Ian Hedges’ Family Tree

Following the information that has allowed me to identify my grandfather Henry Hedges and his parents, my brick wall has now disappeared. I’m sure there will be many moments ahead that will seem just as difficult, but for the moment, its plain sailing.

I have renamed the ‘My Brick Wall’ page on my site to ‘Henry Hedges’ and created a redirect to catch any links to the old page.

For anyone interested in the technical, I have added the following to my .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /my_brick_wall.htm http://family.ijhedges.com/henry-hedges
redirect 301 /crown_agents.htm http://family.ijhedges.com/henry-hedges/crown-agents
redirect 301 /northern_provinces_news.htm http://family.ijhedges.com/henry-hedges/northern-provinces-news
RedirectMatch 301 ^/my-brick-wall/(.*)$ http://family.ijhedges.com/henry-hedges/$1

The first 3 lines are to catch any really old links to my original site. The next line redirects any page in the my-brick-wall set of pages to the corresponding henry-hedges page.

I decided to start a section on my website about the ships and shipping line that Henry Hedges travelled to Africa on. A couple of days ago, I bought a postcard on Ebay of M.V. (Motor Vessel) Accra, which he travelled to Nigeria on twice in the mid 1930’s. Well at least I thought I had!

The M.V. Accra that Henry travelled on was the second ship of that name, launched in 1926 and owned by the British & African Steam Navigation Co. Ltd., later Elder Dempster Lines Ltd. She was 9337 gross tons, 450.8 feet in length and registered in Liverpool. She had accommodation for 243 first class and 76 second class passengers. She was later torpedoed and sunk on 26th July 1940.

After looking closer at the postcard, which I should have done before I bought it, it is of the third M.V. Accra, which entered service in 1947.

As I said earlier, Henry travelled to Nigeria twice on the M.V. Accra.

• 6th April 1932. Travelled on ship MV Accra of the Elder Dempster Lines under master J.C. Shooter from Liverpool to Lagos, Nigeria. He travelled 1st Class. His address in the United Kingdom was 243 Giston Lane, Aston W4. He was age 34 and his occupation was a printer.
• 4th April 1934. Travelled on ship MV Accra of the Elder Dempster Lines under master J.C. Shooter from Liverpool to Lagos, Nigeria. He travelled 1st Class. His address in the United Kingdom was Long Marston, Tring. He was age 37 and his occupation was a printer. He is travelling this time with Lillian age 26. This must be their honeymoon as they were married on the 1st April 1934.

So, its back to searching for the correct ship images as I work on the new page.

I have finished working on the theme for my new phpGedView database and am now ready to release it.

The link on my website has been updated to http://familydb1.ijhedges.com/phpgedview/index.php and the existing accounts have been notified of the change.

I still haven’t got to the bottom of the problem with the statistics module on phpGedView, so have settled with turning the earliest/latest birth/death year off. I have got a theme that I’m quite happy with, it uses the same header from my blogs and a similar colour scheme.

I have found another thing that doesn’t work for me with the latest phpGedView, RSS feeds. When you try to look at the RSS feed, you get the following message on screen:

Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: stats in /path to phpgedview on your host/phpGedView/includes/functions_rss.php on line 166

I have searched the forums and again found nothing. I googled it, and like the last problem with the statistics module errors, the only hits were sites with the same problem. Like the last problem, I’ve concluded I don’t need this functionality, so have turned off RSS feeds; problem not solved, but avoided.

Looking at the Place Hierachy list that the software provides, has allowed me to sort out my assortment of locations. For example, sometimes I had put the location of Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, England as Moreton, Morton in marsh, Morten-In-Marsh, Glos etc. It took a while to go through and correct them, but it was worthwhile.

I have been using phpGedView to provide some family members who are interested with access to my full family tree data. It has not been without incidents, a couple of years ago, a security flaw in it allowed my website to be hacked and defaced. This was not as bad as it seemed, because it allowed me to reorganise my website, splitting the different areas into their own sub domains. My family tree site became family.ijhedges.com and the on-line database became familydb.ijhedges.com. The theory behind this was that a vulnerability in one piece of software was less likely to impact the whole site again.

Anyway, back to phpGedView, the version I am running is quite old (but patched for security). When I first started using phpGedView, I didn’t have hosting with a database, so I had to configure the software to use index files. The later version, 4.x, no longer supported index files and required a database, so I was unable to upgrade when it was released. Although I have had hosting with database access for about 10 months, I had never revisited this option, content to leave it as it was.

