One of the ongoing challenges with a family tree is telling your family’s story with it. Yes, you can have all manner of dates, locations, and other assorted facts, perhaps even with some scattered photos or notes, but none of those things really tell the stories… the tales about your ancestor that have been passed down through the generations or funny stories about an eccentric aunt or uncle.
A few potential services I’m noting here to investigate later…
- The big players (Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch)
- Storied.com
- Storyworth
- Novella
- MyFamilyArchive
- TheirStory
The same standard questions apply…
…
If you’re feeling really ambitious and DIY…
I’ve always had a public version of my tree available on places like MyHeritage and Ancestry in order to find matching relatives in other trees. However, there was information I was OK sharing with family, but not the public, like personal stories, audio and video recordings, and other personal details. So, a while back, I decided to set up a private site for just my family that would have a copy of my tree including living people, a collection of stories about individuals and families, a blog that summarized my research, a section for photos I’d started scanning, and a lot of other things.
The method I used is outlined below and is really only recommended for folks willing to install some software on a server (that you need to keep up-to-date), develop a workflow, and maybe do some coding. If you’re comfortable with a basic LAMP set-up, you could do this.
What I set up was this:
- The site was hidden behind authentication so access would be limited to those I shared it with. This also kept it out of seach engines.
- For the blog, stories, and main site navigation I used a self-hosted WordPress blog with a custom child-theme that I wrote (initially I used Anchor CMS but decided to switch to WordPress since I was so familiar with it).
- For the family tree, I used HuMo-gen, which imports data and photo references from a GEDCOM file. It’s not perfect and I like some of the alternatives, but it did the trick for serving up tree visualizations, ancestor profile pages, and basic reports.
- For the photo album I used a heavily modified version of a PHP photo album script that pulls metadata from a Google Sheet with extensive detail on each photo that I scanned. My process for photo scanning and cataloging was/is a bit complicated.
- I started on (but never finished) a custom document management system because I didn’t like any of the current solutions. It stored document metadata in a database and allows me to store transcriptions and notes as well as tag individuals in each document using permanent IDs that are assigned by the desktop software I use.
- Links to Google docs of my in-progress family history books so family can follow their progress.
- A custom Google map highlighting where different families resided over time.
- There was also an accompanying private Facebook group.
A couple of years ago, though, this got to be too much to maintain and I pulled the site down. I still have the Facebook group and it’s my current primary method for sharing stories and research, as flawed as it is.