Family ancestry site advice sought

Question
1

Hello everyone.

My daughter is creating a extended family history site. I am looking for insight on how best manage/display the vast number of pictures she will be dealing with.

So far, she will have the following types of pages:

  • Home
  • Family
  • Person

There are multiple families making up the extended family. There are relationships between the families that tie them together. There are, of course, multiple people making up a family.

I am open to suggestions on how to serve up numerous pictures (JPG or PDF) that would be associated with each page.

I am thinking she needs to leverage blog pages so tag functionality can be tapped. For example, if she creates a blog page for each Family and each Person, she can filter a blog index to show only JPGs or PDFs of that Family or Person.

Am I on the right track? Are there other options? Insight on any hints?

Thanks in advance.

2

There are several very nice applications (I use Reunion for Mac, there are good ones for PC’s) to organize the family data as well as the media assets (photos, video, electronic documents, etc.). You might be interested in those with HTML export capabilities, such that you can upload the whole genealogy part and just create links in Sparkle to do the presentation. Using software also helps preserve your data forever (using standard genealogy data files, like GEDCOM or others), so your daughter can some day pass the whole thing onto her grandchildren.

We have some experience with the process of trying to accumulate and manage LOTS of family information (https://www.dormie2.com/genealogy.html, a Sparkle site), and it would be impossible to be building our own pages - forever - to present that data.

Full speed ahead, though! You and she will be surprised how popular such a project can become.

3 Likes
3

Thanks @JBTexas. Good direction to follow up on.

4

Thanks again @JBTexas.

My daughter already has an extensive library within Ancestry and it appears Reunion is a substitute for what she already has. So, I’m going to rephrase my question in another post.

5

This is mine, created with Sparkle: http://updegrovefamily.com/

1 Like
6

Whoa @updeinva! Great site.

Your site brings a bunch of questions to my mind but let me start with…

How are you managing all that content? Is every picture stored in the Sparkle project file?

7

For photo galleries you need something like Smugmug or Flickr that you can link to, so no, they are not in the Sparkle file. There is a way of embedding Flickr albums into your Sparkle page (Classmates & Faculty). The free standing photos were placed on each page

The pdf files were uploaded directly to the server and then linked via Sparkle buttons or text.

The Family Tree was created with MacFamilyTree and resides on their server.