The purpose of sending these out is to improve the quality and quantity of the information in the master data base - and website. It would be very helpful indeed if the recipients of the sheets could over the next few weeks add as much additional information as they can lay their hands on!

For any individual on the data base, it would be wonderful if we knew all of the following:
Full names Date of birth - and place
Date and place of marriage
Date of death - and place and cause
Brief details of education, residence and employment
Any interesting or amusing anecdotes
Wife or husband - details as above
Parents - ditto
Children - ditto

Because of a peculiarity of the data base software I am using [Brother's Keeper] the system assumes a marital relationship between partners; dates and place of marriage clearly show the full legal status BUT their absence does not imply no marriage. If anyone wants to show clearly that they are not married, there is a space to put 'No ceremony'.

Note that I do NOT intend to put current addresses of the living on the website - just town [or county if preferred].
You will probably find on the attached sheets [and on the website] that there are quite a lot of UNKNOWN or Mary Unknown type of entries: some of these are simply needed to link a parent to a child; others simply reflect lack of knowledge on my part. The more that can be completed the better! Also Child1, Child2 etc.

A word or two about the layout of the sheets, as they are a bit confusing I am afraid. The full print out of the data base would have run to over 200 sheets - and the cost of copying and posting around the world would have been too much for my pocket. They also contained a lot of repetition. I have therefore shortened the text considerably by taking out almost all the notes that appear in the website pages and moving families on to the pages of senior members in the hierarchy. To try and make it clear exactly who is descended from who, I have tried to be consistent in type and lines [but have doubtless failed in places!] An example is below - I hope it makes things clearer rather than more confused! In general terms, I have tried to keep sub units of each family between the lines of the same length, with shorter lines to separate children and even shorter ones to separate grandchildren.

The most confusing [I find] is the placing of second marriages - but looking at the length of the lines does help clarify this and I hope I have put [1] and [2] for each separate partner. Finally - to reduce the number of trees being cut down, I have tried to send out only the relevant pages from the pack and to send them to the parent with children - and in some cases the grandparent. I hope this is generally acceptable - but, if not, perhaps those of you who get a pack of paper could send pages round your families for completion. And finally finally: if you could send the sheets back with all the additional information to me:

Michael Harte
Greenman Farm
Wadhurst
Sussex TN5 6LE

England

or e-mail

Head of Family Details

Wife/Husband
---------------------------------------------------------------
M Child 1 [first child - male - of Head of Family]
Details
Wife
-------------------------
F Child 1 [ie Child of the above M Child 1]
Details
Husband
------------
M Child 1 [ie Child of F Child 1]
Details
------------
F Child 2 [ie Child of F Child 1]
Details
Husband
Details
M Child 1
Details
M Child 2
Details
------------------------------------------------------------
F Child 2 [Second child - female - of Head of Family]
Details
Husband
Details
------------------------------------------------------------
M Child 3 [Third child - male - of Head of Family]
Details
Wife
Details
F Child 1
Details

The full set of family group sheets can be found here

The relevant pages have been sent round as follows: