Computers and Genealogy: a fruitful combination.

Part 3. Sharing Your Family History on the Internet

(Continued, Part 2)

One of the ways that you can easily share your family history with others is to set up your own family website. The pages can be as simple as a listing of names and dates, or as intricate as multiple pages with hyperlinks, images, sources, etc. The way you present your information is entirely up to you.

There are, at a minimum, three pre-requisites that will need to meet before you are able to publish your family history:

1. You must have a place to put the pages. In other words, you will need to have storage space reserved for you on your ISP’s (Internet Service Provider) server or buy space on one of the commercial web hosting services.

2. You will need to generate the contents of the pages. Most modern genealogy programs have the ability to generate web pages from your data. If you are using one that doesn’t include this ability, then you will need to use a separate program to do so, or write your own HTML code.

3. You will need to have at least a passing familiarity with the use of an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program in order to upload your pages from your computer to your web site.

Let’s go over each of the above points and I’ll try to explain them in a bit more detail.

A place to put your pages . . . . It seems kind of obvious but storage space on an internet server is essential. There are several ways that you can get the space you need. The easiest (and cheapest!) way is to ask your ISP if your service includes free space on their server. Most ISP’s include limited space with your service agreement. Typically, the space provided is for a relatively small amount of storage. You should contact your ISP and inquire about the availability of space for personal web pages. They will generally also have instructions on how to access and upload content to their servers.

Depending on the size of your pages, the storage capacity that you need could easily exceed that provided by your ISP. If this happens then you have no other choice but to purchase storage space from one of the many commercial web hosting service available. Some of the more popular ones are: Go Daddy, HostMonster, IPowerWeb, and many others. What you need to look for in any commercial services is connection reliability, how much storage space is included for the price, are there any bandwidth limitations, and are there any additional fees.

Connection reliability is obviously important. If the provider’s site is constantly down or unavailable for any reason then no one can see your pages! Make sure that the amount of space that you are purchasing is more than adequate for your family pages. The space should be sufficient to store not only the HTML code that make up your pages but also all the other files (pictures, sounds, PDF documents, etc.) that you want to be part of your web site. Look carefully at bandwidth limitations that the provider may impose. Simply put, this is a limitation as to how much data can be transferred to and from your website on, generally, a monthly basis. You certainly don’t want anyone who tries to visit your website to receive the message that “Bandwidth limitations exceeded – site temporarily unavailable”. And finally, make sure that all of the fees and charges are fully explained and that you understand exactly what you get for your monthly payments.

Before deciding on which service to sign up with, you will want to do some research on the web and read reviews on those that you are interested in. As a general comment, it is probably a good idea to purchase the most space and bandwidth that you can comfortably afford. As your family history grows so too will your need for megabytes of storage and bandwidth.

You will need to generate the contents of the pages . . . . If your software supports the generation of web pages, then this should be the simplest step of all. Most of the popular genealogy packages include the ability write your family data to a series of HTML files. You can generally control how the output looks, i.e. page layout, colors, backgrounds, who to include, type of pages (ancestor narrative, descendant narrative, or pedigree), etc. You can decide to include or not include pictures of individuals, places, and events. Look through all the options that your program offers, and then generate several different types of webpages. Take a look at all of them on your browser and then decide which type you like best and how you want your pages to look.

If the genealogy program that you use does not offer the option of generating webpages for you, all is not lost. You can choose to either purchase an additional program that will generate the pages or you can use a free one that is available. All genealogy programs can export their data to a GEDCOM file. A very popular program that can take this GEDCOM file and use it to automatically construct a web site is TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding). This program uses PHP and MySQL as the underlying “engines” and is capable of producing some extremely sophisticated pages. Although the cost of TNG is not very much (currently $29.99 USD) there is another program that works the same way and is free – PhpGedView. The only requirement for using either of these programs is that the ISP that is hosting your site must have PHP and MySQL available for your use. This sounds more complicated than it really is. A good place to learn more about this requirement is to do some reading on either of the programs homepages. Regardless of which program you choose, the nice thing about both is that they produce “dynamic” webpages rather than “static” ones.

Dynamic web pages allow you to upload a data file to the server, and then automatically generate the revised pages “on-the-fly”. Static pages are ones that are produced locally on your hard drive by your genealogy program and then uploaded en masse to the server. The advantage of dynamic pages is that they offer a lot more convenience and are a bit easier to maintain. The advantage of static ones is that you have more control over exactly how they look and how they are organized.

I have used PhpGedView to generate webpages and can vouch for their ease of creation and quality of presentation. There are links on the TNG website as well as on the PhpGedView site that list webpages constructed with both so you can easily see how the final products look.

If you are using “The Master Genealogist” (TMG) as your program of choice, then you should be aware of a companion program called “Second Site”. It will read your TMG database directly and generate either narrative or grid style person pages, a master index, a surname index, and source pages. No GEDCOM export is required. The program has gotten excellent reviews from users and also has been mentioned several times in The Master Genealogist forums.

