Genealogy

Katz family Highum family

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

Photos (click on thumbnail to view larger image):


Possibly due to my Scandanavian ancestry (Norwegian 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 represent/maintain/present genealogical data interesting.

Books

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). Laars Torschild Aaberge (1768-1829), the root of this genealogy, was my paternal great-great-great-great grandfather. The book consists almost entirely of names (3400+ linear descendants), dates, and occupations, with only a little additional description. The introductory pages provide some enlightening details on the difficulties of tracing Norwegian names. My Anders Ness page shows census records for my great-great grandfather and describes the naming issue in more detail.

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) (1818-1881) was my paternal great-great grandfather. Her book much is more interesting than Oyane's, as it contains newspaper clippings, stories, maps, and reproductions of original documents.

My wife's first cousin Norman Katz of Monrow Township NJ has done extensive genealogical research on his family; his work is posted here in PDF. As they were originally Polish jews, many branches on this part of the family tree end at the holocaust.

David Ness entered some data from the Oyane book into a .csv file (a flat file, easily imported by spreadsheets or databases). In late 2003, Norman Katz sent me his Katz family database information in portable GEDCOM format, and I subsequently integrated my brother's Ness family data with it. I wrote a quick-and-dirty Perl script to generate static HTML web pages from the GEDCOM data, and a decade later (in 2014) I rewrote the Perl script as a PHP program that generates pages dynamically. The resulting web-browsable family tree, generated from a single GEDCOM data file, displays over 1200 pages (900+ individuals and 300+ family groups). As noted above, I don't care much about this, so I'm rather lax about keeping the data up to date. Nevertheless, updates, corrections, and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks to David Ness, Lars Oyane, Carolyn Jones, Norman Katz, and Linda George for their contributions to my family genealogy database.

See also: my family photos pages (not password protected).