I was able to install and get the credentials meshed, but I haven’t implemented it on the live site, yet. I spend most of my time doing straight research for family tree members. Right now, I’ve topped out on 2000 members of a family tree for my uncle. Their family is having the 100th reunion this June in Springfield, Ohio.
On the live site, I have managed to integrate Wordpress, so I can blog about crap on the same URL.
Do you have an example link running geneweb? I did look that over again before I posted just now, but the example link listed on their main page is dead.
Thanks! Will check it out here. Seems that there at least a few others on the TNG forum exploring this. Exploring Wordpress or Drupal options is possibly next on my list, since my family’s interest in this area seems to be growing a bit now.
Edit: You guys are quick today.
I will PM you a link to an example site (I don’t make it public).
Someone, take me under their wing and teach me all your secrets! I was watching “Faces of America” on PBS this last couple of weeks, and it prompted me to get back into Genealogy, especially since it’s a little easier now (last time I did any work on it was pre-internet, which was hard.)
I’ve been using Gramps, and found some excellent sources on rootsweb that take a couple of branches of my tree pretty far back, but I am still coming up bust on my Dad’s side, which makes him sad.
I’ve already discovered some neat stuff, like the fact that on my mom’s side, someone’s traced it all the way back to a little village in the Alsace region of France. We knew there was French in our background, but we thought it was from a much older source.
Anyway, help meh! I have no living grandparents, sadly, which does put some holes in things.
I still have my subscription to world deluxe Ancestry.com, so if you want to pass me your Dad’s information, I’ll see if they have anything.
Is it worthwhile to spring for a subscription? I was semi tempted to, but I didn’t know anyone else who was using it, so I had no clue if it was worth is. They’re sponsoring that new NBC Genealogy series that’s coming up after the Olympics, heh.
Anyway, I’ll PM some infos!
Lots of folks can construct huge trees using just that site. It’s a great investment but feel free to PM me names as well if you need to, since I’m not quite ready to ditch my subscription yet. In addition to just finding information, I always try to save copies of any digital documents I find there to my own source repositories, and in some cases I even capture screenshots of web pages relevant to citations even though that might be overkill. Managing source info is very time consuming and often boring, but also satisfying in its own way if you’re anything like me.
As for general tips and other resources, it’s all about where your families lived and when. Did you try alternative spellings and dates, for your dad’s family?
I just emailed you what I found on your Dad’s line(s).
An Ancestry subscription is a great investment, and it’s possibly the most useful site out there for anything genealogical. They’ve even purchased a DNA research lab, so you can get swabbed, send in your kit, and match your research up with other folks that have similar DNA.
It’s possibly the most expensive site out there, however. My World Deluxe Subscription costs 299.00 a year. There are tiered plans (i.e. non-international versions) as well as plans that let you pay month-to-month.
Thanks for the help, guys. Through some advice given by mystery (I have some ancestors on my mom’s side that were born in SF pre-1906, which makes birth records more or less impossible to find,) I was able to find her dad’s line going back to Scotland. Still having some issues finding one person, I think due to possible multiple spellings of her first name, but I’m chipping away at it.
Maybe I’ll have as neat looking a site as mystery someday!
Resurrecting thread to show off my new project: I’ve completed the Wiki integration with TNG.
Here’s an example of a person’s page in my tree: Erick Carlson. If you notice, up by his name, there’s a little yellow page icon. Click that, and you’ll be taken to his Wiki page.
It’s a concept test, right now, so there’s not much there. Eventually, I want to add functionality that extends the gallery feature of MediaWiki to hook up to my Flickr account and display images for a given person. I also want to be able to create “stubs” of pages for people that don’t have pages…i.e. create a register description of them and their immediate family, where people, dates, and places all link back to the appropriate pages on the site.
Nice! (FYI there seems to be an extra slash in that wiki link).
So this is the newest thread about family-trees/genealogy…
Does anyone have suggestions/hints for using Ancestry.com? It’s pretty good and I have a tree already pretty well built out going back into the 1500s on my Father’s side. I hit a family member around the Revolutionary War times and I’m seeing multiple entries for him and then noticed other multiple entries for the same people on my tree, especially as you go further back in time. It’s just a bunch of little minor discrepancies, but its clear they are for the same dude/dudette. And they are rather famous/powerful for their time so you can be more sure that the info is correct over just some random 1700s guy. But when one profiles says the guy is a lone child, but you know he has multiple siblings it gets tough to reconcile. Plus the one lady from back at the beginning of my tree who has a single well done profile that shows she married and was widowed then remarried…but the second husband shows to have married her before the first husband’s 4 kids were born?!
Anyway, I’m diverting off into some other sites that are specific to the Revolution and state’s (Maryland) founding families as well as gravesite info sites. Just wondering how anyone who’s done this sort of thing was able to filter thru Ancestry.com’s quirks.
My high level comment is “Disbelieve everything you don’t have an actual primary source for.”
And remember that people are pattern matching animals. Which is why you have people born in 1850 named “Smith” who appear to have 600 children - because everyone TODAY doing research says “well, MY great-grandfather’s name was John Smith - THIS must be the same dude!”
Haha. Ya. I’ve got good links back to where I’m trying to get due to the prominence of the family at that time and the place where they were all born was itself prominent. It’s just one dude with the name John that is throwing me a little. But using a couple of other sources I was able to confirm my branch of the family and where it breaks off.
What peterb said. Most of those databases are user-contributed and you’re going to want to to refer to census data to back up your research. People are hopeful and really want to fill in those gaps any way they can. And often, they’re just too committed to a set of assumptions to rethink a line they’ve already drawn. And once you get to pre-19th Century, you’ll probably want to start thinking about travel, to look at church records and the like.