| Generating your own genealogy web pages is a simple task from most
genealogy programs. You may be pleased with the results and customize to your
satisfaction. I strongly recommend this approach. As you do this, be careful
to protect the living by whatever means are in the program. Some privacy is not the
default status. Most genealogy web pages produced are verbose or cumbersom and
difficult to customize. Narrative forms are for ancestor and descendants only. If
you would like to find another way to display your pages there are several programs
available to generate web pages from your GEDCOM file. These include Ged2HTML,
GedPage, Ged4Web, and ____. With these extreme caution is needed to protect the
living, since most do not have this feature built-in. They also do not have much
ability to embed the notes and sources or include pictures. Several genealogy
services will display your information using your GEDCOM and generate the web pages
dynamically on request as well as index the entries for researchers to find. This is
a far more efficient than the do-it-yourself method, but still lacks in linking to other
data bases and displaying images.
I have taken the challenge to see if I could generate customized pages that span
multiple data bases with interlinks to make navigation smooth. I wanted the pages to
be printable in narrative form that contain all available information including notes,
sources, and images, and still keep living privacy if requested. GedWeb is my
attempt at such a project. Although the result is a large number of files, they can
be easily burned to a CD for sharing with the rest of your family. Customizing is
done through a style sheet (style.css).
You can see a sample of the GedWeb output at
http://home.earthlink.net/~jimpool9/example/ (closed until final
version is ready). You can download GedWeb.exe to try it on your own
GEDCOM. The program is written in QuickBasic and is DOS based rather than Windows.
The source code is available for inspection. This is freeware and is packaged
in a ".zip" file to include the style sheet and the navigation graphics.
Please click here to download the package (version 1.8 is not yet
available - target date is February 2004).
You may want to use the Reorder program on GEDCOM files made
from your new data bases to place the families in a logical order. Creating a new
data base from this reordered GEDCOM will help organize your postings and reports.
You may want to use the Report program to prepare a narrative
report of ALL vital information in your data base (not just ancestor or descendant). |