Before I get into importing your genealogy database to a website, I want to discuss a very important issue: living people. From a personal security standpoint, I think it is unwise to put information about living individuals on your website, whether they are your children or cousins. Don’t help identity thieves or other miscreants in their nefarious pursuits. You don’t have to alter your regular Family Tree Maker (or whatever software you use) file; just make a copy of it and then edit that copy and call it something like your “webdata file.”

Setting Up TNG And Your Website

First you will set up TNG on your web host server. Darrin Lythgoe will supply you with good instructions for this. Second you will need to upload your genealogy database from your computer based program (such as Family Tree Maker) into TNG. Both of these things are usually done with an FTP (file transfer protocol) utility. There is an FTP utility built into the Internet Explorer browser, so you don't have to look very far.

You accomplish the second task mentioned above by initially converting your genealogy database into a Gedcom file while still in Family Tree Maker (or whatever computer based genealogy program you use). You will then upload the Gedcom file into TNG. Next, you can upload any photos and documents you wish to display and associate them with individual ancestors. After that you can customize the website software to give your genealogy site your own personal look. Inevitably you will have to debug the program and make sure that all the links work properly.

Other software:

We ended up creating about eight extra pages on our website to complement the standard pages supplied with TNG. The HTML code for these pages was created on Adobe GoLive 5.0. The graphics we needed for these pages were created with Adobe PhotoShop CS2. We have used two different versions of Family Tree Maker for our PC based genealogy program in the last seven or eight years.

Dave Clark

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