Ancient Web: Kyle MacLea Hosted a Family Tree on a Unix Server

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Not every historical website has to be a big public museum. A wedding page and a family tree can preserve just as clearly how ordinary people used the Web.

Visit the MacLea family homepage on Kitenet

Kyle Scott MacLea's small family site identifies itself as a homepage for Kyle and Holly. It was last updated in September 2007, and its copyright and Creative Commons footer spans 2005–2007. The front page offers exactly five choices: the couple's introduction, wedding, photos, genealogy, and external links.

The wedding page, updated in December 2005, records a ceremony at Orr's Island, Maine, that June. It links to photographs and a planning page the couple originally prepared for guests. This is the everyday Internet of its period: put the information on a page and email everybody the address.

Genealogy had its own network

The family-history section is more ambitious. MacLea says his paternal MacLea/McLea line can be followed into mid-eighteenth-century western Scotland. He connects other family branches to French Canada and to the Tyrol near the Italian-Austrian border, while acknowledging substantial gaps.

A deeper MacLea research page discusses the family's migration and a plan to collect descendants of James Brown MacLea, who emigrated from Scotland to the United States in the late nineteenth century. It links to a FamilyWiki, a genealogy blog, and a Livingstone and MacLea Emigration Registry where related families could contribute evidence. The page also describes the author's interest in comparing paternal genetic lineages.

Those are links to projects that existed when the page was written; some of their destinations are no longer reachable. The historic pages don't prove all genealogical connections, and family research should be checked against records before being treated as settled.

The hosting context is important. This page sits beneath a traditional tilde-user address on Kitenet, a long-lived independent Unix server. It does not pretend to be a social network profile, and its information hierarchy has survived without being rebuilt around an app.

The combination is wonderfully ordinary: a couple's wedding, their photos, and a much more complicated attempt to connect relatives scattered across continents.

Browse the 2006 genealogy index and the preserved family homepage.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.