What started out as a small project about five years ago for records from Cumberland County, PA, has now morphed into something much larger. Over the summer of 2019, we added about 400,000 new records and created a new website with a much nicer interface. If you think this looks basic, you should have seen the old site!

For the geeks out there, the site is essential one humongous Perl script (about 2,500 lines of code), mixed with SQL, HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. The back end is all MySQL. The site itself is WordPress. Trust us, the code is ugly. In asking advice on a rewrite that never happened, our friend told us that Perl is “an old guy’s language.” Hurtful words, those.

Oh, and although we use the royal “we” throughout the site, there is no “we.” Unless you include the deer, turkey, quail, and other various wildlife that wander through the yard daily. This is a one man show.