About
I started this site with the two-fold purpose of celebrating the joys and events of my family, and putting on record the highlights of my path through this life. It's the home for all my family videos and movies, lots of family pictures, and my (sort of) autobiography. It celebrates my adult family, my wife and my two children - the "Daniel J. Schoch family," as well as my family growing up, my mom and dad and my brother and sister - the "Albert E. Schoch family." I love them all dearly.

Username login required
You will need a username login to access pages other than this home page. Logins have been created for most of my close family already, but I'll enable a link in the near future to request additional logins. In the meantime, feel free to drop me an email at my personal email address if I failed to include you in this initial group of logins. You don't need a login to access my personal blog, found on my "Dan's Blogging" page.

After you login with your username, you will be able to change your username, your name, and the email address associated with your login on the "User Profile" page. Of course, I created a "Change Password" page as well.

I welcome comments!
Once you get a login and start poking around, please leave comments about what you find. The comment you leave will be associated with a specific page, but feel free to submit a general comment on any page. I welcome all comments to correct, clarify, fix typos, make additions, provide answers, request more info, or report bugs.  Use the "Submit Comment" button to the right. Btw, no one will see your comment besides me.

Forgot username/password?
Finally, if you already have a username but don't remember it, the Forgot Username page will look up the login associated with your email address, and the Forgot Password page will help you reset your password.

A pile of (searchable) family videos
When I fully retired, I decided to work on a project that's been in the back of my thought for quite a while - converting my family videos to digital format. I knew it would be a big project, but I have to admit that I underestimated how long it would actually take. At any rate, I have now finished converting all of our VHS family videos to digital format (whew!) - a real labor of love.

While converting the videos, I kept records of what event was taking place, edited each "event" down to a separate video, and recorded which family members were in the clip. All these videos are searchable on the "Media Search" page. I also created a "Who's Who" page with a list of everyone in the videos, to explain who everyone is along with a few snapshots of most of the folks.

Super 8 home movies too!
When we were cleaning out Ruth's Dad's house after he passed on (Aug 2019), we came across about a dozen or so Tiedemann home movies, in the old Super 8 film format. So I purchased a device that will convert Super 8 film to digital files. There is some tweaking in the frame speed that needs to be done once the Super 8 movies are in digital format which was a bit of a pain. So if a movie seems to be running too fast (or too slow), please let me know and I'll look into it. These old movies can also be found in the "Media Library."

I have also tracked down all of my childhood home movies and have converted them to digital as well. There's about 65 Super 8 movies my dad had taken when my siblings and I were kids. It was a fun family night whenever we watched these old movies (which we did often). These are also in the "Media Library."

Why write an autobiography?
I never thought of writing an autobiography. Frankly, my life hasn't been all that interesting, nor am I a great storyteller. And, of course, as you begin writing all about yourself, you feel narcissistic and self-centered.

At any rate, here's why I decided to do it: In 2010, while driving in Florida not far from where I think my dad grew up, I realized that I knew very little about my dad. And I had the same thoughts about my mom. I was clueless about simple things like where they grew up and what they did as kids, what companies my dad had worked for, what my mom did in her early adulthood, and what they both did during World War II. And I can say the same for my aunts and uncles as well. For example, even though I knew the names of some towns they mentioned, I had no details or timelines. So through the process of elimination I determined where my family lived when I was born (spoiler alert: Third Street, in Kenvil, NJ). I've been able to answer a few of those questions about my dad and mom, but (unfortunately) lots more will stay forever unanswered.

That's when it occurred to me that I should write my own document to record some of my life details, especially my childhood and early adulthood. So I started a Word document, which I thought would be a simple, several-page "resume on steroids"-kinda record. It got much longer very quickly, even though I intentionally excluded most information for the last couple of decades (hopefully my kids will remember those years!).

As I worked on this autobiography, I couldn't decide what to do with it. I didn't want to self-publish a paper book, and was uncertain how to "preserve" it. Frankly, I didn't want to lose the effort I put into that early Word document.

