Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Tuesday's Tip - Use "Story View" on Ancestry.com

This week's Tuesday's Tip is to:  Use the "Story View" on Ancestry.com in order to tell your relative's life story in words and pictures.

One of the newer features in the Ancestry Member Trees is the "Story View."  This view provides a story board list of the photographs or document images that the user has attached or uploaded to their Tree, and the user can add or edit written content that describes each image shown.  The user can move the images and descriptions around to put them in the desired order.  Lastly, the user can save them and/or print the Story View.

I described the process of accessing and working in Story View in First Look at Ancestry.com's Story View (posted 31 May 2013).  I am not sure if every user has access to "Story View" yet - I know it was going to be available this summer, and the summer is almost over!  I can see it on two of my Ancestry Member Trees but not on the other five for some reason.  If you have an Ancestry Member Tree, look for it on a person's Profile Page:



The green "Story View" button is next to the "Edit this Person" button just below the person's name and birth/death information.  When you click on "Story View," it takes 15 seconds or so to open the "Story View" page the first time.  Here is the top of the "Story View" page for my great-grandfather, Frank Walton Seaver:



Ancestry shows you all of the images (photographs and attachments) that you have collected for the person, and on some of them has written a short description based on information about the family.  The user can add or edit the information in the Date field and in the Description field by clicking in the field and typing content.  Here's the next screen down:


The user can move images up or down, or delete them, by clicking on the image itself and doing the desired action.  I put all of my images in a Date Order with the most important record first.  Here's the next screen down:


And the last part of the page:


At the top of the screens above is a "Print" link that opens a print dialog, which opens a PDF of the file.  I saved my file as a PDF file and opened it:


The PDF Print file puts one or more images on an 8.5 x 11 portrait page showing both the image and the description.  This file could be printed to make a report or a scrapbook.

This "Story View" has real possibilities to make it very useful.  A user could add more information to the Description content (e.g., a transcription of the family census record, an abstract of a birth record, etc.).

My preference would be for a landscape PDF file with a larger image so that the image is more readable.

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Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

2 comments:

Karen said...

Randy, story view is not yet available on private trees. There is no announced timetable when it will be.

Geolover said...

The 'story' feature is primitive. When reporting US Census items it leaves out the County name, and certainly does not report what the user has entered for the Census place name if the Ancestry entry was wrong in some respect. It does not include all timeline items. Many other little glitches, such as inability to edit side-by-side with the person profile page without opening a separate window.