Hi there my name is Alan Jones and the setting up of these pages has been a dream of mine for a couple of years ever since I got into website construction.

A little history of myself and how all this came into being is what this page is all about.

The DAFFORN name is my mothers maiden name, I had a great deal of trouble starting off research on her name until I was perousing someone else's film at the local LDS Family History Centre when I found the marriage of her grandfather and grandmother, it took my little time to fill in the gaps.

Within a year of that breakthrough I had a list of thousands of names of all the variety's and spellings. However, in 1996 I got a virus in the computer that destryed all my research notes. The lists are all gone, they were nicely stored in PAF 2.2 and dBase 3 files, the virus is of the type that cannot be cleaned. To clean the virus off it was necessary to physically dispose of any disk with it on. The only thing I have written down and kept is the lists of sources, and where it came from, so back to the sources.

As the lists are re-compiled they will be installed in the source and data area for everyone to look through and maybe add to.

As the Guild of One Name Studies member I feel it is incumbent on me to make sure this information is available and more importantly to ensure the information is up to date, verified and as accurate as possible.

This site has been constructed with Frontpage, the only Micro$oft product I have found that is very useful, until a program or suite of programs that run under Linux I will continue to use Micro$oft Windows operating system.

Another pet project I want to do is look at every available piece of software that is avaliable, evaluate it and provide a link to it. Personally I use PAF (it has the easiest data entry of any of the programs I have ever used), and I have got registered copy's of Ultimate Family Tree, Family Tree Maker and Winfamily5 they all do different tasks that I want, no single program does all the tasks that I like it to do. Also, there is a notable lack of programs for Unix currently available - there is only one, lifelines, and while it is very powerful in itself, it lacks a decent interface (that means it does not run like a windows program) and is difficult to learn.

This project will take time, I am a ful time student, just finished a diploma a Computer Science, I am now working on a degree in librarianship which I hope eventually to take to PhD, and I am also starting a course at the University of New England in New South Wales where I will get a diploma in Genealogy. I hope a the end of all that to run a local history library.