Presenting family genealogies on the web
Presenting readable, genealogical information, data, and stories is a complex challenge. It seems to me that people’s lives ought to be expressed as more than family trees, dates, and lineages. I have been struggling with this problem for quite a while. Perhaps you have as well.
Over the years, I have noticed a few ‘special’ difficulties in making this type of information, useful, accessible, easy to find not to mention human. The major problem areas, for me, have centered around the following:
- genealogical data & stories can run deep & wide (they may, and often do, involve a lot of data from many locations, sources, and media)
- genealogical data/ information itself evolves and changes. It changes often (even more than often for those of us who make lots of mistakes or find new things frequently); AND! the changes are irregular or unpredictable.
- my personal belief is that genealogy information is best when it is humanized with stories, histories, oral traditions (now written down), images, maps, etc.
Given these challenges and the fact that I use a website environment, one built using WordPress plus GRAMPS; I thought I’d attempt a melding of several techniques and technologies in order to make a more user friendly presentation format for my genealogy information. Three example pages, of my latest ‘integration’ efforts, may be viewed at:
So my questions now are…
- am I succeeding, am I heading in the right direction???
- does this presentation style (format) seem generally helpful, useful, easy to use?
I would greatly appreciate your input. If you are willing to share your thoughts with me, you may either use our Contact page or Comment below to voice them.
If there is demand for pointers on how this was all built, I am happy to provide that in another posting or set of postings, for now suffice it to say I have done some minor tweaks with WordPress and GRAMPS to build the example pages above; oh, these pages will largely maintain themselves automagically.
Nov 17, 2011 @ 11:00:28
Mark,
I looked at various pages in the new integrated environment you created and was generally impressed with what I saw. The high-level tabs in each tree of Individuals, Surnames, Places, Events, and Sources were good ways to categorize the different sub-sets of info, yet with the ability to easily click and link to related information. On the individual index, I liked how you listed “partner” rather than “spouse”, as spouse can often be an inaccurate or confining definition. I liked the cross-referencing of places with the individual’s events that occurred there. The presentation of events by type and date was interesting, although I’m not sure a researcher would search by event type as a primary means to find something (more likely to search by individual or place). I liked how the source information was presented at the high level, but when drilling down into a person’s record, the outline style formatting under the source references section seemed to spread out the citation into bullets and sub-bullets so it took up a lot of space–programmatically is it possible to have all the citation details on one line using Mills’ Evidence style templates?
When looking at a specific individual’s page, I liked how the Events section displayed with dates, places and descriptions; how the Parents section displayed info typical of a family group sheet including siblings; how the Families section displayed the sub-section of events if there were multiple partners whether or not they were married, and how all the Media thumbnails were displayed. I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the Attributes section was, with the long value string that didn’t link anywhere. I assume you will only have an entry in the Web Link section if you’ve previously made a blog posting related to the individual, like in the case of Michael Senger? For the Family Map of Michael Senger, it pulled up a map of Germany, but without any drop markers that I could see (there were about 8 references below the displayed map, and if I clicked one of them it opened a new map rather than zooming in or showing the drop marker on the existing map–so I’m not sure if this was meant by design or not). The Pedigree section displayed what I would describe as an outline descendants view showing the generations above and below the target person, which was valuable info; conversely, the Ancestors section displayed what I would traditionally describe as a pedigree chart, so aside from the differences in naming convention, I thought the views of the displayed info would be helpful for a researcher.
The one bothersome thing in the navigation was the double scroll bars for the main page and then the subset of information from the database, which is exacerbated on the longer pages. It is possible to lose one of the scroll bars if you scroll too far up or down with the other scroll bar, especially if using your mouse scroll wheel. I have this same gripe with some of the views on Ancestry.com, too, so it’s not meant to be a criticism to you, but rather to the way multiple scrolling works in general. Would it be possible to do a “freeze panes” of info at the top of the database extract, to include the high-level navigation tabs, A-Z quick navigation, and column headings? That would at least keep a researcher somewhat grounded while scrolling thru information.
Overall, I think this is a great way to display a lot of related genealogical information. I am left wondering how hard this would be to accomplish for an average genealogist who is not as tech savvy as you with web design.
Nov 17, 2011 @ 15:12:41
Hi Deena… thank you TOO much for the wonderfully detailed review. Most of the issues you mentioned involve s and the way they work. Although you did touch on a number of items that the developers of GRAMPS may appreciate getting (I’ll provide them as suggested improvements to the GRAMPS web generation facility).