A Genealogy Gem for a Website

Ever since I launched my Ferguson One-Name website some 3 years ago, I have not been very happy with the Family Group style web pages compiled from Legacy, nor did I really like the output from TNG Software. So, I have regularly browsed the web to look for an alternative.

At last, I think I have found it in HuMo-gen which is made by Hubb Mons, who says: "I originally wrote this software for myself, because I was dissatisfied with the features of other Gedcom-to-HTML converters, but I readily offer HuMo-gen for use by the wider public". Exactly my thoughts!!

And furthermore it is free, open source software. What more could one ask for?!

You can select what to include on the Main Index (Opening Page), as shown below:

Whilst it is written in PHP, it is claimed that no knowledge of PHP or HTML is required in order to use the program. I agree, in fact anybody used to Wordpress will find it very easy.

This shows the options available from within the program, but with only a little knowledge of PHP and HTML one can easily customise this page to include other items, for example a picture of oneself, or maybe a brief description of the site. On this page there is also a Person Search Box.

It is possible to select various levels of permissions, for example one can limit the display of Sources, to say, oneself, or family etc. or, as I do, publish them for all to see, as on the right.


Clicking the filing card icon next to the name produces as a range of other options, such as different report formats, and a range of tree charts. From these charts clicking a name will go to the report for that person.

As can be seen, the sources on this screen are links and these lead to others who use this source.


I think that this software is relatively new, from the HuMo-gen website I would think around 2009, so are there any snags? Well, yes, but none are terribly important and most can easily be overcome, some are specific to its use with Legacy. Like similar programs which rely on importing GEDCOMs it suffers from the limitations of the long outdated technology of this format.

For my usage, the fields for the genealogy sources are too short, but should be easy to enlarge in the MySQL database (I haven't done this yet). The PHP scripts are, understandably, largely in Dutch which makes following them more difficult for those of us who do not speak this language (I am not monolingual btw.) and in the Sources List, the descriptions have yet to be translated, but nevertheless the meaning of them is pretty clear.

I recommend that anyone trying this program should first try it on their own PC and not the web. This involves installing a stand-alone server and the manual gives a full description of how to to this for XAMPP-lite. This also a free open-source application. Be prepared to do some work for yourself to get the output to that which you wish, but if you do hit problems the site has a Forum which I have found to be very responsive and helpful.

I have yet to put my site on-line using HuMo-gen, but only because I wish to fully familiarise myself with its workings, and I will do so at the end of December. To those, who like me, are not happy with what has been around for a while, I would say "give it a run".


© Ron Ferguson 2010

Genealogy Patience Pays!!

We all know of the seemingly impenetrable brick walls which we bump into on a fairly regular basis. I hit one one these with my 4th great-grandfather, Benjamin Ferguson, who, according to the 1841 census was living in Kendal, and born in 1766 in England but not in the county of Westmorland. He did not appear on the 1851 census, so I assumed that he had moved on to higher things.

Over the years I have tried to find out more about him, visiting the Kendal Archives to find his burial, but without any luck, in fact I cannot even find the christenings of his children in the Kendal Parish Registers. My research has not been helped by the fact that northern England is an outpost of internet indexing, meaning that the Union Tavern in Kendal is almost a second home!

Regularly I search new registers which come on-line, and three months ago I had a minor break through, I found a Benjamin Ferguson born in 1776 in Pardshaw, Cockermouth, Cumberland, on the Beta Family Search site. OK, the surname was spelt "Furgison", but the given names of the family were those commonly found in my family. Could this be my long lost relative? With still some way to go, I contacted Kendal Archives again to see if they had the Kendal Settlement Certificates for the period between 1770 and 1790, but unfortunately they only had those to 1734.

Every now and again I switch the main search site which I use, and this month moved back to Findmypast. As always, I carried out a quick check on my brick walls and nearly fell off my chair when I found my Benjamin on the 1851 census living with his, now married, daughter Mary Airey, of whom I had never heard! This time his surname was given as "Ferginson" and his place of birth Cockermouth - Eureka!! I am left with another brick wall though - where does his father "Samual Furgison" (sic), date of birth unknown, come from??

Advances can happen in most unusual ways. Like many of you I try and help other researchers whenever I can, and this week received an email asking if an Ann Owen born 1807, father George, had any connection with the Owen family of Prescot, Lancashire, in my tree. Not having an Ann in my Owen family I asked for more details, only to be be told that since her Ann and my family came from the same area she wondered if there may be a connection.

A Richard Owen born 1791 is my one of the 3rd great grandfathers on my maternal side, and I wondered if Richard might have had a brother called George who might have been Ann's father. I have not even looked at this side of my family for years, so I started by looking for his birth in Lancashire OnLine Parish Clerk, and there was his christening, and the names of my previously unknown 4th great grandparents.

Yes, persistence does pay, as time goes by it may not seem like it, but consistently checking records and revisiting sites which may well have been updated since last time often brings results. Now, if only I could get my hands on the person who ignited the 1851 Salford Census records and with it my 3rd great grandfather's history, but congratulations to Manchester & Lancashire FHS who have recovered so much of them.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Are Genealogy Fairs Worthwhile?

