Hi Tara
Thanks for taking an interest in the site, your suggestions are all good and are things I have thought of doing but I did try and reject them.
I did give everybody numbers first starting as you would with the Captain, Crew, Cabin passengers, steerage passengers and I did not like it very much it seemed very impersonal, I have got quite fond of some of the characters and calling somebody number 157 I just did not like. No offense meant but you do not seem like the kind of person who would like the Captain to be number 1 and the cabin passengers at a higher number than the steerage. To be honest I think if I had put your great, great, great, great, great, great Auntie twice removed at number 250 you would be getting tore into me, as we say in Scotland.
By putting the people on separate pages I have avoided any hierarchy and protected myself from the wrath of Irish people who only have poor Aul labourers in their family tree.
I have remembered why I did not do all the lists alphabetically I think the problem was different family groups with the same surname, it got complicated. In some of the newspaper articles the interviews along the way back to Liverpool identical surnames were separated into family groups I wanted to keep that where possible. I did not have that luxury with the steerage passengers as they were all lumped together.
To be honest I have never had a website, never dreamed I would have and I am not really computer literate so any changes I do are a struggle and a steep learning curve. I have a wife a full time job, two daughters, a dog, a croft, a small sadly neglected yacht, , I am hoping to and have begun to write a book about the Annie Jane. Oh and did I mention a web site!!! And I am not even going to mention the rabbit problem.
I ask myself why start this now? after all I have put it off for ten years, would be better to wait till I retire, Well at the moment the monument and possibly the graves are threatened by coastal erosion so now seems the right time to raise awareness of the tragedy, which to be honest has been very much forgotten about. If it wasn't by the goodness of a wealthy philanthropist in 1880 who happened to hear the story there would not even be a monument. So that's sort of sad. I have yet to hear from anybody in Ireland that they had heard of this tragedy before or know of this spot where the bones of so many their countrymen and women lie buried. That's sort of sad to.
Thanks again for your help and your interest. And I hope you will dip into the list and see if you can find anybody and encourage other amateur genealogists from other areas to do the same. I think with your experience of Irish searching you will have more luck than me.
Regards Allan
The Irish Newspaper archives, is it searchable? and do they have papers that are not already in the British newspaper archives? I have already been through all the Irish newspapers on that site. I am afraid that poor people did not have the money spare for obituary's
