About this Site

Welcome!

Having been bitten by the genealogy bug, I have been collecting various family information, photos and records for several years now. I have designed MyFamilyRegister.com as a personal genealogy site for interests in my Laragy, Cook, Cain, and Ochs ancestors, just to name a few. Because I am not really following a single family line, I couldn't just pick a domain name like laragy.com, cook.com, cain.com, or ochs.com (coincidentally, none of which were available), so I had some difficulty choosing a domain name. I went with MyFamilyRegister.com because it was true to my purpose and, more importantly, because -- after hours of searching for a good domain name -- this one was actually available! Traditionally, 'The Family Register' is a page included in the family Bible where each family member's name and date of birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage and death are recorded. (see Google samples.)

The goal of this site is to pull my research together in one place and in a meaningful, useful way in order to more easily share it with relatives, as well as with the hope that others might find this site and be able to help fill in some of those remaining gaps.

While one of the major goals of this site is to share information, another is to protect the privacy of living relatives. Therefore, I have made every attempt to remove the names of living persons from the database (though they may appear in some photographs). In many cases I did not have a birth or death date of an individual. If I had too little information regarding a person, I opted not to include the individual on this web site. However, if it was apparent that the person couldn't possibly be living any longer (for example, having a parent born in the early 1800s), I opted to include their name. Going through this process I whittled the database down from over 400 people to just under 200 individuals. In doing so, I may have eliminated some people who are no longer living and that should have been included here, but I felt it better to be safe than sorry. In any event, please feel free to contact me if you spot an error, feel someone is missing, or if you have any other comments or concerns. The last thing I want to do is make anyone uncomfortable with the information presented here.

As for the technical details... This site was built using 'The Next Generation' of Genealogy Sitebuilding© (TNG), which was developed by Darrin Lythgoes. The data was exported from FamilySearch™ Personal Ancestral File™ (PAF), into the GEDCOM format (an international standard recognized by all genealogy software). Then the data is imported and stored in MySQL database tables and is dynamically displayed with PHP. All without re-typing a single piece of data from the PAF file. Pretty amazing stuff! I use Photoshop® image-editing software and Picasa™ Photo Organizer to work with the images. I use OpenOffice.org™ (free office suite) to edit scanned documents and transcriptions, and save as Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The free program Acrobat® Reader® is required to view PDF files. The primary benefit - PDF Documents always look and print exactly the same, for all receivers of a document, regardless of the hardware or software used.

Well, that's the gist of it. Please feel free to contact me if you have any comments or questions. I would love to hear from you! Thanks for dropping by!

Sincerely,
Jim Laragy, Jr.

P.S. The photo used on the home page is my grandmother: Isabel Ochs.