Family tree index
Steve's page

[Links on this page are password protected; send Email for access.]

Possibly due to my Scandanavian ancestry (Norwegan on my dad's side, Swedish on my mom's), I have little interest in genealogy; for me, names and dates per se are not very interesting. I'd rather hear a story about someone than read raw birth/marriage/death data. But I have several relatives who are interested, and they've done lots of genealogical research. And my brother David and I both are/were computer guys, so we find the computer issues of how to maintain and present a genealogical database interesting.

Lars E. Oyane of Nesttun, Norway wrote The Aaberge Family History, privately published ca. 1976, 200+ pages, typed, single spaced, with index; truly a labor of love (or insanity). It consists entirely of names, dates, and occuptions, with very little additional description. Laars Aaberge (1768-1829), the root of this genealogy, was my paternal great great great grandfather. David entered some of data from this source into a .csv file (a flat file, easily imported by spreadsheets or databases), but he only did the part that interested him; in the family tree above, you can trace from my page up to my paternal great grandfather Andrew A. Ness, but no farther.

Another distant relative, the late Carolyn Dahl Jones of Topeka KS, wrote Peder and Guri Highum Ancestors and Descendants: A Family Story, 1990, almost 400 pages. Peder Pederson Høgheim (Highum) was my paternal great great grandfather. I find this book much more interesting than Oyane's, as it contains newspaper clippings, stories, maps, and reproductions of original documents. But I have not integrated its data into the family tree above.

My wife's first cousin Norman Katz of Monrow Township NJ has done extensive genealogical research on his family; his work is here in PDF. As they were originally Polish jews, many leaves of this part of the family tree end at the holocaust. In late 2003, Norman sent me his Katz family database information in portable GEDCOM format, and I subsequently integrated my brother's Ness family data with it. Then I wrote a quick-and-dirty Perl script to generate web pages in HTML from the GEDCOM data.

The resulting web-browsable family tree (cf. links at top of this page) consists of over a thousand web pages (almost 800 individuals, 300 family groups) generated from a single GEDCOM data file. As noted above, I don't care much about this, so I'm quite lax about keeping the data up to date. Nevertheless, updates, corrections, and suggestions are welcome.