About the “Grimshaw Origins” Website
Answers to Some Basic Questions…
The “Grimshaw Origins” website was started in mid-2000 to make the results of research into the beginnings and development of the Grimshaw family widely available. The main objective of the website is to collect, organize and post information for the benefit of Grimshaw researchers everywhere. Development of the Grimshaw Origins website is a hobby of the author, who receives no monetary compensation for the effort. Progress on website development is posted on a “Whats New” webpage. A Grimshaw Origins site on Facebook also provides information on the Grimshaws as well as updates on website development.
Contents
How Is the Website Being Developed?
How Can You Contribute to the Emerging “Grimshaw Story”?
How Did the Website Get Started?
How is the Website Organized?
During the first 10-plus years of its life, the focus of Grimshaw Origins has been on information collection and webpage preparation. Webpages have been posted as information has become available in a somewhat random order. Approximately 350 pages have been posted in various stages of development so far. The webpages are listed, generally in reverse chronological order of posting, on the “Whats New” webpage. The topics of these webpages have been found to fall into six general categories of potential interest to Grimshaw researchers.
Origins of the Grimshaw Surname and Family
Early Grimshaw Family Lines in England and Ireland
Involvement of Grimshaws in the Industrial Revolution
Grimshaw Immigrants to the New World and Around the Globe
Prominent Grimshaw Individuals and Families
Miscellaneous Grimshaw Individuals and Information
Six webpages for these categories have therefore been prepared with introductions (and hyperlinks) for the webpages falling within the purview of each category. The overall structure of the Grimshaw Origins website can be depicted in a conceptual manner as follows:
The organization of the website in this way was initiated in April 2011 and may be expected to take a number of months to complete. Concurrently, additional webpages will continue to be added to the website as information becomes available.
How Is the Website Being Developed?
As noted, webpages are added, or amplified, as information becomes available. Grimshaw information comes generally from four or five major sources.
Contributors. By far the most interesting and important information comes from Grimshaw researchers who are willing to paticipate in telling the “Grimshaw story” on this website. This input most often comes by email exchanges (including attachments of documents) or by surface mail. It has included family narratives, descendant charts, portrait photos, drawings and sketches, scanned images of documents, and photos of homesites, graves and other relevant materials. A “Hall of Fame” webpage recognizes the paramount importance of contributors and salutes their efforts. Contributions
are always attributed to the source of the material.
Internet Search. As the web has grown and matured and people have posted family history information on websites, it has become increasingly valuable as a resource for the “Grimshaw Origins” website. When such information is found and incorporated on a webpage, a link to the source webpage is provided. The LDS FamilySearch website and several commercial sites have also been valuable sources, particularly the Grimshaw family inquiry pages and forums. Tim Halstead’s Grimshaw Group on Yahoo Groups is especially useful to descendants of the Yorkshire line of Grimshaws. Many Grimshaw items of interest have been found on Ebay and purchased for additions to webpages.
Site Visits. Many of the locations of importance to Grimshaw individuals and families have been visited for local research, contact with key individuals, and taking photos. These visits are one of the most enjoyable and interesting aspects of the Grimshaw research hobby. Brief visits have been made to Grimshaw sites in both England and the United States, including the Grimshaw location southeast of Blackburn and elsewhere in Lancashire.
Library Search. The Mormon Family History Library in Salt Lake City is unsurpassed as a source for Grimshaw information and has been visited many times for research for this website. The British Library in London has also been an excellent source, especially for information on England and Lancashire that can’t be found anywhere else. The library at The University of Texas at Austin and local libraries that were often visited during Grimshaw site visits have also been of critical importance. Local libraries often have site-specific information that cannot be accessed without an actual on-site visit. The local libraries at Blackburn and surround communities have been particularly helpful for Grimshaw research.
When information is found or contributed, it is added to an existing webpage or a new webpage is created. Almost all of the substantive webpages developed incrementally as more contributors come forward or additional research is performed. The month and year of webpage opening or additions are noted near the bottom of each webpage. Activities and accomplishments are posted month by month on the What’s New webpage.
How Can You Contribute to the Emerging “Grimshaw Story”?
If you have information on individuals, families, locations or other aspects of the Grimshaw family, you are encouraged to contribute it for addition to this website. Please contact the website author using the information at the bottom of this webpage. Contributions have taken many forms in the past, including family history narratives, scanned documents, portrait photos, and pictures of homesites, gravesites and other locations. Most
contributions are by email exchange with attachments, but surface mail may also be used.
