by Junep Ocampo
(Published in the Philippine Star, 17 August 2001)

Almost everyday, Mona Magno-Veluz surfs the World Wide Web and visits a site that is very close to her heart. She has seen this site from its very beginning and has witnessed its development and growth. And she wants her children and her children’s children to see and also use it.

The site in nothing spectacular. It doesn’t have any fancy graphics or anything moving or talking objects. But it contains information that gives a background to Mona’s life. It contains her family’s history.

The Magno-Veluz Chronicles (magnoveluz.homestead.com) attempts to trace the beginning of Mona’s family — the Magno’s — and her husband’s — the Veluz’s. It began as a mere hobby for Mona who is a self-taught genealogist and who has become her family’s unofficial historian, interviewing relatives during wakes, reunions and weddings.

“I am notorious for interviewing those I’ve never met before — complete with tape recorder and a laptop. After two years of talking to so many people — my lolo’s, lola’s, great aunts, neighbors of a deceased uncle, you name it — I realized I actually knew so much more about my family and my husband’s than any single person did,” she recalls.

It was then that she thought about putting up a website that would contain all the information she has gathered. After a month of work, she launched the site at a family reunion during Christmas 1999.

Mona, who works as director for market development and communications for Ericsson Philippines, is not alone. There is probably millions of people like her who have found the Web a convenient archive for their personal information. …

Building Your Home

… Mona says the hardest part in creating her own website was finding the right tool. At first, she experimented with those available online; but she found them slow and produced ugly results. She used FrontPage, a website creation software instead. And she found the software Family Tree Maker useful in managing the more than 500 names in her site.

Mona chose Homestead (www.homestead.com) to host her site. Although new in the game, Homestead is now considered by many as the most generous of site hosts. It is completely advertisement-free (Geocities “shares” banner ads with its sites). It allows up to 100 people to collaborate on a site, split maintenance chores or even post new documents or add pages. And it offers 16 megabytes of storage space per site, 1 MB more than Geocities.

Maintaining Ties

Many people who have created their own sites probably did them just for fun. But for Mona, it was more than that. She was driven by something noble.

Her Magno-Veluz Chronicles traces the Magno family’s beginnings in Iloilo City and the Veluz family’s origins in Del Gallego, Camarines Sur. It contains glimpses of world and Philippine history and how these had affected the lives of Mona’s ancestors. And it has a number of feature stories narrating anecdotes on the lives and loves of her predecessors.

She recalls that the initial work was tough, but it eased up along the way. “The website opened doors for more materials to come in from other family members. I even discovered long-lost family members in other countries who accidentally found my site via other genealogy sites. I got several god leads from inputs given by ‘instant’ relatives in Canada, Guam and the United States” she says.

Mona says the best moment in the creation of her website was when she found the baptismal certificate of her mother’s paternal grandfather, with details on his lineage. The document, she discovered, moved back her research to as far as 1840. “It was my biggest breakthrough yet,” she says.

But more than anything, the Magno-Veluz Chronicles serves as a link for members of the two families. Mona says the site has managed to raise awareness of the Web’s personal usefulness within her family circle. “It’s really a good communication tool. We sign up for community family sites where we post party invitations, announce illnesses or deaths, exchange photos and remind each other of birthdays and anniversaries,” she says. “It has helped up manage distance better.”

And that’s what the World Wide Web is all about — linkages. Without her saying it, Mona is probably aware that the Web has linked her not only to her kin who are alive but also to whose who have long died. And it will link her further to those who have yet to come.