Although I have been involved in genealogy for some 10 years for various reasons I have not visited Genealogy Fairs until this year. I have attended fairs at Stockport, York and Newcastle on Tyne, and broadly speaking my reaction has been favourable. But why?

Visiting the various companies displaying their software, books, charts etc. is interesting, but hardly earth shattering, although I have usually found two or three things which are of use to me, usually books or specific data discs. If  I was asked whether I would go specifically to have a look at the wares on sale, then probably not.

No, what has been of most use has been the help available from "information providers". Whilst companies such as Ancestry, Findmypast, and The Genealogist are frequently represented at these fairs, it is not these to which I refer, largely because I am reasonably familiar with their range of services, but I do recognize that they will be valuable to those who are not. Their stands are always very busy, maybe because they often offer free access!

What I find most attractive are the genealogy organisations, the local family history societies and national organisations, such as The Genealogy Society, Local and National Archives, and many others, strictly speaking some may not be genealogy societies but concern themselves with aspects of out history, eg. The Indian Army. Following my visit to the York Fair, I am pretty sure that I have found my 5th great-grandfather from an idea I picked up at a local fhs stall.

If you are considering going to one of these fairs my recommendation would be to look carefully at which societies will be exhibiting rather than at the commercial concerns who, in general, will be there anyhow. Look for family history societies and local archivists from the areas in which you are researching. The national organisations can also give invaluable advice on where to look for information.

Finally, before going do ensure that you have noted exactly what you need to know. There is nothing worse than going to a stall and not be able to remember a name or place. Take my word for it - I know!

© Ron Ferguson 2010

English & Welsh Birth Registration

Birth registrations are of great importance when studying genealogy, and for this reason I looked at the total registrations for the Fergusons as part of my Ferguson one-name study.

Initially, I examined the total births, given in Free BMD, which showed an increase between the years 1841 and 1910, tending to flatten off after about 1880. I then looked at the percentage change in the birth rate in 10 year blocks, using 1841-1850 as the base point. I was shocked! The graph on the right show an increase in the rate of growth from around 25% to 28% up to 1881 and then a massive fall to an average of around 6% thereafter. Why?

My first thought was that because birth registration was not compulsory until 1872, more and more people were registering up to that date, and then the rate levelled off, but I could not believe this. So could it be due to immigration from Ireland and Scotland?

To check this, I looked at my brother-in-law's family, the Grimshaws, a family which I know to have been English born and bred from at least the 16th century. His graph showed a steady decline, even going negative at one point! My next step was to compare these results for the total registered births and the censuses (from the ONS) between 1841 and 1910/11. The results are shown in the graph below:

Interestingly, the path taken by the rate of change for my Fergusons follows that of the total births for England and Wales (T%Change), although the changes for the Fergusons are much more pronounced before 1891. The Grimshaw results seem to be completely anomalous, Alan Grimshaw swears that this is due to an extremely high level of female births in his family!

It is also of interest that the changes in the birth rates and censuses follow the same trend until 1880 when they, arguably, diverge. It is said that both the censuses and birth registrations understated the true figures for this period and by the fall in the rate of change post 1880/81 this does seem to be the case.

To summarise, we may conclude that prior to birth registrations becoming compulsory there was significant under registration, and, similarly, the censuses did not settle down until after 1881 (and we know that even after that they were incomplete). The high figure for the rate of births for the Fergusons can only, therefore, be explained by immigration from Ireland and Scotland, and this factor, I would suggest, should also be applied when considering others with a name associated with these countries.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Create a Search Engine Sitemap

Although my genealogy website has been on line for many years I have not bothered to include an XML Sitemap for use by search engines, although, naturally, I had a sitemap for humans. However, to have a decent ranking it is becoming more important that an XML sitemap is included, especially for Google and Bing.

Naturally, being a genealogist, I am a reluctant payer, and I searched for a free sitemap creation program. I could not get the Google Sitemap Creator to install on my PC, so I looked at site after site using Google, all of which had a limit on their free entries of between 500 and, say, 3000 pages. I have almost 9,000 pages on my site, so they were not of much use. I then came across Xenu.

Unlike the other programs which created the sitemap on-line, with Xeno you download the program, and run it on your own PC, which was when I realised that there was an unexpected bonus with this program, it has a Link Checker! Actually, this may be the main function of the program, but by this time I was suffering from tunnel vision! So I ran it, and it tested the links on my 8,600 pages in 44 minutes, identifying a number of broken links of which I was unaware - brilliant.

The XML Search Engine Sitemap was created in no time at all, and I uploaded it to the root of my site and submitted it to every Search Engine I knew. I now await with interest to see if the visits to my site increase. The program also produces a report of its activities whilst searching your pages but, probably because of the size and depth of my site, it took far too long for me to wait until it completed its work.