Why put it here?
Around the same time, I started working on my project to convert the family videos to digital format. Those two projects progressed side-by-side, but unconnected.

When I started to think about how to make the digitized videos available to my family, I settled on creating a new website to be the home for the video library and figured I might as well add the autobiography. The biggest requirement for the website was to have a secure login, since I didn't really want the world to have access to all the videos. And although there isn't anything (very) embarrassing in my autobiography, I wasn't crazy about having that "out there" either.

So the "Daniel J. Schoch & Family" website was born. My hope is that when (or rather, "if") my descendants wonder who this "Dan Schoch" guy was and what he did, some of those answers will be on this website in the "Autobiography" pages.

Lately I've been noodling on what will happen when I pass on. My hope is that my kids will keep this website going for a while, and maybe add to it, to the extent that I've built updating features (it's already pretty easy to upload new media files). I have no idea how long the hosting service will keep the site alive, but I do know that if the hosting service goes away, so does the site. So I guess I'll have to trust my kids to keep it going for a while. So I'm also looking into moving the whole site to a USB drive or some other portable media, so it can be passed along to my kids and grandkids.

NOT a family tree
I've included a few tidbits of family information prior to my birth. This could easily have grown into a family-tree-kinda pile of information. I have a few facts along those lines, pretty much limited to off-the-top-of-my-head things about my grandparents. But I haven't included everything I know or have access to, and definitely didn't do a lot of new research in that direction. Maybe someday, but not today.

As I diddled around with this website, I decided to add some things that I thought would be useful and fun to do. I have to admit, I've had a lot of fun learning and playing with HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and SQL. Bottom line, I've learned a lot and enjoy playing with web technology and database programming.

Media Library
As I worked on my autobiography, I designed a method of adding related pictures to the sidebar that relate to the topics on the page. Some pages have more pics than others - I just worked with the digital files I had on my computer at the time. I realized I had quite a few digital pics, so I uploaded a ton and added a slideshow page for all the photos. Also, I recently digitized a few old audio cassette tapes, so I've included those audio files for your listening pleasure. All this morphed into a single searchable "Media Library" as I combined all the video, image, movie, and audio files into one place. There's also a feature to create "Albums" of your favorite media files, and you can reorder the contents of the albums.

House History
One of the large aspects of my adult life (and, subsequently, my family) were our many moves. The "House History" page lists all the addresses I've lived in my life from the time I was born. The "Moving Recaps" page (the last page in my Autobiography) includes pictures of almost all of the houses, and gives a brief narrative of the moves.

Message Board
All users can create posts to the common messages and view everyone else's posts on the "Message Board" page.

User Gallery
The User Gallery shows the "display name" and the user "profile" for all logins, and (if the users turns on the display), their real name and email address.

Website Journal
Somewhat early on, I added a "Website Journal" so I could record odds and ends about my development of the site. Most of this is not very interesting, and some of it is simply technical documentation for me.

Personal Blog
As mentioned above, I also decided to create a personal public blog (named cleverly "Dan's Blogging"), which is viewable outside the djschoch.com login firewall. I have no idea what I'll be blogging about, but what the heck!

LATEST CHANGES (updated 9/27/2025)
Below are a few of the newest features on the website:

• A new "Media Library" page provides for seaching and the entire media library, including akk audio, image, movie, and video files. Searching by text in the media title and description is also available. On this page you can create and manage collections of your favorite media files (audio, image, movie, and/or video). You can also view or create your own "albums" - collections of any media. Once an album is created, it's easy to change the order of the media. And you can share the album with others, in either read-only or modify modes
• All users can now upload their own media files - audio, images, or video. All files are included in the Media Search.
• "Hashtag Attributes" can now be assigned to any file, identifying the event, location, people, and/or animals. These hashtags can be used to search the files.
• Any user can create new hashtags for use by everyone.
• New topic-specific page navigation menus have been added to most pages.

Most recent media file changes (either newly uploaded or modified):

• 1 image files on 05/08/2021
• 39 audio files on 02/20/2021
• 62 video files on 02/20/2021
• 65 movie files on 09/10/2025