The first version of the Adamthwaite Archive started life in early 2006 as a few pages tacked on to the end of my own family history website.  It was a very amateur affair, only shared with a few other Adamthwaite researchers.  However, as the Adamthwaite mailing list on Rootsweb.com grew, and as more people found the website through search engines, more and more information was added.  As a result, the website expanded (just like Topsy!) until it became necessary to transfer the whole site to a new url of its very own.

 

Version two moved to the current url in August 2007.  It still followed the original design and was still constructed with Microsoft Frontpage - however, with the increased volumes of data, particularly on the pages showing births, marriages and deaths, upload time was a problem.  There were also the usual difficulties associated with sites built with Frontpage - such as incompatibility with some browsers.  Also the time taken to update some of the pages meant that instant corrections were not always possible.

 

Version three was loaded up over the course of several months onto a hosted site at www.moonfruit.com and transferred to the original url in January 2009.  Although the new design required the use of Flash Player (both for construction and viewing), the advantages of speed of uploading and consistency with all browsers made it well  worth the change.  And they used a really intuitive editing software called Sitemaker ... now at last I could make corrections and add pages whenever necessary; all that I needed was a connection to the internet.

 

Hopefully, the extended use of pdf files to present the data spreadsheets and many of the large format files will not cause problems to any users.  It remains to be seen how long it will take Google and other search engines to trawl the new pages, as now only the Welcome page has the same url as the old site.  The Moonfruit Sitemaker also provides other possible tools that we may decide to use in the future - such as blogs, and member-only pages.  I can't really see us needing the video facilities, but you never know - and we do have one sound file now!

 

Well that was what I wrote back in 2009 - but technology progressed apace and soon many people seemed to research on mobile tablets and the like, so we had to move on too ....

 

Version four (Jan 2016) I migrated the site to the HTML Version 6 of Sitemaker, so that the site would be more accessible on mobile devices and also in order that an archive version could be created on the Guild of One-name Studies web server. This alone has reassured me that all the research we had gathered about Adamthwaites around the world was assured of a permanent place on the internet, that would remain available to all future Adamthwaites long after I had become one of the statistics!  though while I am able, continuous updates will be made to this 'live' site with the Guild version being synced occasionally, until such time as this becomes a 'Legacy' site, waiting for a new, enthusiastic successor to take over where I left off.

 

The migration to V6 caused some formatting problems on almost all the pages and also the loss of some features such as the photo galleries and various forms which I replaced with compatible versions.

 

There followed over five years of time spent happily adding new articles to the Miscellany section, updating data spreadsheets and creating more sections and pages to display all the information I discovered about the ADAMTHWAITES on newly released information, until ...

   

MAJOR CHANGE (2021/22) - my hosting company Moonfruit closed down at the beginning of December 2021, following the demise of Adobe Flash Player (their editing software relied on it) and they transferred all the websites they hosted to WIX over a period of several months.  I had six websites hosted at Moonfruit and the first five to be transferred were relatively straightforward to edit to get rid of the glitches, though extremely time-consuming.  But this Adamthwaite site never appeared on my Editing Panel at WIX, even though it was online (full of errors) but no-one seemed to know whose editing panel it was connected to. I spent weeks trying to locate it in order that I could make all the corrections necessary.  It finally arrived on my WIX Editing dashboard in late Feb 2022, after I had spent many sleepless nights and had made countless attempts to contact anyone who could sort out the problem.  I am still making all the corrections to the Ravenstonedale website, but as soon as that is completed, I will get started on this Adamthwaite site.  I can only apologise to any new or returning visitors who are frustrated at not being able to access all the data spreadsheets and family tree charts which are currently missing ... I promise to sort out all the problems just as soon as I can.

 

Once this website has been completely corrected, contributions of photos, stories, memories will again be very welcome, and also corrections or additional information to any of the data spreadsheets (but it would be easier for members to email me directly with these).

 

Happy hunting!

 

Sue Mastel

website coordinator

21st February 2021