Putting your tree on the web?

[kerry]

I've been thinking about this subject for a while - here are some questions to consider. Some of them relate to online genealogy, some are specific to Chinese.

Some requirements are obvious and would apply to on-line or off-line software:

• Must provide basic data entry and reports that are relevant to Genealogy
  
• Must support GEDCOM.
  
• Must support Unicode.
  

Multi-language support is nice to have but is generally "tacked on" to software that is fundamentally written and developed in English. Becomes more important if you want non-English speaking users to get involved.

There are some other questions which are specific to web-enabled genealogy:

• Who's your audience? (Most of my audience are not subscribers to ancestry.com so the "closed community" model doesn't work for me.)
  
• What levels of Privacy and/or Information Hiding do you want? (Important!)
  
• Is the "master" copy of your tree the Internet version or the one on your desktop PC? How easily can you synchronise between the two?
  
• What access do you want to give to other users or collaborators?
  
• How technically sophisticated are you? Some websites "do it all for you". They just don't do it the way I want it so I do it myself. ;-)
  

And there are some secondary questions which you may want to look at (although you may have had the decision forced on you by factors mentioned above). These have been minor issues for me.

• What name structure conventions are supported? (Firstname surname and Surname - firstname.)
  
• What place name structures are supported? (Software that rigidly enforces a four level place name - town, county, state, country - may chokes on 6 level or 2 level place.)
  

[Henry]

Dear Colleagues,

I am in complete agreement with Kerry with regard to on-line or off-line software used for Chinese genealogy with regard to: support for GEDCOM & Unicode.

For Chinese genealogy applications, genealogy software should support the input, search, and display of Chinese characters. For those that do not have the ability to key-in or input via the cutting and pasting of Chinese characters, in traditional or simplified character sets - people may only be able to input JPG images of their family/clan lineages.

Some of these considerations mention may only be appropriate for setting up the family tree for the past 3 or 4 generations where there is good knowledge of the place-name geography or time-frames. For people trying to input lineages, 20 plus generations from their family genealogy book - information regarding the administrative geography and time-lines if any, are usually provided lineage annotations or from narratives found within the genealogy book.

Other considerations regarding the posting your tree on the web:

Sharing a clan lineage that details ancestors to a certain level of geography such as the county or town levels may be perfectly acceptable to most clan members, however, exposing the lineage down to the village and family levels may not be acceptable to everybody. At these levels, some people prefer to have this information left private and reserved only for family members.


Henry

[Ah Gin]

I agree with Kerry & Henry's postings. Just because we are nuts ;-) does not mean the rest of our families near and far, alive or dead also share our passion. Somethings are best left in private. For a long time many Aussie folks with Chinese blood, but with good old Anglo names, did not want to acknowledge their Chineseness. Thus, to see their names or their relative names exposed to the glare of this thing "Internet" is just too much for most people. Even for some genies, whilst they are proud of the fact that they are related to Emperors etc. they are less keen to show relationship to black sheeps of the clan.

"Did you know that Auntie xxx (her real name) had a son, now living in Silverton?". "But I thought Auntie xxx was single all her life?" "Ah yes, but have you seen this cool web site? There was this Chinese character, Ah Something, who worked on the family farm. Ah Something died and his remains were sent back to Siyi in 1895." The fact that Auntie xxx died in 1930 is neither here nor there. And the entire family got very tensed. And some refused to speak to each other for years, as there is a bit of Chinese blood in the family after all.

Regards, Ah Gin

[jefferyseow]

I put mine on Rootsweb. I have set my account so that anyone who is still Living gets labled as Living. So in my own case you will see Living Seow (that's my dad) married Ivy Chung Guat Kheng (my mum, deceased) and has two children Living Seow married to Living Lee (my brother Greg and his wife) and Living Seow (me). So I'd say it is important for the website host to have the option for people who wish to upload, to select this i.e. to hide the identities of the Living.

[Doug 周]

Jeffery,

The security feature of Rootsweb is good and something the user has the option of enabling.

What other feature of Rootsweb do you like? What do you dislike?

Do you display unicode Chinese on Rootsweb?

Can you display last name first for some people, and first name last for others?

Does your program allow photos?

Doug

[jefferyseow]

Doug

What I like about Rootsweb is that a lot of people use it so it makes for very rich search results. Sometimes overly heart-attack rich.

The thing I like least about it is when I upload an updated gedcom the old one or ones still exist so search results contain a whole lot of unnecessary duplicates.

I cannot display unicode Chinese because my gedcoms are created using the old ancestry.exe application which does not support unicode or even ASCII.

Errr, why would I want to display the last name first for some people and the first name last for others?

Yeah ancestry.exe allows for the incorporation of media (picture files, video etc) but I never use those. I only use the application to generate a gedcom of "connections" and biodata which I can upload to the web and a book in rtf (rich text format) that I can email to relatives.

Jeffery

[Doug 周]

Jeffery,

One of the reason to have control over display names is that relatives in China are more comfortable in the surname first format whereas in Western countries they prefer the Given names first.

Also, some of the younger participants (less than 30 years old) like to display only their nicknames or given names.

The display name is just a marker of the level of options for the user. Hopefully it makes the display comfortable for the users to use one database.

Doug