Wednesday 19 January 2011

Revamp

SecondSite, the program I use to generate my web pages from my Genealogy database (TMG), has come out with some interesting new features.
It was a good time to review bits of my main website.
As always, when testing, I find things that are missing, have incorrect links etc etc, so a few of those have been tidied up, some snippets added to timelines and so on.

However, the main change will be added gradually as I review all the charts.

What is now possible, is to produce a dynamic descendant chart that can be expanded/collapsed to help you get the feel for where the person of interest on the chart "fits".
I've defaulted them to "open collapsed", so that the initial view you will see is that of your person of interest, and their relationship to the subject of the chart they appear on, but you can then either open/close individual branches, or nip up to the top of the chart and expand or collapse the whole chart.
I started with the FAIRBAIRN chart for my Archibald, but several others have already been converted.
One thing that was always missing from the existing descendant charts was the spouse at the lowest level of the chart. These now show.
In addition there's an alternate view of a pedigree chart with much the same expand/collapse dynamic view, but instead of being presented in the more normal flying geese formation, this one shows the parents immediately beneath each ancestor on the chart, AND has the ability to show where a person has more than one set of "parents", eg adoptive parents, foster parents, or simply alternates from research where conclusions have not yet been reached.
As yet there's only one of these charts available, and that's my own pedigree on the charts page of my main web site, but it is highly likely that this will be used in the One Name Study pages, where alternates exist on where someone "fits".

Quite apart from the above changes, there may well be some extra snippets on the GRAHAM chart from the branch in Sth Australia (see posting in my Guestbook, 12 Jan), and one or two more snippets on the WIGHT branch in Sunderland, the family of Hector Cowans GRAY and Elizabeth WIGHT on the WIGHT chart, but whether or not anything appears there depends on how many generations down the tree the changes are, as the charts may cut off a generation or two too early.

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