How this archive works

The narrative-and-curation layer that sits alongside the structured family tree. The tree is the index; this site is the book.

The division of labor

The structured family tree lives on FamilySearch — 3,428 individuals across 1,510 families as of June 2026, maintained by Chuck Eesley and Dale Eesley jointly, with the FamilySearch instance treated as canonical. The downloadable GEDCOM and the tree-export page are this site's mirrors of that record. A parallel Ancestry.com version of the tree exists too; the two are kept in rough sync but FamilySearch is the reference.

This site is the narrative and curation layer that sits alongside the tree — the photographs and their captions, the documents transcribed in full, the essays that read across multiple people and places, and the family-memory layer that genealogy fields can't hold. The structured tree carries the names, the dates, the parents and the spouses. This site carries the rest.

What goes where

The split, in practice:

FamilySearch — the structured record. Names, dates, parents, spouses, children, places of birth and death. The records-search engine and the collaborative-tree corrections layer that make the structured side function across many descendant lines. DNA matching where opted in.
This site — the narrative record. Long-form biographical essays where they earn the length; photographs with labeled captions and provenance; documents transcribed in full (memoirs, letters, eulogies, obituaries) or curated by metadata (the Letters from Vietnam collection's policy is the canonical example); places with significance (a single road in Lowell carries a fuller account than its individual residents could); essays that cut across the structured tree (Family threads, the Three Charleses, the Three Peggys, Robert Earl's Little Histories); the family-memory layer that arrives by email from cousins (Roberta's June 2026 Aunt Ota stories are an instance); and the bilingual Chinese sections on every Zhou-side page.

Why two sites and not one

Both the structured-tree side and the narrative-curation side are doing real work, and trying to do both jobs in one platform makes both jobs worse. FamilySearch has the records-search engine, the millions of indexed vital records, the DNA-matching, and the collaborative tree — none of which would be feasible to rebuild here. This site has editorial control, full-document transcription, narrative-essay space, privacy policies the family can set rather than the platform, and — most importantly — file-level ownership of every piece of content. Static HTML, source code on GitHub, deployable to any web host or a USB drive. The longevity assurance is structural, not contractual.

So the architecture is: the tree is the index; this site is the book. Each does what the other can't. Visitors who arrive at one side and want the other can find their way across via the links on the individual person pages.

The four content collections

The site's data model has four typed collections:

People — one entry per person (family and non-family). Carry parents, spouses, dates, a one-paragraph summary in the frontmatter, then a Markdown body for the narrative. Cross-link bidirectionally to documents, places, and artifacts where they appear.
Documents — long-form narrative content. The type field distinguishes memoirs, combat logs, travelogues, registers, ancestor sketches, essays, letters, letter collections, eulogies, obituaries, and tree exports. Some are transcribed in full; some are catalogued by metadata only; the Letters from Vietnam collection page explains the curation principle.
Places — locations the family touched, with signatures and "then and now" pairings. The point of this collection is that some places were visited more than once across generations, and the resulting multi-generation pilgrimage record is itself an artifact about continuity.
Artifacts — catalogued objects, mostly photographs. Schema mirrors the field structure of Maggie Eesley's Four Generations archival catalog so her metadata imports nearly losslessly.

Editorial principles

A few principles run through the site and are worth naming explicitly:

Living people get a light touch. See the privacy page for the full version.
Bilingual on every Zhou-side page. English at the top, full 中文 below, on the same page. The practice of making the family record itself bilingual — rather than translating it later — is the data-model expression of the cross-cultural marriage the contemporary archive holds.
Curation policies are stated, not assumed. The Vietnam letters collection page says explicitly that a small published set is reproduced in full while the rest are catalogued by metadata only with the body held privately. Other policies (privacy, AI-generated imagery, family-memory sourcing) are stated where they apply.
Corrections are documented in place. When the date on a photograph is corrected (the c. 1979–85 Highland Ridge reunion portrait re-dated to c. 1971–72 per Roberta's June 2026 email), the prior reading and the correction trail stay on the page. The archive treats family memory as a primary source, and a primary source can be wrong; documenting the correction makes the editorial process visible.
Transmission chains are credited. Robert Earl's memoir → Chuck. Maggie's Four Generations deck → Chuck. Roberta's June 2026 email → this archive. The chain of family memory that brought each story here is the source line on every page.

The keepers

This archive is the next round in a long line of family record-keeping — from Mary Eesley Bean's 1985 indented register, to Margaret "Maggie" Eesley's Four Generations photographic catalogue, to Robert Earl Wildermuth's 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage and 1988–1993 memoir, to Dale Eesley's ongoing FamilySearch tree, to Roberta Burnes's curation of the paternal-side material into the next generation. The previous generations of keepers built the structured record. This site is the narrative layer Chuck is adding on top of it.

Robert Earl closed his last manuscript by addressing "future genealogists." This site is one of them answering.