TERRELL FAMILY TREE

This website is just a simple landing page to link to resources online about the Terrell Family.

The primary goal is to honor the lifelong genealogical efforts of my late mom, Jackie Ann Presley (Terrell).

Obituary

BACKGROUND ON JACKIE PRESLEY’S GENEALOGY

For years mom accumulated file cabinets worth of photocopies of records, pictures, and legal documents after visiting countless courthouses, churches, and cemeteries. Ultimately, Todd and I had limited time to dispose of the voluminous physical materials while liquidating her estate because there was almost no organization we could discern. But mom did spend many years using PC software to try to organize her research. She scanned many hundreds of the photocopies and pictures she brought home and loaded it faithfully into Brother’s Keeper, and then later the Personal Ancestry File (PAF) program. I cross my fingers that the most relevant parts of what we had to discard are not lost but memorialized digitally in this program. She would have loved to see all of this in the hands of her grandchildren.

Mom used Personal Ancestry File (PAF) software on her laptop to input her research into digital form diligently over 25+ years. When I would visit, I’d be sure to get a backup from the program and of the file system that contained all the linked pictures. Every few years, she’d either be suffering from a PC virus attack or desperately needing a new laptop. The point is, I made backups every year or two. This is lucky because in 2016 or so something like ransomware got into her laptop and encrypted a lot of the linked pictures. The result was that you could browse the family tree in PAF, but the linked pictures were “not found”. I worked on it for a bit back then but didn’t have the time to really fix it, so I think mom stopped attaching new pictures. I finally booted up her laptop in SEP 2021, updated it, and fired up PAF. I found that by restoring successively older backup .zip files onto the media folder, but not replacing existing files, I was able to get back what looked like all the pictures, properly linked. I don’t know of a way to verify that it is complete, but I restored all the backup files I could find, so I think it is as good as it will get.

LINKS

PAF has a feature to “export a web site”- it is not very beautiful or easy to navigate, but it exports ALL of the pictures that are linked to the family tree records in an organized form, and as such it is invaluable (if you looked at the installation directory of PAF on her laptop, you’d see thousands of pics with no organizing structure). So, other than browsing the PAF program directly, this is the best way to see her work together with linked pictures.

Click the link below to open the first navigation page, then click “Ancestors” or one of the other links to navigate. On each ancestor page, click “Parent” or use the arrows at the bottom to navigate the tree. When you see “Scrapbook” beside a name, there are pictures linked by mom.

PAF WEB SITE with linked pictures

PAF also has a feature to export its family tree info (without pictures) to a GEDCOM file, which is a more “modern” genealogy file format. I did this, trying lots of export options, until I got a file that would upload into Ancestry.com. The family tree on Ancestry.com is much prettier to navigate but doesn’t have mom’s attached pictures. However, it does introduce the possibility of using Ancestry.com tools and features to enhance mom’s work, should one of her descendant’s choose to pick it up again.

Ancestry.com > Terrell (requires that I have already shared this with you from Ancestry.com)