It was never my intention to use this Blog to promote software, however I am making this exception for Xeno because (a) it is free and (b) it is perfect for the job I wanted it to do, and more. I rank this program as my "Find of the year".

Your Genealogy Websites and Mobiles

From the day when mobile phones first came onto the market I have avoided them! I didn't want them intruding into my private life, and that of others in public areas. A definite No, No! However, technology catches up with us all, and for a while I have been watching the growth of the internet on mobiles. A month ago I asked a friend if I could view my home page on his mobile, only to see that it split! Nothing for it - I had to buy one, not an iphone, I might add, but an economical windows.

The image on the right shows my index page after I had made a number of changes to the coding and you may like to compare it with the PC version at My Website. In this view it is now not too bad, and can be scrolled to the left to see the off-screen portion, and if the phone is rotated to a horizontal position then it fits fine.

There are still some problems, the left hand column is pushed left, so is partly obscured by the background, and if the view is enlarged then the Guild of One-Name Studies blue logo pushes the footer down so that a brown background space appears.

Styling

The page was already built with the design being separate from the content using CSS, which fortunately makes changes easier, and there were quite a number to make. When designing the site I had only given consideration to the appearance when the width is not less than 800px, with mobiles we are talking about a maximum of 480px - quite a difference, and as a result the above is a compromise, as I was not willing to change the overall design of the PC version. For example the tree image is a background-image called by the CSS and not the HTML which means that its proportions relative to the space available cannot be changed, hence the left-hand column being partially obscured.

What I was able to do though, was to convert all the font and image sizes to ems so that they would change proportionately. Similarly the margins and spaces were also changed from pixels to ems and the overflow for the two columns was changed to "hidden". Unfortunately the Guild logo is already in place before the hidden statement kicks in, hence the brown space mentioned above.

The Problems

They are just presentational problems, but the main one is that mobiles do not have a hover state, which is unfortunate because my CSS based navigation comprises drop-down menus hidden in the blue bar, Sure, when the bar is tapped they drop-down OK, but they do not respond when tapped as the site is already on its merry way to the default link for each header! There is no way that I wish to change the navigation on the main site.

What Now

It is clear that the only way I can resolve the navigation is to write an app style navigation system to replace the drop-down menus for each of the sections for which they apply. It is a little more complex than this, though, as my main site has around 7000 pages which currently use my "blue bar" navigation I would like all to be accessible from a mobile. As far as I can see, this means that I am going to have to design a separate app style navigation linking back to the main and sub menus.

Comment

I hope that I might have given some thoughts which may help those considering a similar project, and would welcome comments on my proposed app style navigation.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Genealogy Websites are Boring!

So said a recent tweeter. My instinctive reaction was that part of the problem was that the designers are trying to cater for the higher proportion than average of genealogists who still use IE6. But on reflection I think this to be unfair.

Is it True?

I made the basic assumption that the comment did not refer to the research aids, such as Ancestry.com, so over the past month I have made a point of looking at many genealogists' own sites. and, regrettably, I think that it is probably fair comment.

Part of the problem is that the sites are presented by genealogists many of whom, I suspect, have little or no experience of designing and coding websites. Many are, therefore forced to use sites such as Rootsweb, rely on their database program, or use a program which converts a GEDCOM into webpages. This is not a criticism, in fact I applaud the efforts made by all who seek to make their work available to others, and I know how hard they try to overcome the problems which they inevitably meet. Indeed I have used a standard template for this blog!

The image above is of my own website; now I am not a designer but can code, so the design is one which I have put together from looking at pages in books or on-screen. I make no pretence about it being of a high standard, but at least I'm happy with it! I have shown this to illustrate that it is not necessary for all pages to look dull. This is true for the many different types of pages which can be added to a site, for example, forums, blogs, tutorials, biographies etc. etc.

Options

However, I suspect that the tweeter was referring to a lack of dynamic pages, and with the best will in the world, here we have a problem; which is that the family genealogy which we may wish to display basically comprises a list of names and other data. No matter what one does with it, it is still a list. The Next Generation of Genealogy Software, based on PHP and SQL overcomes this by using selections of family trees from which one can link to details of each individual.

My personal favourite is the Pedigree style from Legacy where the notes are included on the same page as the tree, which I prefer, although it is not as dynamic as TNG. It also has another problem in that it requires one page per individual, which means it is not really suitable for very large sites, I currently have around some 6000 such pages. I do include a dynamic family tree, made using DftCom2 based on Java, on a separate page of my site.

When it comes to other formats, Descendant, Ancestor, Family Group, Individual, we are down to lists, they may be formatted differently but they are still lists. For very large sites there may be no alternative other than to use one of these options, or TNG. There are a few other programs but the user experience is similar to those mentioned. I understand some university work is being carried out on alternative formatting, but as yet this has not been taken up.

What can we do?

At present, the best solution would seem to be to create a wide selection of attractive pages to complement the lists of genealogy data from which we hope others will contact us, and hence expand our knowledge and/or trees

© Ron Ferguson 2010