Frequently Asked Questions

1. How did your site start?
The story about my genealogy research starts this way. We had genealogy related papers going back to the 1600s. My mom entered them in pedigree sheets in 1978. Computers were not cheap as they are today. I ended up putting them in life lines on FreeBSD around 2001. I had about 150 names. I knew these last names the most: Harlan, Mendenhall, and McClellan or McClelland. I started using PAF around 2003. I added more people in 2005. I had about 330 names at that point. I did some imports of gedcoms and I had about 1,500 by 2006. I was finding Medieval names also. I grew slowly until I discovered Roots Magic. In early 2015 I started importing family trees. I would get up to 500 or 400 at a sitting. Pretty soon I had 92,000 names by early 2017. I had gone down the alphabet in order and by "E" it looked too familiar. I was close to just repeating it all over again and finding very little more so I had to stop. I could tell that I had tons of duplicates of medieval names also. I mean I think I have 30,000 duplicates of medieval people. Especially of the 200 AD people you can find online pretty easily.
I focused on a few more familiar names and I only found about 1,500 more. I took out tons of duplicates. To make this site I exported a gedcom of everyone born over 110 years ago. I used a gedcom to html converter on NetBSD. That took 25 minutes. I had to make a site map with perl also. It was way too big to try using my regular sitemap generator.

2. What did you find?
I could tell my closest long lost relatives lived in Idaho. They put all but maybe ten of my first round of genealogy in the IGI in 1905 and in 1944. And that was done long before I was born. I also had been pretty curious all along about some of the nationalities I found in my research.

3. How familiar are you with these names?
I am pretty familiar with the more recent names and not that familiar with some of the names from hundreds of years ago. I am sure some of you have different information on some of them. Corrections are welcome.

4. What genealogy programs have you used?
I have mainly used PAF, life lines, and Roots Magic. Now I use Ancestral Quest. I tried gramps but it took a long time to open since I had so many people. I tried to generate maps with oxy-gen butthe program did not finish. I did like it but I think it was a bug. I wish I could split this site up more also.

5. Will you update your site?
I will redo my site and the next one will be in a different subdomain. It takes a long time for search engines to index and catalog 70,000 people. If you have corrections please email them to me.

6. Why did you make mailing lists?
I wanted people to have a free forum where they could discuss certain last names. As long as it is civil and on topic that is all I ask. So far I have Harlan and Mendenhall mailing lists. Send an email to harlan-list at ericbuchanan.info or to mendenhall-list at ericbuchanan.info. To join a McClelland or McClellan mailing list for free send email to mcclelland-list at ericbuchanan.info. You will receive a confirmation email that you need to reply to. There are not a lot of mailing lists like this online.

7. What languages do you speak?
I speak English and Spanish. I speak some Swedish and Italian.

8. Social Media
I cannot use facebook, myspace, instagram, and other related sites. Also I will not be doing any DNA genealogy tests. I do not use instant messenger programs because I read they copyright what you say as if it were theirs.
9. Medieval and Royal Genealogy
This was fun and rewarding however there was a huge problem for me. I had tens of thousands of names that were probably only about 3,000 people. I could tell after a while that they identify by multiple names that do not sound like they match. And they seem to be from different countries when in fact they are one person. I mean an English royalty person might show up as an Eastern European royalty person with a totally different name. Be careful if you do this a lot since you can run into many duplicates. Also William the Conqueror is also "William" a bunch of times if you go looking. And "Conqueror."

List of surnames
List of People