My Wish List

Any Families Mentioned on This Site

• Old photographs would be welcome; I can scan them and return them quickly, or, if you prefer to send me scans, I would appreciate it if they were scanned at 200dpi, true color, to match the other photos here.
• Birth certificates, marriage licenses, death certificates, and other such documents would also be welcome. As with the photos, I can scan them, or if you prefer to scan them and send the files to me, please use 200dpi and true color.

Yearke/Gierke Family

• I do not have any pictures of the siblings of my grandfather, Harvey Yearke. I also do not have any pictures of his parents and their parents or siblings. I would greatly appreciate scans from anyone who has these photos.
• I am wondering who might have ended up with Albert Yearke's police badge and any other memorabilia.

Doster Family

• Opinions of my speculations regarding The Doster Genealogy would be welcomed and appreciated.
• The source of the information for George Frederick Doster [I.A] and Gottlob Doster [I.A.6] in Chapter XXIII (Branch No. 17, Michigan) of The Doster Genealogy would be also be appreciated.

Software

Brother's Keeper

Don't get me wrong, Brother's Keeper is a great software package. I've not looked into other genealogy software, because it already does just about everything I want. However, here are a few ways I think it could be even better:

• It would be nice if it generated cleaner HTML; specifically, the lack of a <!DOCTYPE> at the top of HTML documents is not good style. Also, the formatting for group sheets generated quite a bit of debate at this W3C mailing list; see my software page for information on how I've fixed this for pages on my site. Finally, the "return" button on group sheet notes pages is implemented by using a <form> without an "action" tag, which is illegal HTML, but I don't have a workaround for that (yet).
• The ability to generate HTML box charts would be great. HTML creation for other things, especially register reports, would also be welcome (generating RTF reports and using Microsoft Word to convert to HTML generates really ugly HTML code, and having to then run the files through HTML Tidy just makes more work). Also, the ability to define custom header fields for HTML reports would be nice, as I like to put meta tags such as:

       <meta name="author" content="Dave Yearke" />
       <meta name="description"
             content="Dave Yearke's family research." />
       <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
       <link rel="stylesheet" href="./styles/genealogy.css" type="text/css" />

  on many of my pages.
• An option to not print boxes on box charts for living people would be useful (perhaps an empty, dashed or dotted box?).
• Enhanced privacy options, like not printing the first of living people, would be helpful for some people (I've seen other software print names such as "Living Yearke"). A per-user privacy tag in the database for overriding global settings could be useful as well, with options such as "Print details for this user even if the 'don't print details for living people' box is checked, or "Don't print even the first name for this person, use 'Living' instead".
• It would be nice if databases on network drives could be accessed via UNC names such as "\\computer2\shared\bk6".
• A method for doing batch updates would be neat. For example, a simple text file could be constructed with lines that contain the BK individual number, the field name, and a value to be added. Then, this file could be processed and the data added to the relevant fields for the people listed. For example:

       001 Religion "Roman Catholic"
       008 Birth Location "Buffalo, NY"
       015 Census Date "1920" Note "Date of birth illegible."

• Database specifictions would also be nice, as would an API for the BTrieve engine, so that perl scripts could be constructed to do queries and updates.

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