* Starting up Family History

[Ruth_Smart]

Background:
My great uncle Euan was 100 last year so his daughters invited as many members of his family as they could find. I took my mother along (who is in her nineties) and we had a great time meeting up with distant relatives. My 2nd cousins Sian and Buddeg had created a huge paper family tree for the Welsh side of our family and asked everyone to update it with births, deaths and marriages. We said that it would be nice for all the female cousins to get together for a weekend to rebuild the family links, which we had earlier this month and included cousins who had flown in from Canada and Australia to take part

Building a multimedia family history:
Motivated by getting to know the Welsh side of my family I thought it would be a good idea to make up my own family tree, as something I could pass on to my grandchildren and use to reconnect with my wider family.
I liked the look of Family Historian for a way to build a digital family history and link in photos and videos so I am in the process of sorting through my old photos and videos and digitising the photos I inherited from my father. I particularly want to record my mum talking about our old family photos, the who, when, where and why to try and make a more "interactive" history.

It's early days and I am finding it very time consuming to add information but it's been very interesting. I've got stuck a few times with the software and done forum searches to find previous posts with the same issues, and so far have been able to work out what to do myself.

I am doing most of the work on my home computer but also run the software on my laptop so that I can show my family what I am doing. At the moment I am doing backups and transferring the backups to my laptop but then I have to remember which version is the master version ! so I would be interested to hear how you cope with this ?

Also, I have a nagging worry about having all this information on just one computer, so I have started to backup the information I am using onto Google drive, which I could potentially share with other family members if they are interested in using the information I am pulling together. I would be interested in hearing how you share information with other historians in your family ?

Thanks, Ruth

[tatewise]

Welcome to the FHUG Ruth - whew - that is an interesting journey!
You questions raise quite a number of issues and I will try to address them all.

One word of caution:
Do not be in too much of a hurry to add all your information to Family Historian (FH) immediately.
Many newcomers wish they had taken a little more time to appreciate how to record their family history in a consistent fashion so as to get the desired Diagrams and Reports, etc.
The how_to:family_historian_documentation|> Family Historian Documentation gives some pointers.
In particular study the Help > Book: "Getting the Most From Family Historian 5" and glossary:animated_tutorials|> Animated Tutorials.

Also you may not have discovered ancestralsources:index|> Ancestral Sources that greatly simplifies the task of capturing your family history in a consistent fashion including linking media.

Data Backups
It is important to have a backup regime for all your PC data, not just family history records.
The glossary:backup_and_recovery|> Backup and Recovery section offers much sound advice.
There is more to backup than just your FH Projects because your customisations & preferences need backup too.

Data Sharing
In order to synchronise different PC running FH, many users employ tools such as Dropbox and OneDrive, and you should be able to do the same with Google Drive.
See fhugdownloads:synchro|> Downloads and Links ~ Synchronise and Backup Tools for how to synchronise using Dropbox and OneDrive.
The same technique should also work for Google Drive installed on both PC and moving your FH Projects into the Google Drive folder, but don't forget your customisations & preferences too.
(Let us know how you get on, and we can add a page to the above section for Google Drive too. It certainly appears to offer more free storage (15GB) than others.)

To share FH Projects via Google Drive with other relations would require them to be running FH V5 on their PC too.
Alternatively, you could create Diagrams and Reports or even Website pages and share them via Google Drive.

If any of this advice prompts further questions then don't hesitate to ask - you have only just begun your journey.

[pwe]

Ruth,
I too use mainly a desktop computer for my family history work but when away from home I use a laptop. I have copies of my FH project on both computers.
In order to be sure which is the latest version, I have added a "notepad" document into the project folder. In this document I put the date when I last amended the file, so that by comparing the note in held in the two computers I can see which is the latest version.

Peter E

[tatewise]

A more reliable method along those lines is to write a Plugin that reports the latest Update date of all the Records, or even simpler, just look at the Date modified for the Project .fh_data folder or the .ged GEDCOM file.

[Ruth_Smart]

Thank you for your replies

I seem to be spending all my spare time now scanning photos and family documents :sigh:
and I have been renaming all the images with date (yyyymmdd) location who, to help organise all the photos.

What's the best way to attached meta data to photographs ?
Background notes on the significance of the photo ?

Thanks, Ruth

[tatewise]

Ruth asks:

What's the best way to attached meta data to photographs ?
Background notes on the significance of the photo ?

The answer rather depends on how you have linked your photos and their subject matter.

If linked directly to the Multimedia tab of an Individual Property Box then you have the Note, Date & Keyword fields of the Multimedia Record itself, or you can link Note Records, or attach a Source Record to a Link/Note.
This is often most suitable for photos of people.

If linked directly to a Fact then you have the options above plus the Note field of the Fact itself.
This is sometimes useful for photos of places or events.

