Initial Copyright 1984, Oran Stroud Lanham, All rights reserved.

Copyright 2006, Clifford Wayne Lanham, All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 2006

Copyright 2013-2019, Kevin W. Lanham, All rights reserved.

Permissions may be sought directly from the authors using their

Contact Information

We often grant permission for other genealogists since we all help each other.

We wish to thank those who have so graciously assisted in gathering this information. No doubt some names, places dates, etc., have been omitted which should be included. If you know of or find any information we will be glad to add it to or change it as necessary.

This family history content is dedicated to the Lanham Family for and in behalf of O.S. Lanham. He tried to interest his son and grandson in this work while alive, but we did not get interested until after his death.

This content is available because O.S. Lanham spent over a decade tirelessly working with inefficient tools. We are thankful for his efforts.

This information was originally prepared by Oran Stroud Lanham about our family genealogical line. It is aimed primarily at our own family and any other interested parties.

Conventions Used

When Oran Stroud Lanham originally created this content on "Our Lanham Line" he was not the end point, stopping at his life. He made an effort to include his children and grandchildren. This action indicates his desire was to continue the recording of our line for the sake of our posterity.

His arrangement naturally centered with himself and covered his ancestors.

This starts to get more expansive as more generations are included and more names are included because each person has a lineage on both the Father’s and Mother’s sides.

So to make this content more understandable to future generations of Lanhams and to help others access it easily, we have changed the organization of the information to include parts, chapters, and topics to help divide up the large amount of information.

The further descendants are being recorded and will be added to any public versions of this content after they pass away (for personal information security reasons, the living are not included).

This content was originally authored on a typewriter by Oran S. Lanham.

His son, Clifford W. Lanham used Adobe PageMaker software to layout and revise the content electronically and then it was exported to PDF for printing as a book. When Clifford was ready to pass the baton to Kevin, Adobe had stopped supporting PageMaker.

O.S. Lanham’s grandson, Kevin W. Lanham, revised the content next. Because page-oriented software takes too much time to enter and maintain, Kevin moved to a flow-oriented design instead that easily allows new additions. Additionally, Adobe’s replacement for PageMaker was called Adobe InDesign and was too expensive. So the prior version was authored in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) using various XML editors (oXygenXML editor, and sometimes even Notepad++). One audience is added to conditional publishing, called "living" to exclude living families for public versions (e.g. our website) of the content going forward. The PDF file is printed by a printer to paper and bound by the copy shop using whatever binding options they have available.

The 2017 version went away from complexity towards simpler methods. Kevin realized he had to pass this manuscript down to a child or grandchild, he needed an easier way to publish that did not require buying expensive proprietary software tools repeatedly as they update and a data encoding format that is long lasting (30-50 years). After evaluating markdown, Kevin selected a plain text variant called "AsciiDoc" that allows for an index and tables. The editor can be any text editor. Kevin used one called Atom. The free and open source plain text tool is called AsciiDoctor. This tool runs on the ruby programming language, although you do not have to know how to code in ruby to use the tool.

The process of publishing this book with free tools is spelled out in great detail in the book called, Publish Your Genealogy: Easily Self-Publish Your Family History using Free Tools, by Michael Lynnmore on Amazon.com.

The first website had each family as a page. The first AsciiDoc website had the entire collection of information as one really long page.

In 2019 we moved to the Hugo static site generator because it also can process AsciiDoc content. We changed the links to the Hugo method when conditionally published as a website or using the normal book method when conditionally publishing as a book. We use the same source data for both the book and the website, so when we update data in one, it is automatically updated in the other too. So now the tools are Ruby installed, the Asciidoctor gem (command line app), the text editor Sublime Text (but any will do), Gimp for image manipulation, hugo static site generator for the website, asciidoctor-pdf for the print book, sigil and calibre for ebooks

The original source files and high resolution source graphics are in the possession of Kevin Lanham.

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