About Our Web Site

This web site had a small beginning in Spring 2000. It was intended as simply a means of private commuication among a small number of family members concerned with researching our family history.

As both my computing and genealogical research skills have expanded and improved, the web site has continued to grow as well, in both size and complexity. I hope there have been improvements in accuracy as well.

On 20 November 2001, all the site files were transferred to the Fiegenbaum.org domain. Our presence had become more public and my commitment to this project was more explicit.

In February 2004, a database built on The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG) software was incorporated into the structure of this web site. The search of and dynamic display of basic genealogical data has worked very well, but some of the database features for photos and reports are still not as flexible as we desired, so we have continued to maintain our own portion of the web site.

There was another redesign of the web site in 2007 and a search function based on Google's custom search engine was introduced. Search engine optimization is a regular part of the "under the hood" tweaking.

In 2010, Fiegenbaum.org moved to a new registrar and new web host. I revised the HTML and PHP coding underlying the web site and deployed a new web design. There was a major update of the TNG software and the MySql database was rebuilt from scratch. We were finally able to fully accommodate all UTF-8 character entities.

Thanks to nearly constant research and the amazing generosity of family, friends and near-total strangers, the history of the family has become broader and more detailed.

In the summer of 2012, a new web design came online. It is slightly less amateur in appearance and may be about as good as our limited graphic design skills will allow.

Throughout 2016 and 2017, there was a effort made to make the web site more compatible with a variety of "viewports" (tablets, cell phones, etc.). Some of that has worked out. Some items, such as the transcription of various historical documents, do not shrink down very well.

The vague notions that were present in 2010 of using the site for more than simply sharing genealogical research have not yet come into sharper focus. But, all hope is not yet lost.