Project History

bigpigeon.us webpage Resources > Pigeon Central > Project History, updated by RAC 30 Dec '17.

My History Projects - Overview.

My St. Paul's Database:

In the early 1970s, I collected family history information from several relatives, including Agnes Christiansen, Alvin Christiansen (my father), and Ellen (Hansen) Larson. I put aside my notes from these conversations until I retired in 1997.
After retiring in 1997, my second cousins, Alvina, Elaine and Phyllis, motivated me to begin studying the early families of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Boomer Township, west of Neola, Iowa.
Needing a computer system to hold my family and church history data, I purchased the Mac-only Reunion software and named my major Reunion database St. Paul's. St. Paul's now has entries for over 38,000 individuals who either lived in rural northwestern Pottawattamie County, Iowa, or had relatives who lived therein.

My Paper Reports:

As I sorted out the early families of St. Paul's, my scope gradually spread to include the neighborhood in which St. Paul's is located.
Meanwhile I was privileged to have additional conversations about family, neighborhood and church history with many individuals, and especially with my aunts, Ethel, Helen, Thelma and Evelyn, now all deceased, and with my second cousins, Arlene, Gladys and Derald.
In 2007 I used Microsoft Word to produce the first version of my extended family history, following with version 2 in 2012.
In 2007 I also wrote a collection of reports called St. Paul's Boomer-Neola Early Families.
In 2008 I distributed some of my reports in binders to the organizations or individuals listed in the Binders & Photographs page and in 2012 I updated most of these binders.
My Aunt Ethel was instrumental in motivating me to begin a series of reports on the rural one-room schools of Boomer and Hazel Dell Townships. Although these reports are largely incomplete, I did prepare a more-complete report for Aunt Ethel in honor of her 100th birthday in 1912.
I have switched to website distribution of my reports and discontinued paper distribution, but have kept the current binders in place.

About My Family History:

My extended family history traces all four branches of my family back to Denmark and includes many collateral relatives.
The planned version 3 of my family history was to incorporate maps and some photographs. I more-or-less completed the Rasmussen portion in 2015, and I then began work on the Larsen/Larson portion.
In 2016 I restructured my printed family history to facilitate porting it to a website. Since then the focus of my work has been on website development.

My Websites:

To date all my web development has been on the Weebly platform.
My web development work began in 2015 with a test site I call Kirsten Pedersen's Relatives, located at kirstenpedersen.weebly.com.
In mid 2015, I developed danishheritage.org for the Danish American Heritage Society.
In 2016 I began adding my family history content to a corner of Kirsten Pedersen's Relatives as a pilot project.
In April 2017, I turned over danishheritage.org to Jennifer Thøgersen of the University of Nebraska.
In May 2017 I transformed the content of kirstenpedersen.weebly.com into bigpigeon.us and began adding more content.
Big Pigeon holds my historical reports, and eventually, I hope, my collection of historic photographs.

Big Pigeon has seven content areas, namely:

Home
Big Pigeon History
More History
Mormon History
St. Paul's History
My Family History
Resources

I have organized my historical reports on my computer to match the structure of Big Pigeon. The History Index page includes an overview index of these reports.

Afterthoughts:

This page focuses on computer organization of my digitized materials. It does little to address the enormous amount of paper material I have. I hope to address this topic later. In event of my early demise, my heartfelt apologies to my dear spouse, Martha, and to my children.
In event of my early demise, Martha will consult the Upon My Death and Donations & Dispersal webpages.