Welcome to Our Family Tree Community Site - An active, online, family tree repository. It is an experiment started in February 2008 as a way for our extended family to actively browse and contribute to our online repository of family tree information. This will hopefully make the information easily accessible to more people, and reduce the pressures on the smaller number of people in the family who often become responsible for this information. This also means that as eveyone can add their own information, more, richer information should become available, and each person has full control over what they share, and to whom they share it.
How will this work?
This site is based on a system called Elgg, which is based on a network of users and communities. Our ultimate goal is for everyone in our family tree to be registered as a user (including our ancestors). Each user can share a variety of information: text, images, audio, video, and even blogs etc too. But don't let that scare you - a user profile of your name and a brief description is a great start. As you add more info, consider 'tagging' it with keywords - this will let people (including you) easily find related information. Whenever you add more info, you can also specify if you want it visible to: the whole internet; all other 'users' of this site; or a specific set of users.
To start with, we will limit users to only family members (so that we don't get strangers posting objectionable material to a family friendly site), and see how that goes. So if you want to register as a member, email Welcome Guest [Log in], and you'll receive an invitation email which has a link in it that takes you through the signup process. Simple! Any existing users (aka family members) can invite other family members to become users too (once logged in, use 'View all Friends' then 'Invite a Friend'). However, anyone on the internet can comment on blog posts etc, and see the resources (if they were added as visible to the public).
To make this a comprehensive family tree, we would also like to have ancestors and children registered as users. For these, and other family members who can not register as a user themselves, we would like another family member act as a sponsor to creaet a user profile on their behalf. This will be clearer and easier for everyone than adding someone else's information under your own username.
So have a look around, have a go at contributong, and if in doubt, give it a go - you can't 'break' anything, and there's no right or wrong way to do anything (at this stage anyway). Lets see where this experiment takes us!
Things to Try:
Why not check out what people are saying right now?
Find others with similar interests and goals.
Here are some example users: Eric Woods, Justin Woods
If you like what you see, why not register for an account?