About the Fieggen Family Tree

Background

“Fieggen” is an unusual surname. In fact, we think there may only be about a hundred living “Fieggens” in the whole world! We've traced the Fieggen surname back to the 1600s, centering around Amsterdam in The Netherlands – yet the name isn't typically Dutch. My other ancestors were mainly German and French.

These are just some of the fascinating facts that I discovered when I started to research my ancestry. And this Fieggen Family Tree is a way of presenting the results of that research in an easy-to-navigate format.

Site History

Inspiration

While adding photos to my Ian Fieggen's Site, I thought about adding one page with photos of my immediate family, formatted as a family group. Because this was back in 1999, when the Internet was only new and most visitors used slow dial-up modems for access, it made sense to have the group as text links, which could be clicked on to show only the desired photo.

The resulting family group worked so brilliantly that I figured that I could easily extend the concept to include grandparents and children as well. And so the Fieggen Family Tree was born.

Growth of the tree

Once I started adding family members, plus their family members, the floodgates opened. I realised that the tree was limited only by how much information I had available. When my parents ran out of material, I began searching the internet for our fairly unusual surname: “Fieggen”. This very quickly resulted in some branches of the family in other parts of the world, most of whom were happy to share information and determine our common ancestors.

Evolution of the Programs

As I added more and more information, I began to see limitations in the way I was manually updating indexes and so forth. At the time, I looked around at genealogy software, but in those days, none presented the information in such a neat format. I therefore ended up writing a few custom programs to automate those procedures and enhance the tree.

2024 Major Update

After remaining on the Internet in more or less the original format for more than 20 years, the site underwent a major update starting in Sep-2024. More than 480 people's pages were reformatted to look a little neater and operate a little more smoothly on today's web browsers.

Future of the Fieggen Family Tree

Considering that I now devote most of my website efforts updating my far more popular Ian's Shoelace Site, I'm not expecting to expand this Fieggen Family Tree much further. Over the past decade or more, my older sister, Margaret, has been compiling a far more extensive and comprehensive family tree within the genealogy website, Geneanet.

I'll nonetheless keep my trusty old Fieggen Family Tree running as a simple way for family members to browse our common ancestry.