About Connbase Online

The history of Connbase

Connbase, my database of Connemara pedigrees, goes back a long way. I can't recall the exact year when it all began, but a rough estimates gives some time between 1985 and 1989. It all started with hand written notes or notes written on a typewriter. It quickly grew to a point where it was getting impractical to search for pedigrees in an unsorted mess of ponies and one of the first attempts of bringing some order to the madness was a binder full of hand-written pages, alphabetically sorted by the first letter of the names and with separate pages for each prefix from which I knew more than three ponies. It made it a bit easier to find what I was looking for. At some point I began entering the ponies in a Word file which made it a bit easier to sort the ponies alphabetically, not just by the first name. It was still a paper based pedigree collection, printed out and stored in a binder.

Connbase existed in this form up until my university days (back in 1995) when I met my husband to be. For some reason my binders full of pony pedigrees impressed this non-horsey guy and he encouraged me to go electronic. Out of this an early version of Connbase was born as an excel sheet with ponies and information entered on each row. This allowed some more practical searching of ponies, pedigrees and foal lists, but my computer enthusiastic husband took Connbase one step further. He transformed it from the excel version to a more useful database allowing him to write the different scripts I need for my pony research. Such as pull out all the descendants on the female side from a mare = the mare families you can find here. It was at this time that we actually began to refer to it as Connbase, but I think I may owe the name to Dan-Axel Danielson who may have used it for the the early ideas about the nice international stud book resource from CPBS and ICCPS. It's a good name though, so it stuck...

Last year I decided, after beginning to build up these Connemara concoctions, that perhaps the time had come to take the next step and my husband has helped me bring about this version of Connbase: Connbase Online.

What's in Connbase

Connbase Online is very much the same as my own utility version of Connbase. It has not been adapted for the internet, so it is very based on my own needs. For example the Swedish letters "å", "ä" and "ö" are used throughout and they need to be entered in the search patterns as well. Furthermore "ö" is also used instead of the Danish and Norwegian "ø". Also heights are given in cm (translated from hands and inches) and colours are given in Swedish. For a translation of Swedish colours and metric heights please go here. I also use my own codes for the studbooks sometimes and there's a number of different registration and studbook numbers. What can I say... I like registration numbers. They help keep track of ponies with the same names and those that get renamed.

All the information in Connbase is to my knowledge correct. Indeed, why would I enter information that is not correct? However, it would be naive of me to believe that there are no errors in Connbase (that such exist is proven to me from time to time) and I will not accept any responsibility for anything bad or undesirable that might happen from the use of Connbase Online. Always consult the relevant breed society to confirm any Connemara pedigree. That said, I'm confident the vast majority in Connbase is correct. There are some pedigrees in Connbase that are not in the Studbooks but that I have found elsewhere in the litterature. For example Rebel has no pedigree in the CPBS stud book, but in Connbase Cannon Ball is entered as his sire. There are some such cases that are a little more shaky than others, but I intend to clean that up at some point. Again, consult the relevant breed society if you want to make sure. Also I have taken some liberty with spelling in some cases, just to keep the spelling of prefixes consistent.

Connbase contains at the time of writing some 57000 pure and partbreds. (Meaning Excel is getting impractical and I have to figure out something else soon... Meep!) The Swedish and British ponies are pretty complete up until present, the Irish until 2004, the Danish something like that too. The Australian and maybe also the American are fairly good as well when it comes to ponies in the main stud books. Other countries have been entered to varying degrees. For no country I claim Connbase Online to be complete. The German ponies are a bit messy as the lack of stud names and stud book numbers have made it difficult to distinguish between ponies with the same name. If you find the designation (I) or (II) that is a non official numbering to help me keep ponies with identical names apart. Also NN is ponies for which I have no name, numbered to help me keep them apart.

I hope you will find Connbase Online useful. It is terribly slow, I know. There are several excellent official resources for Connemara pedigrees (such as the Irish, British, Swedish, Norwegian, French). What Connbase will allow you to do that they to varying extents don't is to move across countries and for example get offspring from several countries listed for the same pony. If you find errors or if there's a pony that you can't find, just drop me a line and I'll look into it. If you can help me out with pedigrees by getting me stud books you will have a friend for life... ;-)

Jenny Hagenblad, Mora, December 2012