Ancestry/Genealogy

And then put together my father's mother's research on that side of the family. Each 'book' was pasted together on legal size paper then their lawyer's office ran off copies for each of us kids. She used legal size binders to put the pages together.

My mother in law was involved with printing her family compilation to a hard cover book. That was very expensive. She and the man she worked with basically had to pre-sell a certain number of copies and then had to have a minimum number of books printed - around 250 books at $50 each, if I remember correctly.

A couple of years ago I re-edited the books into electronic format. I rescanned the photographs and the clippings and reformatted the pages for regular size paper in WordPerfect. I published groups of pages to PDF, then took those PDFs on a thumbdrive to FedEx, rented one of their computers for an hour and assembled all the PDFs into one PDF for each book.

I had those PDFs printed into three hard copies of each book and had them spiral bound with plastic covers. Those six copies cost about $20 each. For my own use I've printed copies of the books on my home printers, punched holes, and just put them into presentation binders. They look nearly as nice as the professionally printed ones. A cheap laser printer worked great for my black and white books.

I also saved the completed books as PDF files with the printing instructions I wrote to give to the copy shop. Now for family members who want a copy, I send them a ZIP file with the PDF, the instructions and some oversize pages that can be put in as fold out fan charts. Most of the younger family members are just as happy to have the books in electronic format.

Since then I have done a lot more research and added a lot to the genealogy on both sides. My primary program for keeping my information is The Master Genealogist (TMG). There are several third party programs that can take the files from TMG or other genealogy programs and create web pages. Most can do incremental updates as you add information to your family information.

I like Second Site - it's not expensive and the publisher also offers a cheap webhosting plan for publishing your family data. I don't use their plan - I already have my own domain and webspace. If you have your own space, it's easy to publish your family site - just create it with the program on your computer, then copy those files to the webspace. You can also publish your information to a CD or DVD and make copies to share with family.

A free way to create a web site from any genealogy program is UncleGED. Nearly all genealogy programs have the ability to export your files to a GED (Genealogy Export Data, I think) file to share with others - and to transport your information to other programs. Uncle GED will use the same GED file to create HTML pages for a site. It's not as pretty a product but for free, it gets the information where you can share it.

I tested UncleGED before I bought SecondSite. It's really not bad at all and if you learn a little about creating a web site, you can make the pages prettier. It will not automatically add links to pictures or documents but that is easy to learn to create, just time consuming.

SecondSite will add media that has been added in the TMG program so photos, census pages, deeds, and other documents that have been collected can be accessed from links from the individual person's page. I'm still accumulating information and don't have all my media in TMG so I haven't tested all the aspects of SecondSite. I have seen a number of very nice genealogy websites that were created with it, though.

You do NOT have to put the information you have in Family Tree Maker on Ancestry in order to share it - there are lots of options. And you can always export your data out of Family Tree Maker with a GED file and import into other programs if you want to get away from the Ancestry control.

I have FTM - I use it as an easy way to check for information on Ancestry, which I do use regularly for my research. But there are a lot of the features of FTM I hate so I take all my info back to TMG for final input.