(AI enhanced by Perplexity AI)

If you’ve visited “News from Nan” over the years, you may remember our old “family pages” — a mix of photos, charts, and links that tried to keep everyone’s history in one place. Now those pages have had a makeover: they’ve become full-fledged, searchable family‑history sites built with WebHelp Responsive, each focused on one branch of the family.

We’ve just finished stable versions for four branches: Anna’s, Dick’s, and two smaller-but-growing sites for Mike and Rick. Dick’s and Anna’s sites already include short stories, photos, and links to older posts and documents; Mike’s and Rick’s are simpler for now, but they have the basic structure in place and are ready for more stories as we find or write them.

Family knowledge bases

Behind each site is a “knowledge base” — a structured collection of facts, stories, and media about one family group. At a practical level, that means it’s easy for you to browse people, follow links to source material, and keep coming back as new items appear.

We haven’t tried to make these encyclopedias. Instead, each person gets at least one small narrative “hub” (a short story), and everything else — photos, charts, clipped documents, older blog posts — can hang off that. It’s enough to be interesting now, but also a framework we can keep adding to over time.

Family lore, front and center

Facts and charts are important, but family lore is what people remember and pass around. Those stories now have a clearer home.

Anna’s site already includes pieces like the “pigtail contest” vignette and wartime stories such as Bill’s hopper‑dredge work, and Dick’s pages highlight his side of the family in the same way. Mike’s and Rick’s sites are beginning to collect their own lore: Rick’s side includes a photo of Rick’s dad and uncle on the high school swim team, and the Nuss page features Henry Nuss, a Civil War soldier whose story we’re starting to flesh out.

How did we do it?

• First, we collected and saved information in Family Tree Maker and related tools — the usual names, dates, relationships, and notes that go into a family tree.
• Dick then wrote a Python program that takes a standard genealogy export file (GEDCOM — basically a portable family‑tree file) and converts it into XML, and from there into DITA, a structured format that works well for publishing. You don’t have to know XML or DITA to use the sites; this is just the machinery that makes them easy to generate and update.
• We repurposed existing material — older posts on “News from Nan,” papers, and book excerpts — by turning them into DITA topics so they can be published right alongside the tree‑based facts.
• Finally, we wrote new stories (and, where helpful, used AI tools to draft or refine them) so that each person has at least one readable narrative, not just a list of dates. The stories and the facts now live together in one navigable place.

The result is something you can click through like a website, but that’s backed by a structured, update‑friendly foundation. When we find new information, or when someone writes a new story, we can fold it in without starting over.

We’re offering a little help

We’re not starting a formal project or class, but if you’re a family member — or a fellow genealogist with similar motivation and reasonable technical comfort — and you’d like to try something like this with your own data, we’d be glad to talk. Our offer is simple: we can show what we did, answer questions, and offer informal, pro bono help as you think through your own version.

We’ll keep the “heavy lifting” (tree management, site structure, and publishing steps) to one or two people, but there’s lots of room for others to contribute short stories, photos, and memories. It’s a way to widen participation without turning every relative into a researcher.

Looking ahead: translation and beyond

One of our next goals is to begin translating selected stories into other languages that matter in our family — starting with German, Dutch, and Spanish — so cousins and extended family abroad can read them more comfortably. As we refine the tools and the workflow, we hope these sites will become a living, multilingual archive of family history and lore that keeps growing as people add their voices.