I'm experimenting with posting some random bits of my genealogy research here with the goal of eventually creating a linked family tree on Hive. You can see the index here.

Adelheid of Sayn was born around 1185. As i've pointed out before, you generally only find ancestors this far back if you are related to royalty somehow. The good news for would be genealogists of a European descent, chances are that you do have some kind of royalty in your family tree somewhere.

Adelheid is of a German origin which makes research kind of annoying. There doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency in terms of naming conventions in terms of places or, as a result, names. Germany at the time was part of the Holy Roman Empire. I guess you can sort of think of it as a spin-off of the Roman Empire and it actually included Rome when it was the Carolingian Empire. I'm reading a book about the Templars which of course includes lots about the Crusades as well which were in full swing during Adelheid's life.

According to Gramps, Adelheid von Sayn is my twenty-fourth great grandmother. She is an ancestor to my grandmother on my mother's side.

I use GenoPro to maintain my family tree but I mainly use Gramps to generate reports and that is what most of the info below is based on. Gramps is open source software for Windows, Linux and MacOS. I also use its relationship calculator functionality as noted above but I've found it only works back to about 27 generations give or take. I've also been exploring The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG) which is web based and requires a web server, PHP and mySQL. I also purchased GedSite which also generates static HTML reports that I will dig into more eventually.

While Gramps is free, both TNG and GedSite are commercial software so you have to pay for them. I think their price is perfectly reasonable and they are both excellent in their own ways. However, I prefer the open source nature of Gramps and the fact that it generates static HTML makes it easy to work with. I like TNG enough that I will probably keep using it also though. I'm still undecided on GedSite until I get back to trying it out more though I've liked other sites I've seen generated with it. For now I am generating reports with Gramps and updating TNG on a fairly regular basis (every month or few anyway).

The chart at the top is an ancestry chart out to four generations from Gramps. The chart at the bottom is a descendant chart out to five generations generated by TNG. The index of all individuals I have posted so far can be found here.