Ancestry Pages - How it was Done |
Research
Over the years I had accumulated a large amount of information on our family trees. Gleaned from family
and going through list serves in the 90s I had stored the information in hard copy, family tree programs
and MS Word documents.
Wanting to go further I signed on the Myheritage website and started adding the names I knew and hunting
for more. I recorded the names and the ID numbers I assigned them, by generation, on a spreadsheet.
I also wrote down details for each family in Word documents, each time adding another generation.
For the Barney and Coull trees I stopped after 15 generations as each generation was getting bigger and
bigger and to be honest, more tedious.
After I resurrected my websites I made managed to add the Fett-Napp and Benker-Porst trees to the site,
directly from my current notes. This proved a good start in formulating a process to add the
gargantuan Barney trees onto the site.
The Big Barney Trees
The Barney tree was so big I had to divide it up into 7 sections. Six were for Leroy Franklin Barney's
ancestors and one was for his wife, Mabel Bryant Barney's family. So you will find a base tree
(Chart Zero) which contains links to all the other subdivided trees. Also, I teased some of the famous medieval families out and gave them their own charts for interest.
In order to convert my Word documents and create a chart to pull it together, I did the following:
- Create basic graphics (jpg) in Photoshop for lines and for number pointers.
- Use the MS Excel spreadsheet to draw rectangles, each representing one person, with
their names, ID numbers, and birth year and death year.
- Import the graphics to use in the lines to connect them, and where the space is too restricted,
the numbers to match up children and their parents.
- Snap shot the entire family chart, one page at a time, and in Photoshop, glue them together to
make one cohesive graphic (jpg).
- Bring that graphic chart into MS Paint and record the coordinate points of the upper left
corner and the lower right corner of every rectangle (hence every person) in the chart.
- Go back the original spreadsheet where all the names are listed, and change the document (and
save it as something new) deleting some fields and adding new ones to add in all the coordinates
gathered in the last step.
- Use spreadsheet functions to create the html syntax to map out all the points and coordinate
them with the file names from MS Word.
- Convert each word document into html, then edit the filename so that it matches what the code
in the spreadsheet indicates.
- zip the entire directory, upload it to the webserver, unzip and voila!
|
|