What's New on An American Family

Web Site To-Do List

Add additional photos to photo albums.
Keep research page and family tree pages updated at least quarterly.
Add additional memoirs.
Update site map as site changes are made.

What's New?

September 2006

Completed redesign and reorganization of An American Family. Changed style sheet for the site to give it a clean, fresh look in a green color scheme. The new background images were found on EOS Development. Reformatted and revised existing pages to use the new style sheet and to freshen the content.
Updated my Research Status Page to reflect recent discoveries.
Added a new autobiographical memoir of my father's early years.
Added new memoir from my father, The Recovery of ET-46, about the combat recovery of a helicopter while he was serving with HMM-262 during the Viet Nam War.
Added memoirs of September 11, 2001 and Hurricane Katrina by my sister, Rebecca Doster.
Added Hurricane Katrina memoir by my niece, Angela Moreau and her children.
Added Remembering 9-11-2001 which I wrote shortly after the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks.
Added new Featured Ancestors page about my parents, Walter and Iona (Polly) Jones.
Added new Site Map generated using Coffee Cup Software's Google Sitemapper.
Updated Resources and Links page to include a number of tools and web sites that I have used in my own genealogy research and web development projects. Removed the "reciprocal links" pages that were on the last site revision.
Updated the Web Directory look and feel on Master.com to match the revised site.
Used Second Site to generate new family tree pages now with Descendant Charts and Pedigree Charts for key individuals. Each page generated by Second Site was "post-processed" to fit the new template used for the An American Family site.

16 June 2005

Posted additional memories of my mother, Iona Bruce Jones, written by myself, Patricia Jones Dumond, and my niece, Chantel Jones Patterson.

7 June 2005

Posted memories of my mother, Iona Bruce Jones, written by my sister, Rebecca Jones Doster.

1 June 2005

Posted memories of my mother, Iona Bruce Jones, written by my sister, Brenda Jones Clesi, and my niece, Angela Mitchell Moreau. Brenda's memoir is My Mom and Angie's is My Grandma.

3 April 2004

Made small correction of fact on main page.
Posted updated family tree pages created with John Cardinal's "Second Site" add-on to "The Master Genealogist. Current encarnation uses a standard graphics package and standard stylesheets as I don't have the energy at the current time to recreate the modified one I used before. Main concern was to get the pages updated to reflect some corrections and new information.

3 January 2004

Changed color scheme in style sheets.
Created and posted new logo for "An American Family" and updated logo link on all pages.

29 December 2003

Changed right column content on home page to point my father's memoir of the early years of his marriage to my mother, Iona Yvonne Bruce Jones (Polly), who passed away on 24 May 2003.
Added my father's memoir of my mother.
Updated some advertising links.

15 May 2003

Finished reformatting all of the Memoirs pages to use the site style sheet.

21 April 2003

Changed the color scheme (using cascading style sheets (CSS)). Still need to figure out what is going on with the links -- some of the look right and some of them don't and the whole point of CSS is that everything should look uniform. Go figure.

23 March 2003

Moved the site history and "What's New" section to this page to separate it from the content on the main page.
Replaced the link exchange banner ads with banner ads from sites with which "An American Family" has an affiliate relationship. I encourage you to visit these sites and purchase from them if you are planning to purchase products such as they offer. For each purchase made from these advertisers I will receive a small commission. These commissions help pay the costs of keeping "An American Family" and our site on MyFamily.com on the web.

16 February 2003

Updated the Family Trees section of the web site with my latest research. This go-round the family tree pages were created with a program called Second Site. Second Site takes a database from The Master Genealogist (TMG) and creates html pages complete with pop-up pedigree charts. There are beaucoup options and settings to make the pages work the way you want them and it took me only one day to create custom graphics (well,they aren't great -- but they are mine) and everything. The graphics were created with Adobe Photoshop by a barely Photoshop-literate (me).

10 February 2003

Added a major section to the site: a Web Directory page to "mirror" the Open Directory Project and allow users to search the largest, human-edited directory on the Internet directly from "An American Family".
Updated all of the "top-level" pages in the site to use the same formatting and style sheet as the home page.
Updated the We Served Proudly page.

History of this Web Site

This is the fourth iteration of this web site. The first was hosted on one of those free web hosting sites for about three months. I soon realized that the old axiom was true: "You get what you pay for." I redesigned the site using Microsoft FrontPage 2000 and moved to a paid hosting site. That site lasted almost two years. Then I began to realize that my site looked like every other page out there created with FrontPage. I bought a license for a good shareware text editor, TextPad, and a couple of books about HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. That was version three. For the current iteration I used a different text editor, dzSoft's Web Pad. I'm still using The Master Genealogist and Second Site for the family trees portion of the site. I'm using Photoshop Elements 4 for photo editing and organization and to create photo albums for the site.