Contact Details

Background

I've been interested in family history for many years, joining the North West Kent Family History Society in 1979. Since then I've taken an active role in Society activities, which has included the running of the 1851 Census Project for nearly 10 years, and development of a computer system for recording Society membership. I edit the Society's website, have been a member of its publications committee for 17 years, and still regularly help with various computing projects.

Since 1994 I've also been writing software utilities for family history. The first program was a simple MS-DOS utility called IGIREAD, originally released as shareware in 1995. This was designed purely for converting files extracted from the CD-Rom version of the IGI, to database and Text formats. LDS Companion, launched in 1999, is a development of the same program, but with additional features and designed to deal with many more of the LDS products.

Being interested in maps, for a long time I wanted an automated way of plotting historical data, such as events from the IGI. Collaborating with my friend Harold Mills, work began in 1995 on a program to plot individual points on a map of England. This initial MS-Dos prototype was followed by a Windows version, culminating in GenMap UK, launched in May 1997. After several years of development, on and off, version 2.0 of the program was fully released in late 2002.

Launched in spring 2003, the latest product is a British Surname Atlas on CD-Rom, which you can read about here.

I have also been involved for a few years in writing front-end search tools for CD-Rom databases. The first of these to be launched was an index of Welsh data, published by S&N Genealogy Supplies in January 2000. Then in April 2001 the First Edition of the National Burial Index was released (5.4 million burial entries, England & Wales), for which I developed the search program. Next, in Spring 2004 the Sussex Marriage Index on CD-Rom was launched by the Sussex Family History Group, for which I again developed the search engine, followed by the Second Edition of the National Burial Index (13 million entries) in September 2004. In 2005 I developed a series of 1851 Census products on CD-Rom for the North West Kent FHS, i.e. a name index linked to page images. To date four of these CD's have appeared, each covering a parish or registration district. Three more are planned in 2006.

Website Acknowledgement

This website was originally launched in April 1997, and completely redesigned in spring-summer 2000. I would like to thank my friend and colleague Steve Simmonds who carried out much of the work for the updated style.

Steve Archer
Updated to January 2006