I'm experimenting with posting some random bits of my genealogy research here with the goal of eventually creating a linked family tree on Hive. You can see the index here.

Carter Skaggs is currently a pretty bare entry in my family tree without even any birth or death dates, approximate or otherwise. But as I do a little more searching, I see he was born in Missouri in 1839, was married to Margie Boswell and had at least three children. Several census records were easy to find along with a marriage record. The Internet has made it pretty easy to find, at the very least, census info on individuals living in the 1800s and often birth, death and marriage records as well.

According to Gramps, Carter is my first cousin six times removed.

I use GenoPro to maintain my family tree but I mainly use Gramps to generate reports which is what most of the info below is based on. Gramps is open source software that is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. I also use its relationship calculator functionality as noted above. I've also been exploring The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG) which is web based and requires a web server, PHP and mySQL. I also purchased GedSite which also generates static HTML reports that I will dig into more eventually.

While Gramps is free, both TNG and GedSite are commercial software so you have to pay for them. I think their price is reasonable and they are both excellent in their own ways. However, I prefer the open source nature of Gramps and the fact that it generates static HTML makes it easy to work with. I like TNG enough that I will probably keep using it as well. I'm still undecided on GedSite until I get back to trying it out more though I've liked other sites I've seen generated with it. For now I am generating reports with Gramps and updating TNG on a fairly regular basis (every month or few anyway).

The chart at the top is an ancestry chart out to four generations from Gramps. The chart at the bottom is the same chart as generated by TNG. The index of all individuals I have posted so far can be found here.