Genealogy on the Web - TNG
The application you see when you click the link to FAMILY TREE on this site is The Next Generation of Genealogy Site Building (TNG). It takes a GEDCOM file and puts it into a dynamic website, so you can create and view charts and reports on the fly.
GEDCOM has limitations, serious limitations, so there's stuff that just won't make sense.
General:
All data is maintained in a genealogy program called The Master Genealogist (TMG) which has a lot of features that don't translate well (yet) to this website.
Sources:
Most data is transferred over as plain fields in the title of the Source. Definitely NOT Strunk & White footnote and bibliography formatting! I'll be working on finding a way to have the structural data on my home computer output to the web in more meaningful fashion. The part that DOES work well is that you can select the documents attached to the sources and see the scans of the actual source documents I've used - there's some pretty cool family papers in there!Notes and Memos:
In TMG I am able to use the program to automatically construct sentences for me, so what I put in the memo field can be just a sentence fragment, phrase, or even a code. These may not make a ton of sense when viewed in TNG.
Witnesses and Other Participants:
TMG lets me attach lots of people to a single tag, indicating the role they played in that event and constructing sentences accordingly. The most obvious example is a Census Tag. Typically you'll have the head of household, the wife, and the children, sometimes a grandparent or other family members, maybe even unrelated folks. In TMG this can be constructed in one tag to all make sense and show up on every participant's person page. Very efficient! Well, GEDCOM just completely doesn't understand it. There's data that just doesn't transfer, and data that transfers but doesn't make complete sense. Don't blame me, blame the genealogical community that still hasn't come up with a reasonable way to share data.
GEDCOM weaknesses aside, there are some excellent reasons I've chosen to publish my data using TNG even though it requires a major "step down" to GEDCOM.
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