Delaware Public Archives - State archives in Dover, DE. The most complete source of DE information. Very good at answering e-mail inquiries.
The Historical Society of Cecil County - Local Cecil Co, MD information.
Maryland State Archives - State Archives in Annapolis, MD. The most complete source for MD information.
Pennington Research Association - Look for me and the rest of the Delaware Penningtons in Group 21.
Historical Society in Wilmington - Great resource for New Castle Co, DE.
Willow Bend Books - A great source for books and you can go there and browse like a library (but no photocopying). Many of my books listed under publications were obtained here.
The Ball Room - A section of the rootsweb/genepool web site devoted to the Ball family.
Hank Z. Jones - Palatine immigration from England to New York around 1700.
Huguenot Historical Society - New Paltz, NY and West Camp.
Abstracts of Cecil County, MD Land Records 1673 - 1751, June D. Brown.
Abstracts of Cecil County, MD Land Records 1734 - 1753, June D. Brown.
Early Anglican Church Records of Cecil County, Henry C. Peden, Jr.
Inhabitants of Cecil County, Maryland 1649 -1774, Henry C. Peden.
Colonial Families of Delaware, Volume 1, F. Edward Wright.
Colonial Families of Delaware, Volume 2, F. Edward Wright.
Colonial Families of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Volume 6, Henry C. Peden, Jr. & F. Edward Wright.
Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) - I keep my genealogy data on the Personal Ancestor File program put out by the LDS. The program is available free and I feel it is as good as anything else available to the amateur level genealogist. The LDS web site (genealogy material, no religious content) prevents directly linking to the page where the PAF program can be downloaded. To down load the program go here, click on "order family history resources" then on "software downloads - free".
Microsoft FrontPage - I (Harvey) create the general section of the web site using FrontPage. I can't say I highly recommend it but it sure is easier than writing HTML code directly. FrontPage has a few quirks and idiosyncrasies that make it frustrating. I have no experience with other web development tools so I can't compare FrontPage to anything else. I use FrontPage 97 but the latest version is FrontPage 2000.
Ged2html - The pages with the genealogical information and the pedigree charts are produced by Gene Stark's program, ged2html. This program takes a gedcom file, produced by my PAF program, and creates all the genealogy data pages you see on this web site.
The ged2html program has many parameters that may be set by the user to vary the output but its most significant feature is an output program that the user can modify or completely replace to get any output desired. The most reasonable thing to do is modify the standard output program provided by Stark to implement the changes you desire. That's what I did. The thumbnails you see on some of the pages were added by me. I then used this thumbnail to provide a link to a page that I could use for photos or any other data related to that person.
I replaced Stark's footer with my own so I could include some extra links and the copyright notice.
I also set the font used for the pedigree sections to a smaller size to make most of the 3 level pedigrees fit on the page without horizontal scrolling.
Ged2html is highly recommended - especially if you're geeky enough to write your own output program. There is a small library of unsupported output programs available for free. The program itself is a bargain at $20. You can use the unregistered version for free, which still allows for plenty of control of the output, but you can't modify the output program unless you register.
Freefind is the search engine used on the search page. It is free but does show an ad on the results page. This particular search engine has a much higher size limit than the other free search engines.
Spinwave JPEG Cruncher is a program that I use to further compress the jpeg pictures you see on the site. JPEG Cruncher applies some magical processing that makes the original picture file quite a bit smaller with only a slight reduction in the quality of the image. With all the pictures we have it saves a lot of space as well as the time to upload and download them.
JPEG Wizard is a program similar to JPEG Cruncher. JPEG Wizard allows more control over how the additional compression is performed but JPEG Cruncher is easier to use. Both are free and operate over the web - no program to download and install.
XARA Webstyle is a program for generating graphics for web sites. It has hundreds of graphics templates which allow the user to change many attributes (size, colors, text, etc) allowing for thousands of combinations. The templates are arranged into set or themes. There are also provisions for navigation bars and menus driven by scripts. The program creates the necessary scripts so no programming skill is needed. Webstyle costs about $69. That's a big investment for me but I've found the program well worth it.
NetLoad is a program to update a website. While Frontpage itself keeps track of the pages you change and attempts to send only those when you upload the web site to the server, I have found it to be very slow and full of problems. There is no ability to send only a file you choose and if you even open a file to look at it Frontpage thinks it has been changed and insists on sending it to the server during the next upload.
Netload does only one thing and it does it well. It keeps track of what is on the server and sends only the changes. It allows you some control to exclude certain types of files that you might not want to update. Usually it takes only 3 mouse clicks to update the site. And it is fast. The program costs about $30.
WS_FTP LE is the program I use when NetLoad won't do. This is a general FTP client and allows you to see what's on your site and upload or download any kind of file. I usually use WS_FTP LE to look around when I'm trying to figure out what went wrong (which is frequent) or to download the server logs. The LE (Lite Edition) is free and will do anything you will ever need unless you make your living at this.
TopStyle Lite helps generate style sheets. I recently started using cascading style sheets instead of the built in themes in Frontpage. TopStyle essentially shows you all the available attributes available for most selectors (html tags). This makes it easy to see what can be done, I.E. what features are available for each tag you might use. You can easily set fonts, styles, colors, indentation, etc, etc. The Lite version is free and is probably all most of us will ever need.
NetTerm is a telnet program. A telnet program allows your computer to act as a terminal of your server, allowing you to execute commands on the server. The genealogy data is over 25 MB. I compress this to about 9 MB which is uploaded to the server. I must then connect to the server using NetTerm and execute an unzip command on the server.