Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Don Created a Wonderful Genealogy Website on TNG

I wrote Dear Randy: Where Can I Find a Full-Featured, Free, Updatable Online Family Tree? on 28 August 2019 in response to reader Don's question.  Several readers offered useful comments.

I received an email this past week from Don, noting that he had decided on using The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG) software and was very happy with the result.  Here is Don's recent email to me about his new website:
"In case you're curious, I thought I'd let you know how this ended up.
"I went with The Next Generation - TNG. Not free, costs:
  • TNG one time fee $33
  • Domain name registration $8 1st year, $9 subsequent years
  • Web hosting $50 1st year, $100 subsequent years
  • Roughly, $9/month on a continuing basis.
"The TNG software is decadently easy to use. The creator has a bunch of YouTube videos and Wiki pages as well as a user forum all of which make learning and problem solving very easy. Was able to upload ~11K person GEDCOM and ~3.8K linked images with minimal effort. In truth, the majority of time spent was correcting issues with my data that TNG pointed out (e.g. place name inconsistencies - Maryland vs Md. vs MD, typos - b 1843 d 1798 vs b 1743 d 1798, etc). It has an Admin access log which lets you see what people are looking at and how often. After all this work I must admit it's nice to know people are referencing my data.
"The Website is lechpowell.com  
 "I'd be happy to help anyone who wants to try TNG if they contact me separately (including my "how to install and setup" document noted below).
"I've created a WORD doc that documents every step in creating the website (in case I had to start over from scratch) and looking at it, I must admit it was very easy to do (with the qualifier that I have an engineering/software background that no doubt helped matters).
"Since I've given up on Rootsweb ever coming back or Ancestry.com ever getting tree indexing to work properly, this seemed like the best alternative. TNG has something called Mods (software add-on's) and the mod for Google search indexing worked great. My website came up in Google searches right away and I get many hits a day from that. In Ancestry.com I'm not anyone way ever finding my tree via tree indexing. Plus I know they never saw my full sources, notes, or images..."
My thanks to Don for sharing his thoughts and actions on this.  I went to his new website and saw the product - he has done an excellent job of documenting his genealogy research, and TNG does an excellent job of displaying it in an organized and complete manner.  

Here is a screen shot of his home page:



Here are three screen shots of an ancestor profile in Don's tree; first, the menu ribbon, and event information:


Further down the page are the family information and photos:


Further down the page are Notes and Sources:



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Copyright (c) 2019, Randall J. Seaver

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1 comment:

Fax said...

An alternative is to use a GEDCOM and GedSite, which I find far more flexible and feature-rich than TNG. This combination has all the benefits of TNG and none of its limitations. This link will take you to the home page. Especially check the example sites to see what others are doing: https://www.gedsite.com/en/index.htm. You can publish your first site within minutes, then customize and expand as you wish. I'm a happy user of this and its still-active predecessor SecondSite that was originally built for The Master Genealogist, a venerable but no longer available program (still being used by many). Support is outstanding.