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About the New Digital Editions
About the 2008 CD-ROM Edition
One of the questions that someone might ask me is, "After all the work you did on the Bohnstedt Book, why a CD-ROM edition?" That's fairly easy to answer. First, I wanted to make available the results of our research to a number of people who could not afford the expensive 1998 printed edition. My plan was for this to be produceable at about one-tenth of the cost of the printed book. These discs and labels were mass produced quite inexpensively, and because they are so much lighter and smaller, they are cheaper to mail or ship.
Second, there is a lot more I that I was able to do with this digital edition that I could not do with the printed edition. For example, I was able to include other complete books, such as 75 År Til Lands & I Luften and Architektur im 19.Jahrhundert / Ludwig Bohnstedt, Leben und Werk. I was able to include video. I was able to include any number of color images I wanted without the worry of color printing costs. I was able to include very large genealogy charts, such as the 1939 Stammbaum der Familie Bohnstedt. I was able to include a search function. I was able to include interactive hyperlinked maps, charts, and genealogical family tables. And as a bonus, I was able to include the entire 1998 Printed Edition as a PDF file.
New Material
Since the 1998 edition was distributed ten years ago there have been new births, marriages, and some deaths. Wherever possible I re-interviewed family members and tried to identify these new events and recorded them. In some cases entirely new family tables were created for individuals who had married and started their own families.
New sections were added to the Appendices to handle new source material that had been provided to me, such as the 1939 Stammbaum der Familie Bohnstedt chart, and it's forerunner, the 1923 Stammbaum der Familie Bohnstedt. The purpose for including significant genealogical charts and books in their entirety is so that future genealogical researchers might be able to make use of them.
Another very important element that has been added is imaged source documents such as U.S. census records, ships passenger lists, and other documents which were used to reconstruct sections of family history.
Error Corrections
I've gone back through the material and looked for spelling errors, especially with names. For instance, several surnames in the index with the spelling "Bonstedt" should have been spelled "Bonsted" (no "T"). In other instances I spelled some of the names "Bohnstedt" when in fact they should have been spelled "Bonstedt", with no "H".
Several individuals were accidentally left out of the index in the printed edition. I have tried to find as many of these unfortunate exclusions as I could and put them back in.
A handful of the table numbers were incorrect, which would have caused problems for someone trying to trace their ancestry using one of these faulty reference numbers.
With regard to the Family Table numbers, in some instances I completely re-assigned table numbers in several genealogical family table sections. Where I did this I made note of the original table number as it was in the 1998 printed edition.
I've re-written nearly all of the narratives sections and the appendices. For all intents and purposes this is an entirely new work.
HTML Format
Probably the most significant thing about this CD-ROM edition was that it was created in HTML format. Most everybody who grew up in the generation after me, and many from my own generation will know what this means. But for those who are still unfamiliar with with the WorldWide Web and the Internet, HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the format used to create web pages for the Internet. In fact I used Microsoft FrontPage, a program for creating web pages, to handle all of the material as I was constructing the pages.
Because this was done in HTML format, nearly everything in this edition that refers the reader to another location within this production, or to a location in the World Wide Web, is hyperlinked. That means whenever you see blue, underlined text, or your cursor passes over an image or part of an image, and the cursor changes, you can click on that word or image and you will be taken to that page.
For example, if your cursor changes from an arrow to this:
it means you can click on that piece of text or image, and you will be taken to another page which is relevant to the topic you are currently reviewing. Of course by now, if you've successfully navigated to this page, you've figured that out.
About the Online Edition
In November 2015 I uploaded the HTML pages to a Network Solutions server, with some minor modifications. One of these modifications was the addition of password protection. Although care was taken to keep the 1998 book and the 2008 CD-ROM edition free of information that could be embarassing to any living family members, I still thought it best to protect the online version with a password so that individuals with no connection to the Bohnstedt could hopefully be prevented from mining data from this family history for commercial gain or other unauthorized and unwanted purposes.
By maintaining this family history as a website I can treat it as a perpetual work in progress; periodically updating media and background historical information as it becomes available on the Worldwide Web. I can also keep family information, such as births, marriages, career changes, and other events up to date as they are provided to me. Finally, I can make corrections to material that was presented with errors in the 1998 and 2008 editions, but overlooked.
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