestors, and this will require a new set of pages devoted as it were to cousins rather than to direct ancestors.
Because my genealogy software simply assigns a sequential number to each new person added to the database, I have stuck with these, arbitrary, numbers. They are the numbers which appear in brackets as superscripts after the names in the text. Source references, to which numbers are usually assigned, I have identified by author and date, or by type.
In the tables of generations which I have put, or in some cases will put, at the beginning of each name page, there is a column for generation. This uses the letters for periods of years (of birth of the relevant person) which is suggested in the book Debrett's Guide to Tracing your Ancestry by Noel Currer-Briggs and Royston Gambier (1981).