DEVON-L Archives

Archiver > DEVON > 1999-12 > 0944103660


From: "Down, Graham L" <>
Subject: RE: writing family history webpages
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 14:01:00 +1100


Celia,

I saw your posting and felt my experience should be worth a reply.

I prepared my own family history website for an assortment of reasons. One
being that I was developing a website for work and had some skills that
wanted to practice (it was after all my first attempt). The second, but
more significant reason is that as I browse many surnames lists and read and
respond to email lists, I find it easy to point to my website for clarifying
information to my recipient rather than spell out all details and the
contexts. One of my design criteria was to ensure that anyone could get to
a name, a place or an individual without hunting too far down the line.

I looked around many personal websites, in particularly family history ones,
before I settled on the format that I used. I felt that too many of them
looked the same, ie made from an automatic gedcom - html converter and
lacked any comments identifying the information source and hence accuracy
and side references such as links to the source and pictures. Likewise, few
if any identified the context to which the information should be applied. I
decided that I'd build my website from ground up. I actually composed it in
a standard wordprocessor, saved the pages as html and updated them using a
html editor, adding some cosmetic improvements along the way. The downside
to this is that this is considerably slower than an automatic conversion,
but gives a good opportunity to review the data for obvious errors.

That said, I feel that your motive is excellent. After all isn't the
internet a worldwide information source rather than a collection of
egotistical sites?

Graham Down
Melbourne Australia
http://www.users.bigpond.com/gdown/ancestry.htm


> -----Original Message-----
> From:Strachan, Celia C [SMTP:]
> Sent:Wednesday, 1 December 1999 10:12 pm
> To:
> Subject:writing family history webpages
>
> Can I ask the list for their comments about the layout of family history
> webpages. I want to provide useful information from my research rather
> than
> show off my own personal family tree. So I was thinking of listing people
> with a page for each surname, and to make the list alphabetical by first
> name.
>
> I would use a table format with as much information as possible across the
> row e.g. first name, dates, parish, relationship to x, source of
> information. I would not include IGI data unless the individual is
> directly
> connected to my tree. Some individuals could have a hyperlink to their own
> notes page.
>
> What do others find helpful and aggravating about personal genealogy
> pages?
>
> Thanks
>
> Celia Strachan
> University of Essex
>
> ______________________________

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