Family Historian User Group

So, to extend the discussion in Where to host tree online so I can share it (13929), what about somewhere to leave your tree when you are dead and gone? A personal website is no good because the fee would cease to be paid. Ideally it needs to be public because any interested researchers could not contact you to ask questions. (Unless they had supernatural powers!!)
Is anyone else contemplating what might happen? If so, what are you doing about it?
Anne

My tree and GEDCOM will go to a local Historical Society that I work with. It would be great if one of my kids took up the torch.. but they probably will not.

I also bring any old docs to them, because they have climate controlled libraries.

About making your tree available for ever. There are a couple of options to consider. The Internet Archive at https://archive.org/web/ is one. The other is if your research is UK based then the British Library Web Archive is available if you apply for your site to be archived. https://archive.org/web/

My genealogy websites are archived at both so hopefully they will still be available after I am long gone.

I am uncertain about this but I have a feeling that facilities like archive.org do well at archiving static pages of HTML, but can't cope with dynamically generated pages where the output only appears if someone answers a query and hits an enter button. So if your data is in static pages, fine, but if it's in online databases, not fine.

Comments?

Adrian,

Both of these services are like the search engines they use crawlers to render the pages and then save them, so a dynamic website is no problem. There is an interesting new plugin for Wordpress sites that will push changes to WayBackMachine rather than waiting for it to crawl your site.

Valkrider wrote:... they use crawlers to render the pages and then save them, so a dynamic website is no problem...

This may be a question of me not being clear with my terminology but... I can see how a crawler could try every menu option and render the pages, as you describe, but if the page is only rendered (because the data is inside a database) when you enter a specific person's name, a name which isn't in a menu, then I'm not clear how the crawler could generate such pages. Of course, the site might be designed with a feature specifically to allow crawlers to hit every record from a database without knowing the names of people, etc - I've no idea.

Adrian,

No a search is dynamic and so could not be indexed. However, sites that use applications like TNG, Genealone, WebTrees all use databases and all have pages that are 'static' and pull data from the database and so they will be indexed. So, if for instance, you look at http://spencer-genealogy.com/genealone/ ... =lastnames this page is indexed and it has all the names in it, any of those names are linked to other pages that are followed by clicking will also be crawled and recorded even though they are dynamic pages with the information stored in a database. The crawlers follow the links but they can't put data into search fields AFAIK.

Hmmmm! But I don't have a website of my own to archive and no time or inclination to make one. Too busy doing research! I have chosen a couple of solutions which will, I hope, keep my tree available after my demise. Still interested in what others have done about it. Or are you all immortal? LOL
Anne

Valkrider wrote:... The crawlers follow the links but they can't put data into search fields AFAIK.

Makes sense, Colin.

Some years ago I wrote up my parents' direct paternal lines for their respective 80th birthdays. I did that in Word and printed it out for them but later got myself a free Wordpress.com site and loaded the stories up as Wordpress pages - some minor reformatting was necessary to stop the whole thing being one massive page. Oh, and to check that there were no copyright protected images in the result.

Paying for the Wordpress site would have allowed some nicer formats and plug-ins but (so far as I know) would have resulted in a degradation of the site after my credit card stopped paying out. Hence I accepted the slight restrictions.

It's all static and is next to impossible to update if I find out some more stuff on those lines, but it is a start.

AnneEast wrote:Hmmmm! But I don't have a website of my own to archive and no time or inclination to make one. Too busy doing research! I have chosen a couple of solutions which will, I hope, keep my tree available after my demise. Still interested in what others have done about it. Or are you all immortal? LOL
Anne

Anne,
One thing that I have done, and do on a regular basis, is to upload my gedcom file to my society website (hopefully they will be round longer than me). They store the gedcoms for me FOC and have permission from me to use the data in their databases. I have also chosen to allow them to pass the data on to any interested party on my demise. They will continue to do this as long as the society is around.

As to online storage FamilySearch will store a tree for you as will WikiTree. I am sure that there are other sites too that you can upload your data to that don't charge a fee and will store it for posterity.

I plan to leave my gedcom [and possibly some paper work] to an Historical Society in my home town and to one in Connecticut where my earliest known progenitor settled in 1634. With some luck, and heavy persuasion, one son MAY take up the research.

With the rapid changes in technology using the internet as a depository may leave your research "SOMEWHERE in the sky".

I have a goal to review some 3000 pages of material left in the New York City library by a person in my line. Hope to be around long enough to finish that. Fortunately folks in the line tend to be long lived!

And as we all know, genealogy research never ends.