Technology & Tools,  Tools

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.Tools

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:

  1. genealogical data & stories can run deep & wide (they may, and often do, involve a lot of data from many locations, sources, and media)
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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