Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t go back to quill pen and ink. Life would be a lot simpler, wouldn’t it? There must be a monk somewhere who’s interested in family history?

I won’t bore you with the details, but I decided to upgrade the Leonard Database this week. The good news is… we’ve gone from 1726 family members… to 2816. There were 669 families yesterday. Today there are 1017. There were 495 different surnames. Now there are 780.

Does this make me a name collector? (Don’t MAKE me stop this car!) Every one of those people has a story and I have personally touched their, uh, data. No bulk downloads from Ancestry or other sources for me. The bad news is, by updating the database, I completely broke all the links to family photographs. Don’t get me wrong, the photos are still there, but you’ll have to look a little harder to find them. At least until I get some fixin’ done.

Speaking of databases, Darrin Lygothe’s The Next Generation software, which powers the Leonard Family database, is also behind an interesting new project from FamilySearch. FamilySearch Community Trees are lineage-linked genealogies drawn from specific locations and time periods around the world. The idea is to assemble enough information to get a pretty good idea how people actually lived in those ancestral villages. And that’s about as far from name collecting as you can get.

A quick search on the Leonard surname turns up 46 hits, including several in Monmouthshire, England. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d love to know what life was like in Solomon’s hometown! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to stick my head back under the hood and see if I can fix what I’ve broken. Pass me that roll of duct tape, will ya?