The Idris Project documents my exploration into our family’s history and serves to present the information I have collected about my ancestors and extended family over the years. The project is named after my grandfather Idris Charles Baker and my father Robert Idris Baker (pictured at the top of this post, working on one of Grandpa’s many projects.)
I started researching our family several years ago after I found and rescued several boxes of hundreds of family photographs that my mother was storing in her garage and was planning to throw out. Starting with those, I was able to put together a fairly complete picture of several branches of my mother’s family, particularly the Joachims and the Pattersons. My father passed away a few years ago, and left many old scrapbooks and family records which I am slowly going through. His side of the family, the Bakers and Elys, have been much harder to track down. There appear to have been several adoptions on that side of the family, and much less record-keeping.
This is very much a work in progress. Much of my data is incomplete, as there are many hundreds of documents and photographs in my files that I have not yet catalogued, and I am finding new information all the time. I have used several genealogy applications over the years, and I’m finding that they record data differently, leaving my records inconsistent. Of course, I was a bit sloppy recording things when I started out, so there is quite a bit of self-inflicted mess to clean up as well. I expect that this website will change quite a bit over the years as I learn more about the family and get better at recording this information. All those old family photos are slowly making it to the website as well.
The site also gives me an opportunity to experiment with the Go programming language and the Hugo web site generator. I use Go to parse the GEDCOM files exported from my database software, and I use Hugo to generate the static website you are looking at.
I have over 2500 people in my database, but they aren’t all directly related to me. There are many branches of my cousins with whom I share common ancestors, and more than a few people who probably aren’t related to me at all. So which surnames do my direct ancestors have? Here is a list of all the families I belong to (that I know of today…):
We seem to be very English/Scots/Irish/German!
I hope this site will be interesting for my family to look through, and helpful to my fellow researchers.