User:Tdoyle

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J W.png This WRG Member is a Descendant of the immigrant John Whitney.

PPV.png This WRG Member was a Volunteer for the Pierce Project.

MRV.png This WRG Member was a Volunteer for the Whitney Manor Records Transcription Project.

My Whitney Line

Edit My Whitney Line

TimDoyle.jpg
Tim Doyle and his grandmother, Audrey (Whitney) Doyle

My name is Tim Doyle and I have been working on tracing my family history since I was 11 (that was 34 years ago). One of my great grandmothers showed me a small family history book, and I just had to chart it out to visualize it. I then realized that none of my other lines went back as far, and I started asking for more information. My mother pointed me to my baby book, which had all lines back to my great grandparents, but I wasn't satisfied. Mom suggested I talk to my great grandparents (I had four alive, one on each side, until I was in my teens) and see what they might know. I spent numerous occasions talking with them about what they knew, their childhoods, their parents and grandparents. I feel as though I personally know my family back about 5 generations on each side because of this.

In the early days of the internet, about 1995, I experimented with placing my genealogical database online. Back then, there was no Rootsweb WorldConnect, no WorldFamily Tree - nothing like that. Genealogy programs didn't even support saving as html, so if you wanted to place information online, you were pretty much on your own. Being that I was a software engineer by occupation, I decided to put something together, and came up with a set of scripts which I called the Indexed GEDCOM Method (IGM). These scripts basically allowed anyone to place their GEDCOM file online and the scripts would create pages as viewers requested them. This software was later found by Randy Winch who was working for RootsWeb and he made many improvements to it, where it is now known as RootsWeb's WorldConnect, currently supporting over 385 million names. More information about the history of WorldConnect, including my IGM contribution, can be found on the WorldConnect History page.

My online database included what I believed to be my correct Whitney lineage. This database was seen by A. Whitney Brown back in 1997 and she posted a note to the mailing list about it. Robert L. Ward reviewed my database and noticed that the lineage that I had was wrong, and notified both the list as well as me personally. Because of the spirit of this group, I immediately joined the WRG mailing list and decided to jump right in and help out others who might be in the same situation that I had been in.

My WRG History:

Miscellaneous

The Hugh Whitney Family, about 1887
Frederick Clifford 'Tip' Whitney (baby), Mathilda Caroline (Heberlein) Whitney, Hugh Monticello Whitney, Mabel Clare Whitney, Grace May Whitney, Raymond Melvin Whitney. Taken in Kansas, circa 1887.
The Hugh Whitney Family, about 1903
Raymond Melvin Whitney, Thomas E. Hayward, Grace May (Whitney) Hayward, Mathilda Caroline (Heberlein) Whitney, Frederick Clifford 'Tip' Whitney, Lela Earle Whitney, Hugh Monticello Whitney, Lloyd Coleman 'Fa Fa' Whitney (my great grandfather). Taken in Tuxedo Park, Missouri, circa 1903.