Familypedia may link me to ancient Languedoc

The Battle of Jarnac was one in which the count and his family are said to have served. Family tree said the family later migrated to Ireland at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which edict had allowed Protestants some religious freedom) and that at least one of them fought at the Battle of the Boyne. That they then moved to Scotland, where my line became prosperous wine merchants. At least two of them were registered with the Burgesses and Guild Brethren of Glasgow. With the money, they could marry impoverished owners of castles.

One of the Forlong or Forlonge descendants married a daughter of the landed gentry with surname Gordon, whose ancestry included half the Kings of Scotland. One of those castles, Pollok Castle, just out of Glasgow proper near Paisley, saw the 1819 birth of their son Gordon Forlong, who became a leading light in New Zealand evangelism.

(Map of Paisley in 1923; public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

I spent much time looking at IGI and other "sources". Some of the Gordon side was confirmed by fairly authentic sources, but the De Forlonge or Forlonge or Forlong people were evasive.

In 2004 I discovered Wikipedia. Hooray! It describes the Battle of Jarnac, so at least I know that that was not a fictional battle.

Then in 2005 I found that do-it-yourself genealogy was covered in a free website that used the same easy software/wiki-markup as I had learned for Wikipedia. A solution!

Familypedia is not the biggest genealogy wiki YET, but the newest software extensions may make it the smartest very soon. June 2009 saw it top 34,600 articles about people or places. But it is growing geometrically with dozens of keen volunteers (including a few programmers) and excellent host support. Its software is basically the same as used on ten million Wikipedia articles. The software therefore has had so many thousands of intelligent people working on it that it is very easy to use for ordinary text, images, and lots of clever charts.

It has pages for France and Scotland - but I have so few facts about my Forlongs and Forlonges!

Familypedia, the Genealogy Wiki, can help you to:
Record in black and white (or technicolor) your family's reminiscences and hard facts about your ancestors and your famous or infamous or ordinary distant cousins;
Link to their times and places so that you can appreciate how they lived and maybe why they travelled or worked or played the way they did;
Talk to fellow-researchers about the best ways of displaying your data;
Find where to look for more old records;
And maybe find that someone else has already written about your relatives, making it even easier for you to get a complete picture.

So I'm working on adding all relevant ancestors (certain or surmised) and a few of their descendants. One page per person.

Someone working on the Genealogy Wikia ("Familypedia") may one day be able to help with this genealogy brick wall! Could be someone living in western Scotland willing to do the hard yards and walk into some dingy room that may hold my secrets.

I hope I'm still around if that happens. But my material on Familypedia will remain, and the benefit of post mortem discoveries will go to those of my surviving relatives who care to look.