(For old news, Click here.)
Version Eight is available at My New Website, fabpedigree.com.
I'm excited to have my own website now, hosted by Lunarpages.com. So far it seems to work very well; please report any problems to me. (My one big fear is that, although Lunarpages allows me a very generous monthly bandwidth, the Search Engines like Google will read every single one of the 72,000 pedigree pages every few days, and use up the bandwidth!)
Although the expansion from Version 7 to Version 8 was huge, it involved minor miscellaneous corrections and additions throughout the tree, rather than any single big addition.
Shortly before the ``deadline'' my friend David Hughes sent me his latest research result: a descent showing the great conqueror Tamerlane Khan to be 20-great grandfather of the present Queen of England! (Tamerlane's descendant, Maria Musaki, had a daughter who married Stefan Despot of Serbia, who is an ancestor of the Perenyi family.)
I couldn't leave well enough alone. After uploading Version Eight to the new website, I took a week's holiday, but then started taking care of some loose ends:
If you Order the database on CD-Rom you will get this newer (8.1) version.
The pedigree is not yet ``complete'' of course, but I think it hints at most of the major lines that show up in European royal pedigrees. I'm going to stop browsing the genealogical bulletin boards for a while, so I don't get an urge to produce a Version 8.2!!
The lists of spouses/partners are more complete now; unfortunately this means they are more misleading as well. If a pedigree page appears to show that someone married two closely related people, it's probably due to conflicting sources: only one of the two is right, but I don't know which one.
(Sorry, but my database format has severe problems I've had to work around. I sure wish I'd used GEDCOM but it would be far too much work to change now. Anyway, GEDCOM doesn't handle uncertainty about parentage very well either.)
I often get asked, by people who have traced their ancestry to someone shown at my site, if there's an error: why doesn't the page show the child from whom they trace descent?
Most children are not shown, unless they are ancestral to someone in my database. (I sometimes make exceptions for children with high titles or whom I know are ancestral to a U.S. President.)
Lists of spouses are not complete either. In Version 7 (or earlier), even the spouses shown as possible parent's of an indicated child are sometimes omitted. I've fixed this in Version 8, so that part of the pages will be more complete. (Spouses not ancestral to a child in the database will still usually be omitted.)
Buried on one of the pages at this site was a puzzle, and an offer of a small cash prize to the first reader who solved the puzzle. Congratulations to Nikolai Scheuring, who won the prize!!
Version 8 adds a few people in the Lists of Famous Descendants, compared with Version 7: