Welcome!
Welcome to martygrant.com. My name is Marty Grant. My wife is Karla Grant. I created this website as a means to share my genealogical research with all who might be interested.
My ancestry is mainly in the southern United States, particularlly in North Carolina (NC), South Carolina (SC), Georgia (GA), Tennessee (TN) and Virginia (VA). I also have roots in Pennsylvania (PA), New Jersey (NJ), Maryland (MD), Kentucky (KY), Illinois (IL) and Colorado (CO). I have relatives in many other states as well.
My first edition of this website was created in 1996 using the free web space that came with AOL. I outgrew them pretty quickly, and moved to my own domain. Within a few years the site had grown to nearly 3,000 individual webpages, most of which were fully documented. The format I was using was basically me typing up everything I knew about each family in book style. This was tedious to create and maintain, though apparently all of my readers appreciated the format. The site would get well over a million hits each year, two million in some years, and I would get hundreds of emails a week.
The format of the site was such that it grew very difficult for me to make changes or add new information to an existing page. Therefore I decided I had to change the format to make it more maintainable. Unfortunately this meant getting rid of the book format that was so popular. I tried TNG which was quite nice, but still too limiting in some ways. I fell back on a simpler approach. My family data is now displayed using automatically generated web pages that are created by my Family History program (Ancestral Quest).Therefore the data I have on file at home is the same that is displayed on the site.This includes all of my notes and attached photos and documents. This style is not particularly fancy or pretty, but it gets the job done. It is easily navigable and searchable. It is much easier for me to update with new information.
In addition to the website I have also written several books on my family, and am working on several more. My goal is to eventually have a book published on each of my ancestral lines. That will take the rest of my life to accomplish as it is a slow process.
If you've enjoyed this site, please consider helping me out by visiting the support page. There are various ways you can help. It isn't required, but any help is much appreciated!
I also "work for a living" as a software developer and we have a great product out called "Working Church" which is for small and medium size churches to keep up with their membership, contributions, and such.
My wife Karla is a Court Reporter for the State of North Carolina. That keeps her pretty busy, but she also finds time to sell Arbonne health and beauty products. She doesn't do any genealogy work herself, I do all of that for the both of us. I have researched her ancestry to some extent, though not as thoroughly as my own.
We have a Christian section on the website with some interesting articles on various Biblical and Christian subjects and some useful links. We attend Kinston Baptist Temple, an Independent Baptist Church not far from our home.