TL;DR -- We started in 2010 with our website. The blog came about in Sept of that year. As we learned about history and genealogy, we custom built our website in a minimal fashion in order to spend more time on the domain knowledge. Time and technology has changed. The need for bespoke modes has not and will again be recognized. So, we'll continue down our nonAI approach. Pending research deals with origins. We touch upon the subject and our plan for the future.
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With the new world of computing being pushed upon us, mainly from the GenAI/LLM incursion on our thoughts in November of 2022 and the ramifications associated with its arrival, we are reorganizing our information. In fifteen years, we have ventured down many paths, made some discoveries, but found more questions than answers. We'll briefly look at origins and son John, because he and Richard were of Nantucket which kept good records.
Our first post was on 25 Sep 2010 (
Welcome). At the time, we had been using Blogger (later purchased by Google) for three years. According to our What's New page, our site was started in September of 2010. This was our first report on
that page:
09/01/2010 -- A blog will be started soon. Questions to ponder will be one topic, such as where was Thomas between 1626 and 1637 (freeman status)? Where is Thomas now (in terms of remains - or, at least, the stones of Abel, etc.) since pavement was put in over the old Gardner burial ground?
Just from the questions, one can see that we had already started to research. The Whereabouts of Thomas became a regular theme and is a now a meme of lost graves. But, number of wives was up there too. This we made progress on thanks to the internet and the appearance of digitized documents from Sherborne, Dorset, UK.
Our site, originally, was on Microsoft's service of the time which we had for a couple of years. One reason for the choice was to use C# of Asp Net. MS provided their users with a nice tool for creating and managing the information related to small business. We liked that. But, MS decided to move to what became Microsoft 365.
We decided to drop back to Linux given John's Unix background. But, it was clear. Given how much we needed to learn and organize, we had to spend lots of time on information (domain knowledge). There was little time for development and fiddling with the architecture or actions of the site. So, John snapped little graphics from the Microsoft site and use them in a new page where positioning was handled by the table facilities plus a little CSS. We are documenting this bit of activity (see "Requirement" on this page - technology and practice). Then, as we got better organized, we brought in JS to add actions to our site.
Again, more time was spent above the floor of configuration and use for knowledge processing with the below the floor technology being done hurriedly. For a HTML editor, we used Sea Monkey. For JS and some HTML and CSS, we just picked up the file with Notepad. Testing was clumbsy in the beginning. But, Google's Chrome's support for the developer's needs improved through time. Once we got into the Google Development session, we were reminded of the full-blown workbench for the developer.
However, that overload can interfere with proper focus on the knowledge involved. It's a case of hats with each dealing with some domain (technical or conceptual or ...), and the juggling of hats can be fun but eat a lot of time and energy. We'll be back on this topic due to LLM's (and its companions) influence on the environment of computing and on people's and user's understanding of such.
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On 13 Oct 2010, we mentioned the Folger family. Earlier that year, we had been in Salem, MA and saw a book on John, son of Thomas and Margaret. We have had several posts on John, such as this one:
John Gardner and the Merrimack River. Here we asked the question: was John better off with the mathematicians who were doing the survey than his cohorts in Harvard learning about the number of angels on a pinhead? Or partying as we see higher-education affording the opportunity for youngster, many times for the first time. That type of question is as true now as it was then.
So, we will look at John and the Folgers, primarily due to John's emphasis on the use of Sherborne on the Island of Nantucket. There is a reference to John saying that he heard of it from his father. For starters, here are two pertinent pages.
As we go along, we will discuss a new format and how to structure it. AIn't is apropriate until we hear of substantive movement in the realizations from research. At the same time, we will lay out the basis for the current hype plus explain a working approach of which there will be many proposed over the coming years.
Post note: Cannot let this post go without mentioning the 15 years of change. Quite frankly, we miss some of the sites that we saw in the 2010 timeframe that represented research by Gardner families over the years. Some sites are still there. Many are not. As we try to build a comprehensive database of Gardner information, we will attempt to disciover some of the older sites through services like the wayback machine (Intenet archive which we have used a lot). At the same time, we have to bring in the modern and futuristic modes being talked about and done. Quite frankly, maturity seems lacking in a lot of these approaches. But, that's a side issue. At regular points, we'll review our progress and trace the pros/cons. Right now, we see no reason to not continue with the bespoke approach. Anyone who wants to touch code can help. Tools? We have minimal but that can change. Vibe coding? Prompts? Some of that is reasonable. But, people are the core of interpretation and judgment. Not machines. Yet.
PS (sort of thing): With the huge Rorschach Test thrown upon us about three years ago (Nov 2022) and the ramifications seen and potentially realized, I never went with the offer of LLM's enticement of purty prose. Nope. Actually, except for spelling, these posts will not be checked except by human editors without tools other than pen (real or imaginary). Too, we retain the right to update grammar, et al, as time pases. All edits will be noted within remarks as we have been doing from the beginning. ... People are going to be the focus.
Remarks: Modified: 09/06/2025
09/06/2025 - Spelling correction. PS added.
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