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Detailed Responses John, Caught your site after contact with people who have recently bought the old McCloy residence in Hornsby, NSW , Australia. My grandfather, Thomas McCloy came to Oz in 1884 and built out of Sydney in !895 - he was a master tailor, a son of Thompson McCloy/Mary Ann Henry and brother to John who is mentioned in one of your family tree pages. We are interested in your collection of names and trees but do not understand the relevance of the Index of names - without dates, places and connections, it is just a list of names - Thompson, Mary Ann and John have no connection with the groups on page 3 & 4, starting Margaret Maxwell and ending Margaret McCombe, not with our family tree, that we know of! Elizabeth McCloy is mentioned in the paperwork and we would be interested to share info locally with her if it was possible. We are rather non plussed at the lack of recognition of the movement of McCloys to NI and subsequent immigration to Canada, USA, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa - in our book McCloys are termed Scots Irish, with quite a few of the Scottish McCloys of today, are those who have returned to Scotland after the end of Stewart/Stuart problem and the English massacre of those Scots who supported the Bonnie Prince - especially those in the Glasgow area and of Roman Catholic faith. I am a retired engineer living in Muswellbrook, NSW - sailed Blue Star line in the 1950's, know the "old country" reasonably well, have a wife Margaret from Sydenham, London, four grown up children in WA, NSW and Queensland - if there is anything that McCloys do, it is move about - it is about 7000 km from one family to the other extreme - you could term us, well travelled folk!! We are in contact with grand mother's side of the family in NI with a distant cousing less than a 100m from where grandmother grew up in Co Derry. Let me know how I may fit in as I am trying to help a NZ McCloy arrived at documentation of all McCloys in NZ - after it happens I may get involved in a similar project in Australia. Regards, John, As one who has puzzled over ways of using computer power to attempt to match seemingly unrelated miscellaneous family members over quite some years, there is a site on the Web - www.lesandchris.com - that bears consideration. The common family history tree form of arranging data does not lend itself to easy database type searching and for quite sometime I have used a spreadsheet with rows dated on the left column from 1700 to 2000 and columns across the spreadsheet carrying the contributor info, which in most cases can be interpreted also as the country of the family member. There are approximate date spreads that cover birth to marriage, birth spread of family members, lifespan , date span between father and son/daughter, so if data is ordered in this way, it is possible to look for possible family relations. The awkward part about family tree software is the possible further use of data residing in it, exported out, so as to be able carry out database operations on it, and the site mentioned has been put together by two dedicated software workers who offer their program free as shareware. If you peruse the site you will soon see it's effectiveness in displaying data in several levels that begin as a sequential surname list and progress to surname/given name choices and then on to family connections, and if one takes up the offer to display on the lesandchris site, it would be easy to link one's home page to it. That you have three family members of my family tree is one thing, but they are not in context as to where on the family tree they occur, therefore they are just words. In due course I will supply as complete a family tree as possible of that family but I still need to find some American connections and believe exposure on the lesandchris site might just be the method to find what I am looking for. I have explored the McCloy family with others all around the world and have experienced how hard it is is to find relevant information that will join up the families that took up life in Northern Ireland - some researchers I have communicated with have been looking for just one clue for over 11 to 13 years, and still have nothing to show for their search - I started with the right info and it still took over three years to prove it. I am a firm believer that once all data held by all people is released and displayed on the Web, then by systematic database manipulation it will be possible to speed up the joining of the data and realise a great benefit to every genealogist. It would appear that those interested in the broad understanding of family name should start to look seriously at home pages in all countries around the world, with compatible methods of data assembly and the ability to share info in standardised formats - GEN@WWW is an obvious way. Look forward to your thoughts, Regards, Jim McCloy dirjm AT hunterlink.net.au John, Thanks for the Email - the new site format shows how busy you have been - it is good to see that others that I have corresponded with over the past three years per snail mail are at long last on the Web and contributing. I have been slowed up recently with an eye operation for cataract but it is coming along nicely and will restore me to 20/20 vision. Made contact with Elizabeth and am to send her my Australian family. Have been trying to get other contacts of mine to make contact with you as I believe they should put their info and their needsinto your pool. My second cousin, Keith McCloy in Denmark is trying to get organised with his own home page so with a bit of luck he could contact you. I'm going to press on with the GED2WWW approach, plus I hope a home page of my own - after a holiday in April when the eye has settled, and we have visited two other genealogy families we have contact with in Victoria - will shaken down what kind of approach etc. We hope to do a bit of gold detecting whilst in Victoria as these friends are in gold nugget country - wish me luck!! Thanks again - bear with me as I will be back, Regards,
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