If linked to the Multimedia tab of a Source Property Box then you have all the Source Record and Repository fields.
This is advisable for scanned documents, and can also work for photos of places or events.

If you have several photos of the same place or same event, then a linked Note Record or Source Record is better than repeating the same meta data in each Multimedia Record.
The principle here is drawn from good database practice, where information should only be recorded once and not repeated in many places. So if it needs updating later you only have to change one set of information, and not remember to update multiple copies.

This possibly harps back to my One word of caution: in my first reply.
Did you spend time learning how to record your family history in a consistent fashion using all the features of FH and AS?

An overriding question you need to consider is where you want this meta data to appear in Reports and Diagrams?
Notes attached to Multimedia Records rarely appear in Reports.
Notes on Facts appear in Reports but not associated with linked Multimedia.
Source Record details do appear in Reports alongside their Multimedia.

[Ruth_Smart]

Thanks Mike,

I ended up buying a copy of "Getting the most from Family Historian 5" and reading from the beginning
It's slowed down my rate of data entry but hopefully this will benefit me in the long run.

Ruth

[tatewise]

You did not need to buy that as it is included with FH on Help > Book: Getting the Most From Family Historian 5.

[davidm_uk]

I fully agree with Mike's "One Word of Caution" above!!

If I were starting again I would collect together a small sample of people, photos, documents, certificates, scanned images from web pages (eg BMD index entries, census images) ie. at least one example of every type of attachment and person (twins, multiple marriages, unmarried couples with children, adopted children etc) that I could think of.

It doesn't matter about accuracy at this stage, invent people if you have to, it's about seeing how best to put all these bits together in FH to get the results you want in reports, diagrams, web pages, whatever. Just build a small tree with FH and AS using this sample set and see what it looks like, you will almost certainly find things that with hindsight you would have preferred to do a different way. Treat this small tree as a throwaway item, so that when you feel ready you can start to build your real tree from scratch, rather than try and work out how to change this test tree.

Also take a look at some of the Member Websites in the downloads section of the FHUG Knowledgebase: http://www.fhug.org.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=links:index to see what others have done.

[Jane]

When working with Group photographs, I always start from the multimedia window rather than the Individual Property box. That way you can add general information about the Photograph and link all the faces in directly. If you are working with your Mum on identifying the people in the photo it can be a great help to zoom in on the photo so she can see the faces better ( I have been known to plug my laptop in to the TV so my parents have a 42" image they can look at), the Multimedia report is a great document to include in the folder(s) you are storing your original photographs in as it shows the details of each person in the photo and any other notes you have written into Family Historian, if you borrow photos you can give the people who lent them to you the report to keep with the originals so they know who everyone is. Much more accurate in most cases than writing "Aunty May" on the back, which is fine if you know who wrote "Aunty May"!

Don't forget you can add notes to items in the photograph other than people, for details you know so for example grandma favourite rose or Dad's first car.

[Ruth_Smart]

You did not need to buy that as it is included with FH on Help > Book: Getting the Most From Family Historian 5.

I bought the book as I found it easier to use as a hard copy reference guide than using a pdf file. Just my preference.

Data Sharing
In order to synchronise different PC running FH, many users employ tools such as Dropbox and OneDrive, and you should be able to do the same with Google Drive.
See Knowledge Base > Downloads and Links ~ Synchronise and Backup Tools for how to synchronise using Dropbox and OneDrive.
The same technique should also work for Google Drive installed on both PC and moving your FH Projects into the Google Drive folder, but don't forget your customisations & preferences too.
(Let us know how you get on, and we can add a page to the above section for Google Drive too. It certainly appears to offer more free storage (15GB) than others.)

Google Drive seems to work just like dropbox.
If you have a Google account(say a Gmail address) then click on the "Apps" icon, select Drive and that should open up a new tab in your browser with your drive folder (note: using Google Chrome as your browser helps)
Use the download link to install Drive on your computer and it should then automatically sync whatever you put into your Drive folder on your computer with your Drive storage at Google.
I have used "More Tasks" in the project window to chose the Drive folder for Family Historian Projects.
All updates to my project are now automatically synced to Google Drive.
Google Drive folders can be shared if necessary with "can edit" and "view only" options.

I have tidied up my original data entries and I am now steadily adding media files which is filling in my family history nicely

[tatewise]

Ruth, thank you for that feedback.
I have added the fhugdownloads:contents:utility_google_drive|> Download and Links > Utility ~ Google Drive page.
Could you check it over and let me know if it needs any changes.

[Ruth_Smart]

Google Drive page looks good.

I am just back from Canada where I set up FH on my uncles computer and linked him to my Google drive project file with "write" authorisation so that he can access my live project.

[tatewise]

Ruth, take care, if you both have write access, and update via FH at the same time, that might lead to disaster.
So ensure you both have good backups, either outside Google Drive, or in non-shared Google Drive folders.

If you only want to give access to your uncle then "read only" authorisation should be sufficient.