Tips & Opinions,  Tools

Share with Gendex

Share your information! It’s a really good idea. Almost certainly someone out there is looking for a family member or two of yours.

Database

The corollary is: you know how hard it has been for you to find reliable information, why not make it easier for everyone by generously making your work shareable. Of course, you want to protect your living relatives.  You also want to be acknowledged for your efforts.  Each of these objectives are easily achieved.

  • Gendex files ‘automagically’ protect your living relatives data.
  • Creative Commons offers license schemes, at no cost, to protect your intellectual property.

I make my publicly viewable data available on FamilySeekeer and GenealogyToday.  I also plan on making it available at TNG.

For those of you who are not familiar with GENDEX here’s a brief write-up on what it is as described by GenealogyToday.com:

The gendex.txt concept was developed by Eugene W. Stark who included the feature in his GEDCOM to HTML translator software, GED2HTML, which helped people publish their family trees on the Internet.

GED2HTML is a program that inputs genealogical data in GEDCOM format, and outputs a collection of HTML files suitable for presentation on the World Wide Web. The output produced consists of HTML files containing the individual data, an index suitable for quickly locating an individual by name and an auxiliary surname index with links to the first individual with each surname.

The gendex.txt files were originally accepted by Stark’s GENDEX site, but since that site was retired in 2004, other sites (including ours) have begun supporting the format.

ManyRoads Creator, Professional Genealogist, Family Historian, ManyRoads Podcast co-host, Old Guy and most importantly 'opa'