Welcome to The Idris Project

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The Idris Project is my experiment to present the information I have collected about my ancestors and extended family over the years.

The project is named after my grandfather Idris Charles Baker, pictured to the left, and also after my father, Robert Idris Baker.

I started researching my family several years ago after I found and rescued several boxes of hundreds of family photographs that my mother was storing in her garage and was planning to throw out. Starting with those, I was able to put together a fairly complete picture of several branches of my mother’s family, particularly the Joachims and the Pattersons. My father’s side of the family, the Bakers and Elys, have been much harder to track down. There appear to have been several adoptions on that side of the family, and much less record-keeping. I stopped researching actively about 8 years ago, and it’s time to get back into it!

This is very much a work in progress. Much of my data is incomplete, as there are hundreds and documents and photographs I have never catalogued. I have used several genealogy applications over the years, and I’m finding that they record data differently, leaving my records inconsistent. Of course, I was a bit sloppy recording things when I started out, so there is quite a bit of self-inflicted mess to clean up as well. This website will change quite a bit over the next months, and probably years. Currently it contains only a list of people in my database and their relationships, plus a list of sources I have compiled. I plan to add quite a bit more information from my database, as well as some of the photographs I have collected. I’ll also be playing with different ways to present the information and make the site more usable.

This site is a static site generated using Hugo. I’ll explain more about how that works in a future post!

I hope this site will be interesting for my family to look through, and helpful to my fellow researchers.