Introduction to Marty and Karla Grant's Website

Welcome to our website! My name is Marty Grant, and my wife Karla and I appreciate you dropping by.

I began my Genealogy research in the summer of 1980 when I was only 14 years old, and have been at it ever since. I corresponded with lots of distant cousins, and after the Internet started gaining in popularity I soon became inundated with e-mails from cousins and possible cousins. That gave me the idea of putting my genealogy data online.

I created these web pages around 1998 or so, and they have changed several times over the years, and grown considerably. Originally I decided to put up standard Register Reports of all my ancestral lines (the way you still see all over the net), but this caused me no end of frustration, as I was getting bombarded with questions about "proof" for each little fact presented. These were certainly valid questions, but I didn’t have time to answer that much correspondence, and indeed, it has only gotten worse since then! At one point I deleted my entire website in frustration after several nasty e-mails came in from someone who insisted that I "owed" them a timely response to their question, and how it was rude of me not to respond. At that point I was getting about 100 personal e-mails a day, and there was no way I could even begin to answer them all.

That lead me to realize that my pages had to be different from the rest of what was available on the web. I needed to have all my documentation included on the pages, and in a presentable and easily understandable manner. In other words, each web page had to be a book (or a chapter from a book) on the family. It had to be that detailed. I began with various formats and eventually settled on one format that I liked, and stuck with that. Now each family page has a narrative with commentary and documentation in chronological order, followed by the children of that family, each of them documented in the same way, or if applicable, with links to their own web pages.

At the time, mine was the only website I knew of which was that detailed, but even now (2005) I still find that most websites out there are still just using the old Register Report with no documentation. There are several good, well documented websites out there now too, and I am glad to see it. Unless you are only interested in one surname or family, it is a never ending job, and I will continue to document my ancestors and close relations in this manner until I’ve done them all. At that point, I’ll do the same with other families that are of the same surnames and in the same areas, but who may or may not be related to me (I’ve already done this in many cases.)

I had two goals in mind with creating my web pages in such a detailed way. One was to present the data to the public for sharing (and to receive feedback and additional information), and the other was to cut down on the number of e-mails I was getting. If all the documentation was already there, then the e-mail questions would already be answered, so I would get less questions, or at least that was the theory. However, it didn’t work out that way, and my e-mail load increased even more.

I still get tons of e-mail, but my contact me page explains to correspondents why I may be slow to answer. Most people are okay with this. I love to help people, and that is why I’m doing my pages this way. I can either help one person at a time via e-mail messages, or I can help untold numbers of people all at once by having a well documented web page for a particular family. To balance the two, I spend the vast majority of my "genealogy" time working on the web pages, and much less on answering e-mail. Of course my inbox always has something like 7,000 messages in it, and I’ll never ever be able to answer it all. I do answer some e-mail every day, and it does bother me that I can’t answer every one, but I’m only human, and only one person.

I wanted to take a moment and briefly describe what my family pages look like, just so you’ll know what to expect.

Each page will have a title, being the head of the family, for instance: "John Smith and Jane Doe of Buncombe County, North Carolina." Following that will be a complete write up of their family, or as complete as I can make it with the information that I have. If anyone has shared the data with me, I include their names as sources. I’ll follow the patriarch and matriarch from birth until death, including every scrap of documentation I have available, and then do the same for their children. If something is unproven, I state it plainly that it is a theory, or that it seems to be the case, or something like that.

After the main section and the children's section will be a link to a "researcher list" page showing names and e-mail addresses of other folks researching the same family so that you can get in touch with them if you like. Some people assume that those listed on that page are my sources, but that is not always the case, though sometimes it is. They are listed there just as a convenience to me and to them so that researchers and cousins can locate each other and swap data. It is just a researcher registry.

After that section there will be a standard Register Report showing up to 4 generations of descent from the main subjects. This will be in the standard format, and will not contain documentation, and the data presented may not all be correct. The main commentary section is where documentation, theories, etc. will be presented. The register report may make some theoretical data seem factual, but that is just because there is no other way to present it.

So in effect, each page will be a book unto itself, or a chapter in a book, with links included to the other "chapters."

I have documented about half or 2/3rds of my ancestry so far in this way. I have them all documented here at home, but it takes time to get it all onto the web. My website consists of well over 2600 pages, and nearly 200mb of data (I use very few graphics.) The pages are growing at a rate of about 2 per week. That is how long it takes to properly document and write up a family for my website. At this rate I’ll still be adding new pages for years to come.

This website costs me money, so a few years ago I decided to try out banner ads to see if I could break even (or get rich) from them. I had always hated those things on other websites, but I understand the need now. I figured with the Banner ads I could break even, and I did at first, but after awhile that income dropped really low, and now I almost always get nothing! Oh well! Breaking even is all that I really wanted. Donations are also accepted and they do really help, though I rarely get any.

Keep checking the What’s New page for updates. I appreciate the encouraging e-mails that I receive. I do read every single e-mail that I get, even though I can’t answer them all, they do get read.

Hope you find something useful or enjoyable on my web pages!

For further reading, check out these pages:

What's New - All the latest updates.
Surnames - These are all the major surnames I am researching.
Mission Statement - What my site goals are.
A Note about Sources - Documentation methods.
How to Contact Me - E-mail, Fax, AIM, etc.
Site Help - How to navigate these pages, etc.
Flood Photographs - Hurricane Floyd hit us in Sept 1999 and we got flooded.
About Marty & Karla - A little bit of personal info on us.
Personal Tidbits - Book Reviews, Movie Reviews, TV reviews
The Fine Print - Copyright, Fair Use, etc.
Statistics - Page counters, statistics, etc. Over 3 million visitors served!

Marty Grant, Kinston, NC June 16, 2005.

Last Updated July 08, 2006