Some technical information

I use Family Historian to maintain my family tree database. I like the program's flexibility, especially in the diagrams, and its strict adherence to the GEDCOM standard. Its main weakness, I feel, is in the website generation where there seems to be less control over what is and what is not published. As a simple example I have so far failed to find a way of formatting dates for family sheet information, eg for a marriage, although it is possible to format dates for individuals' information.

I don't want to sound too negative about Family Historian as it is a very good program, but the above and a few other issues led me to believe that the best way forward was to use and ad hoc tool for website publication. This website is produced from a combination of Microsoft's Expression Web and my own C++ program. The former produces the basic layout and backgrounds to form a template for each page. The C++ program reads the GEDCOM information, converts it into the layout I want in html format and writes it into the template. It also generates the alphabetical list of names and links. I am well pleased with the result and it gives me the flexibility I want.

Internally there are C++ classes for individuals and families, with pointer members doing the job that the GEDCOM @ links do in, for example, the FAMS (family as spouse) and FAMC (family as child) fields. I hope one day to extend the program to handle multimedia objects.

You might guess that the basic layout was inspired by the way that Family Historian presents things. One difference is that I do not produce individual sheets, all the information is contained on family pages.

The site was up and running for several weeks before I discovered that almost none of the text was displaying on the Safari browser, used mainly by MAC users. I had to replace all of the formatting, which used the old fashioned <font> tags, with cascading style sheets (CSS).

Finally I hit on the idea of showing a "confidence level" for each individual to enable the reader to have some idea of the credibility of the information. This makes up for the fact that there does not yet exist an area for citations. As I gather more information, hopefully some of the lower confidence levels will go up.