The Shankland Database
The Shankland One-Name Study uses a home-grown database program developed from Microsoft Access in order to manage its data. The database can store data relating to people, families, life events, census, or indeed any other data required, including document images, photographs, or even audio or video clips. The basic data sources that have been searched in order to find Shankland data are listed in Data Sources.
I have to apologise that none of this is available online, although all of it is freely available to anyone who writes in requesting information. There are two main reasons for this:
- If I were to put the database and its search facilities online, then I would need a much more sophisticated web package from my ISP, with a corresponding increase in the fees I would have to pay. I might also have to devote a significant amount of time to the maintenance of the search facilities to ensure that they remained robust enough and intuitive enough for the web users.
- Currently, people who want to know about their Shankland ancestry send me emails or letters with what they currently know about their family, and I respond with information from the database that I believe relates to their own family line. If I were to put the database online, then I would miss out on the information they tell me in their emails, which itself can be enormously useful and interesting to me and potentially to other enquirers.
In other words, putting the database online would cost me money and time, and I would get absolutely nothing back!
So if you would like to know more about your Shankland ancestry, or indeed if you have information about your family that you would like to share - get in touch, I shall be delighted to hear from you.
I should add that we try to maintain appropriate privacy for our correspondents - for instance, we don't pass on email addresses unless explicitly authorised to do so. But I'm glad to say that we have been able in several cases to put related enquirers in touch with each other, frequently to family branches that they never knew existed.