Living People
The first thing is to either remove living people from the file completely or to clean out the all the data about them other than their names or a combination of the two. Family Historian can help you with the first.
Option 1 : Delete All Living People
There is a Query in the Query Store called WebClean, this will select all the people in the file Born after 1901 who have no death Dates. Spouses with no birth dates are included if their spouses were born after 1901, or Parents born after a selected date. Obviously this can be changed to your own date requirements. In addition you can specify the Descendants of 4 people to be excluded from the Query, I use this to leave in my close relatives.
In FH use the File Save As option to Create a new copy of your family file.
Next open the copy you just created and use the split tree option to remove all people found by the WebClean query.
At this stage you can remove sources, notes which are unused or remove all note and sources if you only want the bare bones up at the web site. Now check the file for any additional people who should have been deleted. Children with parents with no dates may be a problem. The Gedcom file you end up with should be suitable for any of the many GEDCOM to HTML programs available.
Option 2 : Clean all Living dates
The program I use for this Job is Res Privata which is a free tool from Nairbor Software (Download Here). I have added a link in the GEDCOM Utilities folder. There are other tools such as GEDCLEAN which do a similar job.
I normally use a combination of a query and Res Privata to prepare my file for the Web.
Getting started with Web Pages
Most people get free web space from their Internet service provider (ISP), however what that includes varies considerably. Some are better than others. There is no way a general document like this can go into all they ways to get the data prepared and up on the web. If any one has any specific questions, please put a question in the General Forum and I will try and help. I should say that I do not use Frontpage or other Microsoft Web tools, but I am sure other members do so put in your question and hopefully someone will help out.
What should I put on my web site
What ever you like. I have tried with mine to put a few articles and family stories as well as the family tree information. To get started just do a single page and make sure you can get that up on the web, before launching into multipage sites.
Putting the Data on the Web
One of the big advantages of FH is its use of GEDCOM files for storage. It means all the huge number of programs available to put GEDCOM files up on the web, some free some not, can be used. I currently use PHPGedView a free program which means all I have to do is use FTP to upload my GEDCOM and it does the rest.
Previously I used GEDHTree which worked very well, but generated several hundred files which I needed to upload every time my GEDCOM changed.
Take a look at GedCom to HTML converters on Cyndi's List there are many programs listed, try out a few of the freeware ones first you may be pleasantly surprised.
PHPGedView : http://phpgedview.sourceforge.net
Telling the World
Ok, so you have all your web pages up in the Internet, but no one is coming to visit. So you need to advertise your site.
- e-mail signatures : Put your web address at the bottom of your e-mails especially those you send to Family History Mailing Lists.
- Search Engines : As a start register with Google, this is currently the most popular engine and powers several of the main portals. Just go to http://www.google.co.uk and click add link.
They should have the following in the page header
- Give them a title
- Add a Description
- Put in Keywords
If you would like me to expand on any of the above please leave me a comment and I will see what I can do.
Jane.
