When I considered what I might present at this year's AAHGS Conference, I first considered the conference theme, "Fighting Erasure: Staying Visible by Keeping African American Genealogy and History In Focus". For me, those of us who are the family historians/genealogists in our family, we are the griots. I think of the wise elder in the 1977 drama series "Roots", someone who had a long memory and could pass down generations of vital information about the ancestors who have gone on before us. However, if you're like me, I have to write it down, and can't rely on my memory to recall the details of the 5,000 plus relatives and in-laws that I now have in my family tree file. And although I have a family tree file on Ancestry.com, some information on FamilySearch.org, and also keep a copy on genealogy software program Family TreeMaker 2019, for a recent mini-family reunion, I wanted another way to provide information easily accessible information to the family that gathered in our backyard.
I recalled that Bob Scott, a past president and fellow board member of the African American Genealogy Group of Philadelphia, had expressed his satisfaction with a website called Tribal Pages, and that some time ago I'd created an account, uploaded a subset of my family tree, and shared the resulting generated website for a family occasion. But for my 2024 summer backyard "gathering", I thought it might be a perfect system to present a subset of my research, tailored specifically for that group. In this case, I didn't need to create a new account, just another family tree on my account. And rather than manually adding my information, starting with me and working back through my pedigree chart through my parents, their parents and so on, I decided to use a GEDCOM file, a genealogy extract that I'd created from Family Tree Maker. After uploading the family branch of the relatives that I'd invited, I could tweak it by adding additional information to make sure that everyone who was planning to attend was listed on the automatically generated website.
The result? Tribal Pages worked like a charm! I just had to add the names and email addresses of the family members who were going to attend. From the email that they received, they could create a free account for our family website by creating a password. Once they got on the website, they were amazed at the listing of upcoming birthday and anniversary events, the listing of surnames that were "clickable" to navigate to family members' profiles, a pedigree chart, a relationship calculator and more. I had to do virtually nothing more except upload some photos (these did not populate from the GEDCOM upload). I looked like a website guru lol.
If you have very little technical expertise, I still encourage you to view my presentation if you attend the conference. I also show how you can start using Tribal Pages to build your tree online from scratch manually for no cost! It will limit you to 50 photographs for the free version, but the number of names is unlimited, and you can decide if you want to upgrade to a more robust system later. And the advantage of our virtual conference is that you can review the presentation as many times as you want, pause it to try some things, and start it up again. Want to get an advanced look at the type of output Tribal Pages provides? Look at the sample provided.
I hope to "see you" there!
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