Welcome to the Great Harwood family tree
consolidated site
Latest :
What it's for
The aim of this site is to collect
together in one place Family Trees
of people who lived in Great Harwood. The people in those
files can then be linked to give a fuller picture than would otherwise
be possible.
Who can use it
Anyone
can view the information on the site, access is not restricted to
account holders.
People
who
contribute Gedcoms to the site will need their own username
and
password and they will be able to make changes to their information
on-line.
How
it works
The
site uses PhpGedView (PGV) which, as it's name implies, needs gedcom
files as
a starter for each family. Most family tree software will be
able to create gedcom files which are used for the interchange of
Genealogical information. Think of the gedcom as a family database.
One
of the really useful features is that you can search across a number of
databases at once, so for instance if you search for "John Mercer", by
examining the results returned you will discover which trees he
features
in.
There are some quite powerful reports that can
be run - the
results are delivered as a downloadable PDF file, plus various chart
views of people and families.
Once you are logged-in
you will
have a
"current" database which is indicated in the top left of the screen, you
can switch to another by selecting the appropriate option in "Welcome
Page".
Each database can have it's own "favourites", as set by the owner and the
welcome screen will display some useful facts about it.
Contributing
If
you would like to
contribute please contact me, and I'll create
an account for you so that you can "look after" your own family.
Don't send me a gedcom without contacting me first
so that
I can let you know what else I need. The webhosting I am
using is limited in capacity. For this reason
all submitted gedcoms must also be limited to Great Harwood families.
I don't intend to define this in a legal way, but I expect
to be able to find reasonable connections between people in submitted files
and Great Harwood or the immediate area.
Some
Issues
PGV
has a facility of creating links between people in different databases,
this is what makes it a very useful tool for a consolidated site.
However testing has shown that linking can be a little unstable.
A single link between a person in one database and that same
person
in another will sometimes show a brother or sister twice (once from the
local database and once from the "other" one). If I then put in
a
reverse link things go haywire with phantom brothers and sisters
appearing from nowhere. Unlinking is a messy process
involving
manually editing files, something I can't expect anyone else to do.
So, for the time being linking will not be available; as the
PGV
developers sort out these problems I hope to open up the facility in
a controlled way. In the meantime the only links that will
be
there are ones I have created myself and tested on an off-line system I
have. I want to be able at least to give people the flavour
of
what linking could achieve.
Linking
To
explain what should
happen with linking consider two databases - in one we have a Tom Pearce
with his wife, children and their descendants. In the other
are
Tom's parents, his brothers and sisters and their ancestors.
If
we link the two together then when we view Tom from the first gedcom
you will see the whole family - Parents, siblings, wife and children,
information that isn't in the first database, a comprehensive view of his
whole family.
Access
O.K. I have
read all that stuff - Enter Site
Robert Calvert
6 April 2008