I became interested in my family history many years ago, but did not do any serious research. When my parents celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2004 I got a bit more serious. I gathered information and pictures from family and friends and put together a web site documenting their lives. I realized that a family tree web site would not be any more difficult to put together than their Golden Anniversary web site, so I started documenting the information I had, and then I sort-of lost interest again.
In September 2007, something sparked my interest again, and I actually sat down and created my first family tree web site (which I now call version 1.0). It was not database driven since my ISP did not support databases. Each family page was a separate web page making it fairly difficult to maintain. Since there were few pages and a simple index this was not a major issue.
As I started my genealogy research I soon learned about my Grandfather's brother and sister, and their parents, and I added them to my web site. I also learned that they all immigrated from Sweden in the early 1900's. Any further research of this line would mean that I would have to learn Svenska (Swedish) which I began by downloading some free tutorials.
I also knew that my Grandmother's maiden name was Grunstra. I searched the internet and almost immediately found a booklet documenting a Grunstra family tree, but was this the Grunstra tree I was looking for? On page twelve I found my Grandmother's name, and the names of my Grandfather, my Uncle, and My Father. This seemed like the correct tree to me. Under my Father's name was the statement "There are children but no names given." Apparently, I was destined to continue documenting this branch.
I started adding the Grunstra family tree to my web site. By the end of November 2007 I had a second index and over 300 new family pages. This was starting to get complicated, so I started looking for a new ISP that supported databases. I found one and by the middle of December 2007 I released the database version of My Family Tree, version 2.0. It featured a single family page populated with data from the database, a dynamic master index of all the unique family names in the database, and dynamic family indexes for each of these family names. Now all I needed to do was add new names to to database, the rest was automatic.
In January 2008 I added simple Birthday, Anniversary, Address, and E-Mail lists to the site (simple from a database point of view), and released version 2.1. But I was still the only person who had access to add or update the information in the database, so I started designing version 2.2.
Version 2.2 allows visitors to browse very limited information from the database. It also allows registered users to login and access all the database information. Registered users also have the ability to update their own family information. Users may register, only if their basic information is already in the database.