When I wrote about my ancestors, the McCords, last year, I mentioned a great website where a guy had assembled information from pretty much any family bible that had information about births, deaths, and marriages of people named McCord. One of the bibles quoted there originally belonged to my great, great, great-grandfather, William J. McCord. William McCord had done a great job of recording everyone in his family before him, going all the way back to Scotland, and then everyone that came after him, which his descendants kept adding to until the 1930’s, including the marriage of Mom’s parents and the birth of her two older brothers. Part of the bible information included the indians killing William’s own great-grandfather in Pennsylvania in 1756.
Anyway, that page was a great resource and there were a couple of other bibles there from other family members as well. When I went back to visit the site recently, it was gone. I found the email address of the site owner and he said that he hadn’t had much interest from people in the site and the web provider had gone up on prices recently, so he just let it expire. I asked him if I could host the site on my own server, which I’m already paying for, so it would cost me nothing. He wasn’t sure he had all of the original files, but he started working it. He is a retired doctor and had kept a lot of records. At one point he thought I could scan all of the printouts of the old web pages and post those to my website, so he wanted me to have hard copies of everything. Luckily for me, he wound up finding the electronic files along with all the physical file folders for the 31 different family bibles he documented and mailed me a box of all of this stuff, which I got this week. There is a lot of neat stuff in there, including transcriptions of letters from one of Mom’s aunts or cousins in Birmingham about the McCord family.
I found the flash drive first and it looked like he had been able to retrieve all the files when they were converted from Microsoft Word documents to web pages using Microsoft FrontPage 2000. FrontPage makes terrible HTML code, and the pages are a little funny-looking, but it’s the content that matters. I was able upload all 20 megabytes of the files (some of the pages are scans from the original bibles, so they have bigger file sizes than the transcriptions) and pretty much everything worked. I still needed to go in and update some links and email addresses, but with a minimum of effort the website was back online with a new home:
http://mccordbibles.igirder.com
Now that it is available again, I can fix it up whenever I get the chance. Some of the scanned pages are available, but without transcriptions, so I’d like to go in and make an attempt at transcribing everything, although a lot of times the writing is hard to read.