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.

Robert de Stuteville III was born not long after the Norman Conquest. That's going back really far. Anyone who traces their ancestors back this far has a royal ancestor somewhere. While that is neat to find, it isn't anything particularly special. It's not like I'm next in line for a throne somewhere. The fact of the matter is, if you have European ancestry then you are likely related to royalty in at least some distant way. This person is too many generations back for Gramps to calculate with my current settings. However, he is a direct ancestor, so a great-great-great-(many more greats)-grandfather.

I use GenoPro to maintain my family tree but I use other programs to generate reports/web pages. GenoPro will do this also but I don't like the format of its reports. Gramps is open source software for Windows, Linux and MacOS that I have been using to generate static HTML reports and is what the info you see below is based on. I also use its relationship calculator functionality as noted above. I've also been exploring GedSite, a program that takes a gedcom file and converts it into html, and The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding which is web based and requires a setup with a web server, PHP and mySQL. Mostly I've been playing around with TNG which is excellent but I'll get back to GedSite eventually.

I actually like TNG enough that I have contemplated just using that as my only reporting software. However, there are a few reasons why I probably won't. First, it's "closed source" (though by its nature you can of course see and modify the source) commercial software whereas Gramps is open source. Second, Gramps generates pure HTML/Javascript so that it is easy to copy and move around whereas TNG relies on having a database and web server. Finally, it's easier to extract data out of for adding here, for example. While I have been using GenoPro and Gramps for many years, I've only started using TNG and GedSite within the last year.

The chart at the top is an ancestry chart out to four generations from Gramps. The chart at the bottom is a descendancy chart from TNG. You can see how quickly the names start to branch out. This chart only goes four generations down to about the 1200s. You can imagine how many total descendants of this guy there must be. The index of all individuals I have posted so far can be found here.