A while back our niece discovered a bit of an interest in family history. She knew we kept a family tree so she contacted us. She wanted to see it. We keep our primary tree in Ancestry.com. We also put it and other trees with other services such as FindMyPast.co.uk, MyHeritage.com, and several other sites for various purposes. Of course, these sites and services are not free. Even to share a public tree the guest must create an account in most cases. Our niece does not have a paid account with any genealogy service. So we got to thinking about how we could share our tree with her.
Necessity Meets Experience
Because I have worked in the field for nearly twenty-five years, I can do a lot with data and web technologies. We considered publishing the tree ourselves. A lot of things have to be worked through before any code is written. So we sorted our requirements, determined the specifications, decided upon an architecture along with many other decisions. As we architected the website we decided that we would create it so we could produce websites using the same codebase but with different tree data and supporting different styles, colors, etc. Then we began to build our tree website.
We knew the family tree website needed to be easy to find, easy to navigate, easy to share. But it also needed to have all the information one expects to find connected with a family tree such as documentation, photos and other images, and links. Of course it needed to have multiple ways of viewing the information including a charts, lists, family group sheets, pedigree views, even statistics. So with these and other requirements we build our personal family tree website for our niece and others to be able to view our family tree.
A Welcome Tool
Many people have been very happy to have the tree in their hands with all the bells and whistles they wanted. And all without paying anyone a penny.
Share Your Tree
The personal family tree website is now offered as one of our services. If you would like to know more you can check out the details on the service page.
Let us know if we can help you
If you need any help finding your ancestors, just let us know.
