Shortly after Dad became a grandfather, he started working on our family genealogy as a record for all of us. Naturally this work centered around the Scheef and Kemman families that settled in and around LaGrange, Illinois, in the mid-1800s.
For years this was paper-based but once he got his Macintosh, one of Dad's friends showed him how to use Personal Ancestral File, a program written and distributed by the Mormons. Later we moved to Family Tree Maker and that database will be available here as soon as I get past a few simple privacy issues.
Since there are not really a lot of generations between now and when LaGrange was settled, Dad's research has breadth but not a lot of depth. As he dug into church baptismal records and other sources he came across the same family names over and over. On the hunch that he was probably somehow related to these families, he just kept on digging. His database had just about 3000 names. In the last couple of years I have cleaned up some duplicates that were probably introduced by the process of moving to from the Mac to a PC-based database. In addition I have done some searching on the web and added some ancestors on Mom's side of the family.