While working on my own genealogy and family history research, I spent a lot of time finding other families with my surname and I wanted a place to store some of this data so people looking for information on the Zalewski surname could find it.
Along with that research, I was paging through old Milwaukee newspapers when they were available via Google. I kept running across death notices and obituaries, but Google's OCR never transcribed them since they were so small and sometimes hard-to-read. I started a spreadsheet with the basics as I looked through papers to hopefully post somewhere at some point.
One thing led to another, and I put the data I collected in a MySQL database. At that point, I wanted to try something new (to me) and wrote up a small site using Backbone.js and a PHP API backend that I called "The Zalewski Project."
Recently, I wanted to learn Node.js, MongoDB, and React (or the MERN stack) and I work better when I'm working on something solid, not just an "example blog site", etc. I decided to rewrite this site. My host didn't support Node (at least not a somewhat recent version), so I also learned a bit of Microsoft Azure hosting.
It's now built using Node.js and Express, React, and a MongoDB database.
Current URL is located at Microsft Azure