About Our Pages

People often ask, since I'm such a fan of The Master Genealogist (see my TMG Tips) are our family history pages done in TMG? The answer is - not exactly.

TMG does make nice web pages, but makes web pages from the narrative type reports. You can see examples on Lee Hoffman's site - follow the links to Lee's personal pages, then look for the link to the narrative reports created by TMG. But I didn't want to post all that detail, just the basics. My objective it to post just enough for people to be sure they have found the right individual, and them encourage them to contact me if they want more information. I want to engage in conversation with cousins, not just post the information.

So I use a program called Second Site, by John Cardinal. For more information on that program, see his website. John's program reads TMG databases directly, and produces very nice webpages in a variety of formats, with lots of user options. For some tips on using Second Site, see my article Using Second Site to Share Your TMG Data. Our family history pages are the result of some extensive customizing in Second site, as described in this article.

The data on our web pages does come from my TMG Data Set. About an eighth of the total number of individuals are posted on the web pages. I exclude anyone who is living, those too distant from my direct line, or those for whom I think the data is too unreliable. I mark the people I want to post on the web in TMG with a flag. As I add other people to my Data Set that I want to include, or verify information for those for whom I thought my previous data was too unreliable, I change the flag so they will be included in my next update. When I update the pages in Second Site, that flag controls which individuals are included.

I post this data on both on our own website and on RootsWeb's WorldConnect project because I find that different people find us with different tools. For those who know about them, the search tools on WorldConnect are great. But I find that many cousins are not aware of that site, and use conventional web search sites, such as Google. Those sites cannot search WorldConnect, but can and do search and index our own site. I've made many interesting, and a few truly helpful, contacts from both locations.

To upload to WorldConnect, I export those marked with the same flag to a GEDCOM, including just the basic facts, plus a special note tag I use to discuss questionable relationships. For details of this process, see my article on Managing Your RootsWeb WorldConnect Files.

My new book, A Primer for The Master Genealogist, is now available.

Details are available here.

About Our Family History Pages