Jade Cat / McKenzie’s Mint is what happens when genealogy, cats, Paint Shop Pro, family documents, free buttons, travel photos, and early-web graphics all decide they can share one domain.
Visit Jade Cat / McKenzie’s Mint
The site’s genealogy section contains surname indexes, Ahnentafel charts, ancestor photographs, research tips, and a page of family documents with images and transcriptions of wills, affidavits, letters, and other records.
Then the navigation abruptly turns into a web-design supply cabinet.
There are BladePro presets, tubes, button sets, border backgrounds, graphics sets, retouched photographs, a color tutorial, and linkware graphics intended for other people to use on their own pages.
Before templates ate the handmade web
This is one of the useful things about surviving graphics sites from the period: they show how personal websites reproduced themselves.
Someone made a button, divider, background, or image set. Somebody else downloaded it, linked back, changed the surrounding HTML, and used it to build another site.
Jade Cat explicitly distinguishes between graphics offered for reuse and images that should not be copied. That small bit of etiquette mattered in communities where people passed visual components around constantly.
The rest of the site remains just as personal.
There are cat photographs, Washington, D.C. links, trips to Scotland, Paris, Florida, Wyoming, and the Caribbean, information about the West Baden Springs Hotel, wallpaper, genealogy organizations, antivirus information, and a memorial section connected with September 11.
The homepage even includes an old “escape someone else’s frames” link and a spam disclaimer.
Nothing has been flattened into one content vertical.
That makes the site useful as more than nostalgia. It preserves how ordinary people organized research, family history, creative work, travel, and downloadable web assets before a publishing platform decided what their page types should be.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains old personal sites like this because their mess is historical evidence.
The genealogy tells you about a family.
The button sets tell you about the web they lived on.