I’ve been working on my family’s history since January 2000. My Dad completed much of the Cole family tree with the help of several cousins and his parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents back in the early 1980’s. He handed all of the information over to me when I showed the interest, and I’ve been digitizing and cataloging it ever since. When I got married in 2002, I began the voyage to discover his family’s history too.

If you are looking for other sites to complete genealogical research in Arizona, check out my Arizona Genealogical Databases section.

You may be interested to see Our Family History Pages, where I outline a short biography of our immediate family and direct line ancestors. It’s a work in progress, for sure.

As part of the genealogy research, I have begun a Family Image Archive. It’s an online database using PHP and MySQL calls to index over 4,000 family images.

In the Family Image Archive, I have created some basic queries to provide access in chronological, alphabetical and numerical orders. For example, you can click on the link to me and see over 300 images in chronological order with details and thumbnails of my entire life. If you select one image, you can see a larger version with more details, and you can comment on the image from that page as well. My goal is to someday allow advanced searches, for example to present all Professional or Studio images from 1932-1949 of the Stroik family members, aged 18-24.

If you are a family member from the Cole, Fitzgerald, Dreffs, Karpuk, Stroik, Green, or Dominik families, and would like to request access to the Family Image Archive, just call me or send me an email. If you don’t know how to contact me, please leave a comment on the latest blog entry and I’ll get in touch with you.

By the way, I highly recommend the website Ancestry.com for family research. The cost is high, but the research opportunities are priceless.