Thanks for your comments on my family tree. As usual, I cheated! I keep all the information in one of the specialist programs - in my own case Family Tree Maker, but there is no particular reason to favour this one. Most genealogy programs can make create a file in a standard format called 'GEDCOM'. I wrote a Visual Basic program to read the GEDCOM and create the Web pages from it.

How far back? In the UK getting back to 1834(ish) is moderately easy because that's when records were centralised. Earlier involves visiting local churches etc so is much more difficult. So I have the tree pretty well complete for the main family strands after that date and then occasional branches back to mid 1700's.