What is now the Whipple Website began when the webmaster (Weldon Whipple) was a teenager. He had to miss a whitewater rafting trip during the summer because of a touch of flu. Trying to help him occupy his time while sitting at home, his mother pulled out some dusty books she had inherited from her parents and grandparents. Those books told about her ancestors. Looking for opportunities to practice his typing skills (learned in a high school typing class), he purchased some blank pedigree charts and started typing. (As soon as the flu left, so did his interest in genealogy.)
Seven or so years later as a college student, Weldon was given a book purporting to trace one of his ancestors (as well as many others) back to the European royalty. He found the pages he had typed as a teenager, and (during the break before summer school) extended his ancestry based in information from the royal ancestors book.
Years later, in 1978, while doing online music cataloging at the University of Nebraska, Weldon came across the recently published Sons and Daughters of Jesse: A 360 Year History of the Whipple Family Charles M. Whipple of Central Oklahoma State University. Those were the days before the internet, so he searched the online cataloging system to find libraries that owned the book. Noting that Indiana's Allen County Public Library owned a copy, he wrote them a letter via U.S. Mail. Their response included Charles' mailing address. A few weeks later (after exchanging letters with Charles), Weldon had a copy of the book, which he added to his growing collection of pedigree charts (using a typewriter).
A new degree in 1983 resulted in a career change that took Weldon to Rochester, Minnesota, as a programmer for IBM. He bought his first PC there. For $35.00 he purchased the first release of Personal Ancestral File (PAF)). Within a few months, all the information on his collected papers had been entered into PAF.
The first graphical web browser was released in about April 1993. Weldon taught himself the new hypertext markup language (HTML) of the web. He created (by hand) a web page that showed his connection to both Whipple families (the Ipswich and the Rhode Island families) and posted it on a user page of his local Internet Service Provider (ISP) (Note: It turned out that his presumed connection to the Ipswich Whipples was bogus—copied from his parents' genealogy books.)
On July 4, 1994, Weldon received an email from Ontario, Canada, from a Whipple descendants who had found the page he had posted on his ISP's sit. She asked if he was related to the late Weldon Tallman Whipple, a firefighter from La Crosse, Wisconsin. Unable to identify that person, he posted it on his personal website.
Six months later on January 7, 1997, whipple.org came into existence because of a minunderstanding. Weldon wanted just an email address that ended in whipple.org, but the email provider accidentally set up a complete virtual private server for whipple.org. Following a week of indecision, the Weldon decided to keep the server, and transferred all his handcrafted html pages to the new server at whipple.org.
Suddenly Weldon was inundated with email from numerous previously unknown Whipples who wanted to be added to whipple.org. Fortunately, Weldon found a program called GED2HTML ("GEDCOM to HTML") that would take a GEDCOM file exported from PAF as input, and generate thousands of pages. Those pages first came online in June 1997. Over the next few years (under different web site names), those pages found themselves in the Whipple Genweb, eventually at the site genweb.whipple.org.
The Whipple Genweb was good at displaying ancestral pedigrees, but not so good at displaying descendancy charts. A solution to that weakness was found in a new product called The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG). Like GED2HTML, it could also convert a GEDCOM file to an "instant website."
The TNG site initially appeared as iwhipple.org, then later as db.whipple.org
After formal retirement in 2018, Weldon wanted the Whipple Website to outlive him.
In 2021 (during the COVID-19 pandemic), the Whipple Website joined the U.K.'s Guild of One-Name Studies as the Whipple One-Name Study. With few exceptions, it mirrors the site at whipple.org, including the Whipple Database.
Over time, whipple.org and db.whipple.org will redirect to the Whipple One-Name Study:
whipple.org --> whipple.one-name.net
db.whipple.org --> whipple.one-name.net/tng
There are no plans to move genweb.whipple.org to the Guild of One-Name Studies.
Should Weldon die or become incapicated, the Whipple One-Name Study will become a legacy site hosted by the Guild of One-Name Studies. It can return to active status if someone applies to (and is accepted by) the Guild to take over the Whipple One-Name Study.
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