You will need to have at least a passing familiarity with the use of an FTP . . . . The most common way of transferring the HTML files that will make up your web pages to your ISP’s server is through a FTP client program. There are other ways of accomplishing the transfer but using an FTP program is by far the easiest. Although I will not go into a detailed explanation of FTP, it essentially is a direct connection between your computer and the computer that is your ISP’s server. You first need to establish a connection to your ISP’s computer and then choose what file or files on your computer to transfer. The FTP program handles the rest. The step-by-step directions for connecting to your ISP’s computer can normally be found on their website. If you cannot find the information easily, then a phone call to your ISP will normally answer your questions quickly.

There are many free FTP programs that you can choose from. Among the more popular ones are: Core FTP, FileZilla, WinSCP, FireFTP, and GoFTP. Any of these, and I am sure many others, will be sufficient for the simple type of file transfers we are discussing. One possible complication you should be made aware of is something called “secure FTP (SFTP)”. Some internet servers, because of security concerns, use an encrypted form of FTP. If the server you are transferring to insists on this protocol, then you will have to use a FTP client that supports it. All of the above mentioned programs can use either FTP or SFTP. Just follow the instructions from your ISP or the help file that is included in all of the programs.

Once you have established a connection, you have direct control over what files are stored on the remote computer. You can add to them (transfer files to), delete them, rename them, move them into different directories, or transfer them to your local computer. In some ways, the remote computer becomes an extension of your local hard drive.

The file structure of your web site is, generally, not very complicated if you use one of the above mentioned programs to generate the pages. Suffice it to say that the “opening page” of your site most probably has a file name of index.htm or index.html (or some variation of index, e.g. index.php). All of the other pages will be hyper-linked to it. Remember that you will have to transfer all of the html files along with all image files, sound files, etc. that your site uses. Once you have transferred everything then it is a good idea to immediately log into your pages and check out all the links. Any problems should be rectified before you announce to your friends and family the availability of the pages.

One additional item that should be discussed is “domain names”. I’m sure you have noticed web sites with URL’s of www.thejonesfamily.com, www.polishorigins.com, etc. Names that sort of make sense for what the pages represent. My own web site has a URL of www.janicefamily.net. It’s a lot easier to remember www.janicefamily.net than to try and recall www.cox.net/users/~janice. Besides “janicefamily” sounds so much more professional!

In order to get your own domain name for your site, you will first need to make sure that what you choose is not already in use. In my case, I tried to first get “www.janicefamily.com”. Unfortunately that name was already reserved by someone else, so I then chose janicefamily.net. In order to reserve the name for myself I had to pay a small fee. Most of the commercial web hosting services offer the registration of domain names for their clients. Check out their webpages and see if they will register the domain name of your choice for you. It is not essential to have your own domain name but it sure makes remembering it easier!

One last question that needs to be discussed is “What information, if any, should I include on my webpages for living individuals?” In order to answer this question, I believe that it is first necessary to distinguish the different types of information that are generally available to researchers. The information contained in public records such as name, date of birth, residence, telephone numbers, etc. is just that – public information. Information of a more private nature (anything that is not contained in publically available records), such as social security numbers, health issues, employment, etc. should be treated differently. Most genealogy software offers the option to either mark certain information as private, or to suppress the inclusion of living individuals in reports and web pages. Judicious use of these options, either singly or in combination, should enable you to fine-tune your webpages so as to respect the privacy of those living members of your family yet still present an informative and accurate family history.

A useful site to visit to read further on privacy issues and genealogical standards when publishing data is the National Genealogical Society site. The pages at http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/comstandards.cfm have several links to articles that discuss sharing information with others and publishing web pages on the internet.

November 3, 2008

Part 4: Image Editing and Cataloging Programs and Genealogy

Author: Bob Janice

Forum: If you have any questions you can ask me directly in the Forum.

More Tips & Resources

Supplement to the Part 3 (by Zenon, PolishOrigins.com)

If you have already constructed your tree with the help of the genealogy softwares described in Part 1 or have your story written in any form and want to present it to others through the Internet, we can help you in that.

On our Krewni/Relatives section we present pages built for and by people who are looking for their relatives in Poland as well as in the other parts of the world. On each person's page there is short information about the searcher, who is he or she looking for, pictures of relatives (if the researcher has any) and family trees. Example pages: Cybulski,  Ancerewicz . 

On Our Gen Stories section you can either publish your family history with pictures and tree, or submit link to your family website or blog if you already have one. Example Stories: I am Australian. Of Polish Descent, Ray from Minnesota: His Family Search or Recollections of Julius Bier.

All you have to do for us to faciliate sharing your family history on the Internet is for you to provide materials for the page:

- your family tree file in GEDCOM format

- text for Krewni/Relatives page (if you want it to be different than standard one)

- your research or family history which you would like to share with others (for Our Gen Stories section)

- pictures with captions of your relatives or scans of documents (if you have any).

All of the materials as attached files you can send to our or via Private Message .

As long as we are able to manage technically and organizationally with the number of requests for pages, submission and space on our server is free of charge.