Rob Sterling

I recently installed a piece of open source software called phpGedView. “GEDCOM” is the database tagging system developed a few decades back by the Mormon Church, which is big into genealogy and retroactive baptism of the ancestors of its converts. The phpGedView code base takes existing GEDCOM files and makes them easy to view and edit online, basically allowing a bunch of researchers to work off one file library and saving a lot of confusion and integration problems down the road.

I’ve done a little bit of genealogical research in the past, and I helped set up a Y-chromosome DNA sampling project for men with surnames similar to “Sterling”, so this was a natural. I’ve enlisted some other distant relatives in the project as well. Anyone can browse the files, though the names and personal details of the living are concealed from people who aren’t registered users.

A lot of my notes and sourcing weren’t present in the GEDCOM file I used, so I’m working on that.

The only genuinely famous ancestor I have is Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, who advocated Dutch colonization of the Hudson River Valley and underwrote a fair portion of it. He doesn’t really get the credit he deserves, because Dutch New Netherland history has been de-emphasized throughout our nation’s history in favor of the English colonization narrative. Which isn’t really a problem for me, but it’s unfortunate that people like Van Rensselaer have been forgotten to some extent.

Another interesting character is “Chalker John” Tuthill, a man who lived on Long Island in the 1600s and was some odd kind of math savant. He was commonly called “Chalker John” because he often wandered around chalking math and arithmetic on whatever stationary, smooth object he encountered. I suspect the genetic root of that behavior is still present in some contemporary members of my family.

Here’s the main entry point.

Filed under: Ejecta, Technology