Welcome to version 2

Contributors

Among the many contributors to this document we would like to thank in particular: Victor Congdon, Les Fyffe, Heather (Donaldson) Hunter, Charlie Kelly, Greg Lyons, Dorothy Smith, Alastair Lyons and Pauline Wells. And personally I would like to single out John William Lyons; every project needs a push to get it started and in our case that was provided by John, so many thanks from all of us.

State of the project

Several correspondents have provided us with the fruits of their individual researches, and we have done what we can to pull it together. We've made an attempt to keep track of where each snippet of information has come from, but the references are recorded informally at this stage. There are typographical errors, countless omissions, and without doubt numerous errors of fact. With your help we can improve all aspects of the site, so please email John with information, corrections, suggestions, updates, photographs, anecdotes, points of view, and advice.

As John and I are both on the wrong side of 50! we are anxious to find others that will eventually help to take care of the data we have built up here. So please get in touch if you are at all interested.

John has been plugging away trying to get you to yield your family details and your photos with some limited success – please do take time to send us what you have, and tell us what you know, before it gets lost in the mists of time.

Format and Contents

The data is stored using a remarkable piece of software called Family Historian. Among its many strengths is its ability to produce a website automatically from the underlying data, and this website is the result, (although in this latest release I have slightly modified the standard format).

There is a row of tabs at the top of the page:

Home, containing a brief note on the changes in recent releases.
Introduction (which you are reading),
Index, a list of all the people on the tree, and the main gateway into to the website,

From within the Index you can click on the name of any person. You are presented with details of that person's immediate family group. From here you can click on the name of a parent, a child, a sibling or a spouse, and so navigate your way around the tree.

The Tree, giving access to the detailed data in a variety of ways

George Lyon and Catherine Shields:- Allows you to start with the person we now believe may be the father of Henry Lyons, the recently identified George Lyon. The result is exactly the same as if you had selected George Lyon using the Index
Henry (Harry) Lyons and wife née Barnwell:- Allows you to start with Henry Lyons himself. The result is exactly the same as if you had selected Henry using the Index.
Descendants of George Lyon in outline report format: A long text document containing the details of the tree in so-called 'outline' format - a very compressed form that you may find useful for reference purposes.
Records changed since XXXX: - (NOT IN THIS VERSION) a report showing only those people whose records have changed recently. This prevents you from having constantly to check the accuracy of the data in your part of the tree, and notifies you of any changes.

Charts

The Charts entry brings you to a list of progeny charts. They show individual branches of the tree in diagrammatic form. The way in which they are displayed will depend on how your web browser has been set up. The bigger branches may initially appear too compressed to read, but you should be able to zoom in (normally by clicking on the body of the diagram, or there may be a zoom button) and move around (using the keyboard arrow keys, or other arrow buttons on the screen). Charts for the LYON family are now included.
All Charts for Printing: You MAY be able to print the charts directly from your browser, but some browsers have difficulties with printing such large charts. I have therefore provided an All Charts for Printing facility. This is simply an Excel file containing all the charts. If Excel is installed on your computer, it should automatically be invoked when you chose this option. If not, your browser should give you the opportunity to download the file AllCharts1.xls - you will then need to find an Excel compatible program to display and print the charts. From within Excel you can print most of the charts without difficulty (I’ve found that the very largest, those showing all the descendants of an individual, may still cause problems, but the Grandchildren charts seem to work fine). I have provided some more detailed guidance on printing in the Introduction, the first page within the Excel file.
Ancestors of Correspondents: I’ve included ancestor charts for myself and some of the other contributors to the tree. They will be of limited interest to many of you, but they show another of the formats available within Family Historian.

Major Sources

Lyons Family of County Tyrone: The document by Revd RH Robb that provides us with our richest information on the life of the early family.
Lyon Family of Ulster: The paper, by kind permission of Charlie Kelly, that documents his researches into the Lyon family, with whom we now believe we are connected.

Maps

A section containing several maps of county Tyrone. Detailed maps of Ardstraw and Cappagh will follow at some point.

Discussion Forum - WITHDRAWN
Links: Please tell me about any websites you think may be of interest to others.
Contacts (email addresses)

Privacy, security

In balancing our desire to connect and inform the wider family, with issues of identity theft and privacy, we have decided on the following policy: we will publish on the charts all data for those people that we know to be deceased, or who are over 95 years of age according to our record of their birth date. For all others we will publish limited data: year of birth, but not the day and month of birth; town of birth, but not address, etc. Your views on this policy would be appreciated. If you would like less information displayed against your entry, then please contact us.

Distributing the database

In the short term we will not be making the database (the underlying GEDCOM file created by Family Historian) available to others, even within the family. Our fear is that multiple copies would then be updated separately, and we would fail to end up with a definitive database on the family. But there may be other ways of cracking this nut, and we’d welcome your ideas. One possibility would be to split the tree into branches and have one person responsible for each branch. We will revisit the decision in the future.

Next steps

We want to improve all aspects of the data, and the website, so please email John who has kindly agreed to act as secretary for the time being (see Contacts page). In particular, if you know of any official documents, letters, family bibles, etc that might throw light on the family history then please let us know.

Some ideas for further work are:

- extend the tree back in time from Henry

- attempt to connect our tree to other Lyons families

- find the given name of Henry's wife (née Barnwell),

- identify the Barnwell connection

- fill in the blanks in Henry's progeny, and in particular

- keep the tree up to date with recent additions to the family

- provide solid references for all information held, where possible back to official documents

- add photographs

- add mini biographies where appropriate

- make an inventory of Lyons family history resources held by family members and others

Let us know if you are interested in any of these areas.

Photographs

Photographs help bring the tree to life, and we'd like to have a selection on our tree. We suggest recording from 1 up to 4 photos for an individual (eg as infant, child, younger adult, and older adult), and up to 3 family groups at various stages of life, but a single photo is fine. In decreasing order of preference the preferred formats are:

1 a JPG file less than 50kB

2 a JPG file of any size (I’ll compress it)

3 a computer file of any size/type

4 a photocopy sent by post

5 the original document

Send whatever you have, paper or electronic, to John (see Contact page). So please, DONT PUT IT OFF - get snapping, scanning and emailing TODAY.