Yesterday, I set up a new domain and configured the new version (4.1.5) to test it out. Installation was straight forward. I did configure the index and GEDCOM files outside of the navigable folder structure for security. After uploading my sanitised GEDCOM file and configuring the options, everything seemed to be going well. However, when I went to the welcome page along with the expected blocks of data, I had 8 error messages above the GEDCOM statistics module.

One of the errors was, the others looked similar:

ERROR:-2 DB Error: syntax error SQL: SELECT d2.d_year, d2.d_type, d2.d_fact, d2.d_gid FROM pgv2_dates AS d2 WHERE d2.d_file=1 AND d2.d_fact IN (‘BIRT’, ‘CHR’, ‘BAPM’) AND d2.d_julianday1=( SELECT MIN(d1.d_julianday1) FROM pgv2_dates AS d1 WHERE d1.d_file=1 AND d1.d_fact IN (‘BIRT’, ‘CHR’, ‘BAPM’) AND d1.d_julianday1!=0 ) ORDER BY d_julianday1 ASC, d_type; [nativecode=1064 ** You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'SELECT MIN(d1.d_julianday1) FROM pgv2_dates AS d1 WHERE d1.d_fi]

I tried searching the phpGedView support forums, but the results were less than conclusive. Suggestions to update the version of MySQL were provided to some people asking about the error. This isn’t an option to me, I get what my hosting provider gives me, MySQL 4.0.27, which according to the requirements is sufficient. I met the other requirements too, so I had to take a different approach.

I started modifying the welcome page, turning off each module in turn until I identified which one was causing the problem. It turns out it was the GEDCOM statistics module. Now, this was still displaying underneath the errors, so I took a closer look at the data displayed. There are 4 fields for earliest and latest birth and death dates which didn’t contain any data, all the other fields displayed data. So, I customised the module and turned these fields off and the errors disappeared. Each field added 2 of the 8 errors. Looking closer the first 4 contained ‘BIRT’, ‘CHR’, ‘BAPM’ and the last 4 contained ‘DEAT’, ‘BURI’, ‘CREM’, so that made sense.

I began to wonder if I had some invalid data in the GEDCOM file that was causing the problem, so I used the built in GEDCOM checker in phpGedView to check my uploaded file. I did come across some date fields where I had entered a text comment instead of a date. These were for death dates where, in one case, I knew it occurred between a couple of years, and the other I had the day and month, but not the year. I found one in the death indexes and was able to correct this, but couldn’t find the other so had to estimate it, leaving the information I had as a source. After fixing several other missing source details, I recreated the GEDCOM file and used ResPrivita to sanitise it for living people.

Unfortunately, this didn’t resolve the errors with the birth/death dates, so I have left them turned off at the moment.

I still have to recreate the users/passwords for access to the data, upload and secure the unsanitised data, create a custom theme similar to my exisiting website, and let the user know its all changing, so its a way off of release yet.

I have updated the Crown Agents page to reflect the fact that Henry Hedges didn’t actually work for them. I have also created a new page for his colonial service, where I have collected all the information that I know so far.

I have made some changes to the layout of my online family tree pages.

This has included splitting the pages up so that only one family is on a page instead of the 10 that were previously on each page. The software that I use to create the pages from my GEDCOM file, GED4WEB, was unable to set to 1 group per page through it’s options; it kept defaulting back to 10. However, the settings for the program are stored in the computers registry, so if you are confident about editing the registry, you can make the changes there and they work.

The location of the values is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Papineau\GED4WEB

The values I changed were Groups Decendancy and Groups Pedigree, both were set to 1

The usual disclaimer about editing the registry applies. Make sure you have backups and know what you are doing, mistakes editing the registry can cause your computer to fail to start or work properly.

I also added a redirect in my .htaccess file with a permanent  (301) redirect for all old ‘Database’ pages to the new ‘database’ location:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/Database/(.*)$ http://family.ijhedges.com/database/$1

This worked perfectly, however, after the changes I made above, the old pages will not match the new pages, so any old links would find the wrong data. I have to remove it, but still, I’ll mention it so I have it for referance and for anyone else who might need something similar.

I have given this site a makeover. It now uses Wordpress, which will make it easier for me to maintain.

I’ll try to post updates on my research as I follow leads and search new resources.