I was recently contacted by a fellow Winans researcher, Dale Winans (1-5-1-3-11-7-8-2-3-1-1), who supplied some interesting information and corrections for various pages in our transcription of Alice Winans Egy's "monumental genealogical tome".
Dale suggested that the people in Mrs. Egy's book could be better visualised via a spreadsheet and proceeded to provide just such a tool. He created a spreadsheet in .ods, or Open Document, format which displayed all the people in the pages I had transcribed thus far. When I raised the possible objection that not everybody possesses programs on their computers which will display the spreadsheet file correctly, or that some versions of Microsoft Excel, or other programs, might issue error messages while displaying it, Dale quickly offered a solution:
He converted the spreadsheet to .html format. If you can see this page, you can see the spreadsheet. Here it is:
As Dale says:
It provides a central location for links to further information on the person being researched, but it also gives a more tangible graphic representation of EXACTLY where everyone fits in the family. You can see more clearly not only how each person is related to Jan, but also makes it easier for people to see how those in different lines are related to each other. By taking two people and tracing each backward to their closest SHARED ancestor, they can discover HOW they are related, i.e. first cousin, second cousin, etc.
Thank you, Dale! At this moment, the spreadsheet should be considered experimental. Dale must update it manually each time I add new pages to my transcriptions of Mrs. Egy's book. To see which pages of the book have been transcribed, please check its page status.
Your ideas and suggestions are welcome. Please send them to Dale and to me.