WeRelate

I am thrilled that one of my pages was featured at WeRelate this week. A big thank-you to the person that nominated the page and to T.K. for telling me!

I love the idea of having a place to share my tree and collaborate with others. Being tech challenged I have struggled with some features on the site but I am learning as I go. There is so much there that I suspect I have barely scratched the surface.

I found it was taking way too much time to add each person and retype (or copy and paste) everything in my file so I broke out a portion of my Wisner family and uploaded it as a gedcom. Not everything transfered to the proper fields and my locations were not recorded in the correct format so I am now going through and correcting the information for each person. Still time consuming but much faster than starting from scratch. I did end up with some duplicate individuals this way that I've had trouble fixing. On the help pages they say they are working on a merge feature and I hope that will help me in the future.

One of the huge bonuses of going back through my file person by person is that I am forced to review what I have done. Some of my sources are missing and others will make sense only to me. One of the features I need to learn how to use is the individual source pages. Overall my file is benefiting from the scrutiny. My pages are not up to the standards that most of you have but I'm learning from all of you and making corrections as I work.

I'm also thrilled that I can add pictures on the appropriate pages and have as much space as I want to add biographical information or notes. Of course I had to learn how to resize pictures! Mrs. Mecomber helped me out at Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook. I also found another program that works at JLog. Once the pictures are uploaded I can easily identify each person as I did here.

Many of the pages I've visited at WeRelate seem to be gedcom uploads and not much different than what you'd find at rootsweb. But other pages are amazing! Take a look at the Family page for Oscar Robbins and Grace Faulke. If you are looking for Virginia links check out this page. I have no idea how they did it. (OK, html, tables, lots of code and a bottle of tylenol?) I love this source page! Again, I have no idea how they set up the contents box, maybe the wiki did it for them, but I'll be working to be able to add my own family notes in a similar manner.

Others have already added some of my early New England ancestors. I plan to link my pages to theirs as I work back and maybe meet some cousins along the way.

Are you using WeRelate? If you are I'd love to hear your opinions. And please share any tips you may have!