Sharing What You Know
You've spent hours digging through courthouse records, scanning endless reels of microfilm, conducting thousands of internet searches, interviewing distant relatives in person and through the mail and carefully documenting the information. You've filled up a dozen notebooks, have reams of photocopied documents and hundreds of pictures. The shelves are bulging with references book marked to the important few paragraphs of interest to you. How do you share it?
Most genealogists dream of the day when they can publish their own family history. Few actually ever do. When they join the ranks of our ancestors, their work is boxed together and, with any luck, gets handed over to one of the descendants who has shown some interest in the work. Often it will languish for years before being searched through. Things that were 'known' are no longer assumed and documentation was filed in a proprietary system that Great Aunt Daisy never shared with anyone else.
The biggest challenge to traditional publishing, actually getting the information down on paper and to a printer, is the drive to perfection. 'I really wish I knew who so-and-so's father was. Once I have that, I can print it!' 'I'm still waiting on the picture of what's-his-name.' 'I don't have the document that proves that relationship and I'm not going to print without it.' 'It's take fifteen years to get that side of the family done, it will take me another fifteen to finish the other side.'
If you are going to preserve your family history, you need to share it! Otherwise there is a real risk that the work you have done will disappear without a trace. And while printing up your work is a great way to create a fairly permanent record, there are faster and more effective ways. With today's technology there are several inexpensive and efficient ways to share what you know.
My favorite means of sharing information is through the use of HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language. If you are reading this article on line, you are looking at HTML. This is a standard format that can be read by any web browser. You don't have to get really fancy to create a family history. And the beauty of this is that it is easy to change whenever you find a new picture, or can document that connection.
Most of the newer word processing programs have the ability to save a file in HTML format. A number of the Genealogy Programs contain features that allow you to save the diagrams and charts in HTML. By learning some of the very basics of using HTML, you can quickly link these together in some sort of usable format.
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