About

Personal

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My name is Brian Patrick Molinari (as is clear from the variuos family trees in this site). I was born in Perth, in 1944. I am retired, and live in Canberra, Australia. My professional education involved a B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering, and a Ph.D. degree in what was then called Control Theory. Most of my working life was spent as an academic staff member in the Department of Computer Science at A.N.U..

I can be contacted at name@gmail.com (where name is replaced with brian.molinari).

I would be grateful to receive feedback on any aspect of this narrative. Perhaps distant relatives might discover it via Google (most of the contents seem to be indexed), and be able to contribute information. Early photographs are particularly welcome.

Family History Project

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Around 2020 I realised that I knew very little of my family history. My grandparents were but a distant memory and I realised that I hardly knew them. My parents had died more recently, and had left me and my siblings with some oral stories and a small box of photographs. I had little systematic to tell my own children, and my grandchildren.

The first phase of my project was basic genealogical research. I took out a subscription to MyHeritage, and used their basic tools. A certain amount of discovery was provided by access to the resources of other Myheritage users. The community was happy to pool resources, and one didn’t have to rediscover the wheel. Trove is a profound resource, and the Australian BDM (birth, marriage, and death) archives were available on a state-by-stata basis, but poorly indexed. Nonetheless I finished up with a an archive of ancestors and a “family tree” website. My family members were unimpressed and very underwhelmed. The Myheritage tools allowed a selected family tree to be printed but allowed little customisation.

The second phase of my project was to build the capacity to print family trees in a fashion that I could control. The latex world provided the genealogytree system, together with a 383 page user manual. I had several thousand ancestors in my MyHeritage system by now, so I was not going to encode the input to the genealogy system by hand (essentially retyping the data). My corpus was available as a GEDCOM file. I undertook to selectively process this GEDCOM data and export it in the appopriate input for the genealogy system. My various family members engaged more positively, and were pleased to get nice A2 printed trees. All the family trees in this site were produced in this fashion. A family tree is as big as it wants to be, and I rely on the ability of a modern browser to display PDF documents in a flexible manner. You will need to enlarge them as required to read. A description of this processing is on my to-do list.

The third phase of the project was the realisation that the genealogical data itself was somewhat empty, no matter how nicely it was presented. I wanted to provide a narrative on my relatives, explaining as best I could who they were and the context in which they had lived. The collection of geneological data, photographs, documents, oral stories and even audio that I had assembled really required the multi-media presentation that a modern website could provide. A self-published book would not cut it. About mid 2024 my son-in-law presented me with the domain name molinari.au that he had acquired for some $10. I determined to build an appropriate website. It was harder than I thought. What you see is a fairly systematic treatment of my four grandparents, and well as my wife’s four grandparents. It is dedicated to our children, and our grandchildren. One hopes that the technology will survive into the foreseeable future.

The material is, by its very nature, open to all readers. For example, the various family trees are PDF documents, and can be downloaded and printed. In the convention of these documents, I stop at my generation in the interests of privacy. I can, of course, produce complete family trees for family members on request.