An elusive ancestor website is devoted to presenting all the information, both direct and indirect, about an ancestor that is very difficult and uncertain.  The particular ancestor who is the subject of this site is my husband's great-grandfather. The difficulty with this ancestor is that he committed crimes and changed his name to hide from the authorities. Thus, there are two different sets of genealogical records which must be somehow integrated to prove the case: the pre-life before the crime was committed and the after-life when he was hiding his identity.

• This sample website has been completely built with Microsoft Publisher 2003. Microsoft Publisher is an inexpensive but powerful desktop publishing program that has a very easy-to-use website creation capability. The great thing about Microsoft Publisher is that it permits WYSIWYG creation of your content - text, pictures, documents - then, behind the scenes, turns your creation into a proper website.

• Notice that as a Microsoft Publisher document, it can be turned into a genealogy book in a straight forward project. Microsoft Publisher is very capable of organizing and creating a complex document and makes it very practical to reformat the website into a book.  While this would be a time-consuming project, it would be very straight-forward because all the difficult tasks of collecting and synthesizing information has already been completed with the website.

• Like any genealogy website, the purpose of an elusive ancestor site is to communicate. When my husband is communicating with fellow researchers, he uses this website to present his evolving information giving interested researchers a simple link to the website instead of a pile of paper. Notice that, unlike a book, they always have his latest information.

• A website such as this is a great organizing tool that structures the work for the genealogist. The elusive ancestor project can be laid-out from the top-down with web pages identified for each part of the presentation and proof. At first many of the web pages will be "stubs" with a "Coming Soon" message. Later, through the months (and years), the content will be filled in and perfected as more and more is discovered about the elusive ancestor.

• This site has a domain name of "poill27.info" which is registered and owned by my husband. The domain name is used to form the website name of "www.poill27.info." This domain name demonstrates how to deal with the common case that the first choice of a genealogy website is already taken (i.e., in this case the domain name of "poill.info" is already taken). If that should happen to you then just find the first domain name using a serial number. For example, for an elusive ancestor or surname website, put a number after the surname part walking up the numbers. In this case it was the 27th one. (Actually this is a fabricated example - it was not necessary for the surname "Poill" but this example was constructed to demonstrate how to deal with this common problem.)