Credit is given to all who contribute, as can be seen on the individual webpages. Also, a short booklet on “Grimshaw Highlights” (about 20 pages long) will be sent to contributors (as a token reward) if they indicate they want one and are willing to provide a mailing address for a hard copy to be sent. The website author receives no compensation for the Grimshaw Origns website hobby and therefore cannot offer any other form of compensation.
Website Technical Stuff
The Grimshaw Origins website has evolved since it was initiated in 2000. It has always been in Microsoft FrontPage 2000, but the hosting service was changed to Lunarpages a few years after the project was started and is still being used. A webpage template based on a FrontPage-provided template was adopted at the onset utilizing widely recognized parameters for technical reports (text with figures and tables). This template has continued with minor modifications through the life of the website. The template includes the phrase “Webpage in preparation”, which is retained until a webpage has reached an adequate level of development to remove it. The objective has been to post information as quickly as it becomes available and to add detail and explanatory text subsequently when time (or more complete information) becomes available. As a result, the 350 webpages on the website are in various stages of development.
Why use FrontPage? The answer to this question has two parts – legacy and priority. FrontPage appeared to be the leading web development software when the website was started (appearances can be deceiving!), and the software suited the website authors professional experience in using the standard technical report elements mentioned above – text, figures, tables. Someday the website will be updated with modern software and features, but available time for the website hobby for now must be devoted to adding information and reorganizing the website to make it more “rational” rather than just a (more or less) random collection of webpages.
What is in the webpage template? If you surf on the website, you will see that the webpages contain the following: 1) banner with subhead and, in many cases, a relevant image; 2) link back to the Home Page; 3) introductory and overview text for the content of the webpage; 4) webpage contents with links to subheads further down on the page; 5) webpage credits, with a focus on contributors to the content of the webpage; 6) webpage main body or content, organized with subheads that are referenced in the table of contents; 7) references for published information when applicable – often replaced by links or references in the main body section; 8) information on the date of initiation and updates of the webpage, followed by another link to the Home Page; 9) former banner (when it has been replaced with the new one) and 10) supplementary information, more or less like an appendix to a printed report. Some of the elements are not needed on some webpages.
Why are there two kinds of banners? Unfortunately, the banner provided in FrontPage doesn’t always work properly, and banners sometimes delete the text they are supposed to contain. Therefore (over time), all banners are being replaced with a custom banner developed for the Grimshaw Origins website. The custom banner was designed to be consistent with the template presentation and at the same time to be easier to read and less cluttered than the original FrontPage banner.
How Did the Website Get Started?
In the late 1990s the website author did quite a bit of research on Grimshaw origins immigrants to the U.S., and census records. This research was written up in a series of three reports.
Click here for the three early reports on Grimshaw Origins in Lancashire, immigration records, and U.S. census records.
During this timeframe, personal websites were becoming more popular and easier and less expensive to create, so the author decided to create a website to make the information in these reports widely available to Grimshaw researchers. From these initial postings, the website has grown and developed for over 10 years, resulting in more than 350 webpages on the Grimshaw Origins website. An initiative was begun in April 2011 to add more organization to the website and make it easier to use.
Who is the Website Author?
Thomas W. Grimshaw of Austin, Texas is the author. Tom was born and raised in South Dakota but has lived in Texas for many years. His ancestors lead back five generations to George Grimshaw, who was born in New Hampshire in the 1790s and married Charlotte Menard near Montreal. Georges father was almost (but not quite) certainly William Grimshaw, who was from Canada and fought in the Revolutionary War on the side of the colonials as a member of Hazens Regiment. Information on William Grimshaw’s origins (for example, whether he was born in Canada or immigrated from Lancashire) has not been found to date.
Tom Grimshaw graduated from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology with a degree in Geological Engineering. He subsequently received Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Geology from The University of Texas at Austin. After a long career in consulting services for environmental protection, he has recently changed his focus to energy policy. He received a Master of Public Affairs degree (Mid-Career Option) from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He has been adjunct faculty at the LBJ School and is currently a Research Fellow at the Energy Institute at UT-Austin. Additional information on Tom can be found on LinkedIn.
Tom and his wife, JoAnne, have a residence in southwest Austin.
Contact information (please use this information for making contributions for the Grimshaw Origins website):
Email: thomaswgrimshaw@gmail.com
Phone: 512.784.1078
Mail: 1308 Shannon Oaks Trail, Austin, TX, 78746
Website Credits
Thanks go to the many researchers and contributors who have made this website possible.
References
None.
Webpage History
Webpage posted May 2011.