Howdy, I'm Lara, your webhostess!

My fanatical interest in Tudor History started when I was in 8th grade. My American History teacher used to "threaten" us with a lesson on Henry and his wives. Well, one day, she followed through on her "threat" and spent that class period and the next talking about Henry and family. She showed us some of the famous paintings and quickly told us the tale of each of the six amazing women that Henry VIII took for his queens. I was hooked. I quickly went out and read Carolly Erickson's Great Harry and shortly after, The First Elizabeth.

When I got to high school the next year, I took World History for the first time. My teacher was great, but unfortunately didn't know much about the Tudors. (He once mistakenly called Mary Queen of Scots "Bloody Mary", which I corrected him on, of course <grin>.) But, when it came time for our research paper, he quickly signed off on my proposed topic: "The Changes of Religion in Tudor England" and encouraged my interests. (And I got an A+!) He was also a supporter of my growing interests in space, astronomy and science in general.

And so these two interests grew side by side, seemingly like parallel lines that would never cross. I continued to read many books on the subject of the Tudors (Elizabeth I in particular) and continued my education in the direction of astronomy.

In 1994, a a good friend introduced me to the wonders of this new thing that was to be dubbed "The World Wide Web" and it was a far cry from the e-mail and IRC that I had been playing with since 1990. He soon had a home page up for himself and shortly after that, I had one of my own. It was late 1994 or early 1995 that I added a Tudor England section to my expanding web experiment.

In June 1995, I began working in the Education Office of the UT Astronomy Department and a few months later, I got a Power Macintosh to fill the ever growing graphic needs of my job. Shortly after, all of my web sites moved to the new machine.

Since I ran several sites from that computer (including several for work), the number of hits on the Tudor England site was beginning to put a drag on the machine and make other pages unavailable at times. So, I started searching for a commercial provider. After flirting with the idea of my own domain (which turned out to be way too expensive at the time) I stumbled across Simplenet. So then the site became tudor.simplenet.com, which started life at that address on July 1, 1997.

Update - August 1, 2000

Yahoo! bought out Simplenet, which gave me the incentive to finally start looking into a new host and to get my own domain name. For now, I'm at OneWorld Hosting. Assuming no radical changes in terms of service or fee increases, I hope to be here for some time. And the nice thing about having my own domain name now is that if I should move to yet another server at some point, there won't be any links to change, since the domain name will move with me!

You might have noticed that the name of the site has changed a little. Instead of "Tudor England" it's now "Tudor History", which I feel is a more accurate description, since I touch on Scotland, Ireland, and the history of the Tudor family in the years outside of 1485-1603.

Update - October 18, 2000

Moving again! The address will stay the same, but some of the forms and email services will be interrupted while I move the site to a new server. I have decided to move to Westhost, since for just a few dollars more, I was able to get twice the disk space (room to grow!) and a much clearer policy on unlimited site traffic.