My family narrative
is my website OR my website
is my family narrative
Although web-based, most of it can also be printed as a reasonable semblance of a book.
I have taken my daughter's 4 grandparents as the main family groups and then used the following structure for each family:
- "Family" home page: short description (still working on most of these)
- various "chapters"/pages about different aspects of the families, including census info., and even the search for information
- Biographies of various family members
- photos
I also have a basic structure for the biographies:
- Born .... with cert. thumbnail, if I have the cert.
- Died... (thumbnail cert., as above)
- Parents ...
- Siblings ...
- Spouse (thumbnail cert., as above)
- Children...
- If applicable, Spouse 2, Children, etc
- Biography
All with photos, where available
The biggest problem ist decide whether biographical details go on the individual biography pages, or on the family pages.
However, as this is a "work in progress" (aren't they all ?
) I don't worry too much about that, I can always change it.
I have found that by having this structure, I can add snippets at any time:
- For instance, after queries on RootsChat I can add more here and there:
some of the articles are, in fact, summaries of the contents of the topic.
For the web version I sometimes incliude a link to the RootsChat topic.
- for instance: I see a snippet of info on the web. I add that, as a snippet, to the relevant page, and every so often, I re-write the page so that it looks more homogeneous.
One point for those just starting:
I spent a lot of time agonising about the "best" way of doing it, but I found that once I had
something written down, it was much easier to decide later, that I wanted to have it differently. Usind word processors and text-editors makes a re-think so much easier, as the "content" is already there, it's usually just a question of moving blocks of text around, and adding a sentence or two, till you are happy (or happier) with it.
Bob
