Friday, March 4, 2011

GenerationStation - Adding Family Members

I've spent some time the last two days adding some of my ancestral families to the GenerationStation, and want to share some of my experiences.  I started with my maternal grandparents, Lyle L. and Emily (Kemp) Auble, then added Lyle's parents, his brother, and his grandparents. 

The process is pretty easy.  I'm going to add information about Devier James Lamphear Smith in the discussion below:

From the My Account page, I can click on the "Add a New Person" link:


The program asks if the person is male or female, and living or deceased, and then the Birth and Married Name.  Once those are filled in, then the Birth data (drop down menus for month and day) and place (town/county in one field, state/country in another field), Death data (same sort of fields), and parents names can be filled in, as shown above. 

Clicking on the Submit button, the user goes to the "Snapshot" page for the person.  From there I selected the "Biography" button and clicked on the "Get Started" button.  A large edit area appeared, with some Microsoft Word-like editing tools, and I went into my database, copied the text for the notes for Devier Smith, and pasted it into the Biography text field:




I have to click on "Save Changes" to add the text material.  I can go back and edit this text any time - in fact, any registered user can.   Next, I wanted to upload a thumbnail photograph of Devier Smith, so I clicked on the "Media" button.  The "Media" page opened, and I clicked on the "Upload Media" button and was asked where the photo was - in my computer files or already in my account:


It was in a file on my computer, so I clicked that and selected the photo from my collection:



I selected Devier's photo from the list, and clicked on the "Upload" button:


The photo was put into the GenerationStation Media gallery.  The last task is to make that photo the thumbnail photo for Devier on his "Snapshot" and other pages.  I had to click on the existing thumbnail photo (with the dummy light blue photo) and then click on "Change Picture," and select the photo I want, and click on "Submit" and it's on the pages for Devier Smith:


This goes fairly easily.  The only part of the process that wasn't intuitive was how to get the Photo that was in the Media gallery into the thumbnail picture. 

The process did not take too long - perhaps five minutes for the whole exercise.  Of course, I had the biography text already available, so the copy and paste effort made that task pretty easy.

We'll look at creating a Family in the next post in this series.

No comments: