I plan to add more features.  But perhaps I should also remove some options left over from the early days of the Internet.  For one thing, I want to rely more on Cascading Style Sheets than explicit style attributes.

Multimedia On Deck

I feel that multimedia is the next big thing in genealogy.  With more online records available, and the prevalence of scanners and digital cameras, it’s now easier than ever to include images of actual records with your web pages.  Better Internet bandwidth makes images, sound and video recordings feasible to download.  I will therefore concentrate on new features for including multimedia.

Still Relevant after All These Years

After ten years, is GED-GEN still relevant, given the popularity of sites like Ancestry.com?  GED-GEN has always been intended for those who maintain their own web sites.  Being a programmer myself, there was nothing on the market that provided the customization I wanted.

I believe that level of customization is still in demand.  GED-GEN may not be as relevant to the casual genealogy enthusiast, who wants only to create and maintain an online tree.  But nothing beats an independent family tree website that is easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to find via Google.

I think family trees on Ancestry.com are incredibly difficult to navigate.  I much prefer the family group sheet style produced by GED-GEN.  Besides, online trees can be just a marketing tool to sell memberships to their online collections.  They are difficult to locate and difficult to use for family members who are not so much into genealogy.   I don’t want to miss being contacted by a distant cousin who happens across my website.  If you’re on Ancestry.com, they can’t find you.

Collaboration

Online trees like at Ancestry.com do provide something GED-GEN does not, and that’s the ability to collaborate with other researchers.  GED-GEN pages are static, in the sense you must re-generate and re-copy the web pages to your website.  But even so, I want to keep control of my family tree data.  I don’t want to give other researchers the ability to modify my data.

Collaboration means to work jointly with others, but not necessarily letting others modify your research without consultation or approval.  Static web pages still provide a means to share information, without relinquishing control of it.  Therefore I think there is a place for a utility like GED-GEN even with the growing popularity of interactive online trees.

Same Old GEDCOM

Nothing has changed in ten years with respect to GEDCOM files.  Their format and the information they convey is still the same.  Even so, genealogy software vendors have never fully complied with the GEDCOM standard.  Each chooses the parts of the standard to support and then doesn’t follow the standard anyway.

A dangerous trend in fact is the newfangled features like source templates that vendors are adding.  They’re not giving any thought to sharing such information via a GEDCOM file, even though there are vendor-specific facilities within the standard to do it.

What Does the Future Hold

GED-GEN is ten years old, but it’s here to stay.  What do you think?  Are GEDCOM-to-HTML utilities like GED-GEN becoming extinct?  If you are a GED-GEN user, what features should I add or improve upon?  Please leave a comment below.

Hubert Yuncker 1828

It’s fun to use GED-GEN to add an individual’s portrait to their family group sheet. That’s fine if you have a photograph. How about adding images for ancestors who lived before photography even existed? For those folks, I like to add an image of their signature or their “mark.” Their signature is usually the only shred of personality they’ve left for us to see.  For example, see my family group sheet for Hubert and Barbe Yuncker.

Here are the steps to add an image of an ancestor’s signature in place of a portrait.  If your ancestor could not sign his or her name, they may have used a mark or symbol instead.

Step 1:  Obtain a Document: The first step is to obtain a document or record that has your ancestor’s signature or mark.  This could be a child’s birth record signed by a parent.  It could be a marriage record signed by the bride or groom, their parents or other witnesses.  It could be a land deed or a last will and testament.

Step 2:  Create an Electronic Copy: If you found an image online, download and save that image.  If you found it on microfilm or on paper, take a digital picture if possible.  Otherwise make a Xerox copy or print the image, then scan that to create an electronic copy.

Step 3:  Edit the Image: Open the image of the document in an image editing program.  I suggest you edit a copy of the image so you do not accidentally change the original image.  I’ll use an 1828  marriage record that shows the signature of the groom, Hubert Juncker, and the mark of the bride, Marie Barbe Gossé.  Her mark is the symbol O surrounded by a circle with the writing “Marque de Gossé, Marie Barbe.”

The following steps apply generally to most image editing programs, without being specific to any particular program.  In the illustrations below, the signature and mark appear side by side.  I work with the signature on the left side.  I would then repeat the steps for the mark, on the right side.

Step 3a:  On the image, select the signature/mark.  Drag your mouse around the signature/mark using the editor’s selection tool.  Try to get just the signature/mark, but also the whole signature/mark including all the loops and flourishes.

Step 3a

Step 3b:  Crop the image to that selection.  As an alternative, you could copy and paste the selection to create a new image.

Step 3b

Step 3c:  Undoubtedly the new image will contain residual portions of the writing that surrounded the signature/mark.  Now is the time to remove all the extraneous marks and noise so you are left with just the signature/mark.  Try the eraser tool, the “magic wand” selection tool, or select and cut such noise away.

Step 3c

Step 3d:  Convert the image to a 256 gray scale image, unless it is already 256 shades of gray or less.  This step may result in a smaller file size, especially since the signature/mark is usually just black and white.  You want about 256 shades of gray though to maintain the detail of the pen strokes.

Step 3e:  Change the resolution of the image to 300 dpi.

Step 3f:  Resize the image width to be a set number of pixels larger than its current width.  Be sure to keep the aspect ratio however so the height is changed proportionately.  I like to use 400 pixels for signatures and 250 pixels for marks.  For instance if the signature is now 375 pixels wide, resize it to be 400 pixels wide.  A mark will usually be just a small character.  If it were 27 pixels wide, I would change it to 250 pixels.

The idea is to make the writing easy to read by enlarging it.  It also helps to be consistent so all your signatures will have the same size.  Thus I tend to use 400 and 250 pixels, respectively.

Step 3f

Step 3g:  For signatures, change the canvas size of the image, in height only, so that it is the same number of pixels high as it is wide.  This makes the image a square.  For instance if the signature is now 400 pixels wide, expand the canvas in height only to 400 pixels high.  Keep the canvas width the same.

For marks, change the canvas size in both height and width to be 300 pixels, or a set number of pixels larger than the image width.  In this example, the mark is already 250 x 250 pixels, so I changed the canvas size to be 300 x 300 pixels.

In both cases, use the option to keep the image centered vertically and horizontally when you change the canvas size.

Step 3g

Making the image square is an important step.  Most portraits of people are higher than they are wide.  If you kept the signature wider than it is high, your genealogy program may display it exceptionally large, or exceptionally small.  A square image will be treated like other portraits.

Step 3h:  Now resize the image to be 300 pixels wide.  Since it is already 300 dpi in resolution, this should result in an image that will print as a 1 inch by 1 inch square image.  On a computer screen, this usually gives adequate resolution and detail.  You may want to experiment however.  If you use the image for other purposes besides your GED-GEN family group sheets, you may want a different size.

Step 3i:  Finally, save your image as a GIF file.  This usually results in a smaller file size than a JPG image.  You could save it as a JPG or PNG if desired.

Now you can add “portraits” of your ancestors using the scrapbook feature of your favorite genealogy program.  Instead of their likeness, you will display their signature or mark.  You can also use GED-GEN to display these “portraits” on your family group sheet web pages.

Annie Barnes kindly wrote about GED-GEN in her blog article Follow Friday: GED-GEN Review – GEDCOM to Web Pages from January 2011.

When you export a GEDCOM file from your genealogy program, it may not specify primary facts properly.  If it doesn’t, your GED-GEN web pages may display secondary facts instead.

Suppose you found two different dates of birth for a particular individual.  One of the dates is the generally accepted date, but you also want to keep a record of the other date.  You would therefore create two birth facts, one for each date.  Most programs allow you to specify a primary date, which is the date to use in reports and charts.

The GEDCOM file may tell a different story however.  According to the standard:

The occurrence of equal level numbers and equal tags [e.g., BIRTH tags] within the same context imply that multiple opinions or multiple values of the data exist.  The significance of the order in these cases is interpreted as the submitter’s preference.  The most preferred value being the first with the least preferred data listed in subsequent lines by order of decreasing preference.

Unfortunately the standard does not impose an order, except to say the most preferred order is primary first.  However it also gives no mechanism to specify a preferred value except by the order of the tags.  This leaves the door open to genealogy programs to export tags in any order they wish.  Although, the implication is they should list primary facts first.

GED-GEN, being a program that reads GEDCOM files, assumes that primary facts are listed first, followed by secondary facts.  If your genealogy program doesn’t do this, you are likely to see secondary facts displayed in place of primary facts.

Take for instance RootsMagic 4.  It uses a proprietary tag to identify a primary fact, then lists facts in the GEDCOM file in order by date.  If the primary fact date is later than a secondary fact date, the secondary fact is listed first.

Fortunately, RootsMagic allows you to specify the sort order of facts using an internal “sort” date field.  To keep your primary facts sorted in correct order, you must enter sort dates for secondary facts so they appear after the date of the primary fact.  Hopefully this artificial contrivance will apply to only a few cases.  That is, only when the secondary fact date is before the primary fact date will you need to change the “sort” date of the secondary facts.

Confusing, I know.  As a work-around, GED-GEN could look for the RootsMagic-specific tag that indicates a primary fact.  This is something I am considering.

This is not the only subtlety missed by some genealogy programs.  For instance the GEDCOM standard prefers that children in a family record be listed chronologically by birth.  Family Tree Maker ignores this and exports children in a different order.  Here a work-around is more complicated.  Not only would GED-GEN have to parse the birth date of each child, but children that do not have birth dates indicated must be placed in some order.

It’s too bad that you can sort a family’s children in Family Tree Maker, but the ordering is not carried in the GEDCOM file you export.  So if you were to import the same GEDCOM file, the children would no longer be sorted chronologically.

Normally a GEDCOM file is “self-contained.”  That is, if a family record is referenced within the file, that family record should also exist within the same file.  In many cases I found that a record for an individual referenced other spousal family records.  However those family records were not included in the same GEDCOM file.

Although GED-GEN performs extensive error checking, the unexpected absence of the whole family record causes a problem.  This error condition will be corrected in the next release of GED-GEN.

As a temporary work-around to this problem, if you export a GEDCOM file from geni.com, please import that file into your genealogy software program as a new, temporary database.  Then export a new GEDCOM file from your genealogy program, which should produce a valid GEDCOM file.  Finally, run GED-GEN using the valid GEDCOM.

The reason is, GED-GEN relies on a “scrapbook” flag that most genealogy programs use to determine whether a particular item is included in its scrapbook.

However some genealogy programs, and online family tree websites, may not include such a flag in the GEDCOM file they produce. By default, GED-GEN assumes a multimedia item should not be included in the gallery if the scrapbook flag is absent.  The original intent of this behavior was for privacy. It was thought an item should be excluded unless it is specifically included.

In fact, a scrapbook flag is not actually part of the GEDCOM standard and is therefore a proprietary flag. Its value will vary between genealogy software programs and it may be absent altogether.

Unfortunately if your GEDCOM file does not include scrapbook flags, the default behavior of GED-GEN is to exclude your multimedia items. Instead, you must set the option to ignore scrapbook flags and include all multimedia items.

To do this in GED-GEN 1.8 or 1.8.1, click the Options button, then the Features tab.  On the Features tab, click the Multimedia tab, then the Gallery tab. Place a check mark in the option for Ignore “Scrapbook” flag (i.e., include all media).

Now when you generate your web pages, your multimedia gallery pages should also be generated.  If not, check the following:

• Your GEDCOM file must include multimedia records. Not all genealogy software includes multimedia items when you export a GEDCOM file.

• You must enable multimedia galleries in general.  Ensure there is a check mark in the option Enable multimedia galleries on the Gallery tab.

• You must separately enable each type of multimedia gallery you want to generate. This is done with the Enable multimedia galleries option on each of the Individuals, Families, Citations and Bibliography tabs.

• If you exclude living individuals for privacy reasons, and all your multimedia items are associated with living individuals, then of course no multimedia galleries will be generated.

Additionally, your genealogy program may use a different value for the scrapbook flag itself. For GED-GEN to recognize the flag, it must know which value your genealogy program uses. Click the Program tab, then the GEDCOM tab. Under the Special processing option, select the name of your genealogy program. If the value Normal (Default) does not work, and you do not see your program listed, please contact me and I will provide a customized value for your genealogy program.

Please download and install GED-GEN version 1.8.1 for a work-around to this situation.

If you previously imported a GEDCOM file from another genealogy program into your Family Historian database, that file might have included separate name parts like GIVN (given name) and SURN (surname). Since you do not normally edit those fields separately in Family Historian, they may, as you make changes to your database over time, become outdated.

When you export a GEDCOM file from Family Historian, it may include those outdated fields. GED-GEN gives priority to any optional name parts it encounters. If those fields are out of date, you will see incorrect names on your generated web pages. Therefore, when you change an individual’s name in Family Historian, you should modify the given name and surname too, if those separate fields are included for the individual.

As of version 4.1.1.4, RootsMagic still does not export source citations properly, either with or without source templates. In GED-GEN, please choose the option for RootsMagic and not RootsMagic Templates. See the “Special Processing” option under GEDCOM on the Program tab.

GED-GEN removes empty space and extraneous punctuation in the source citations exported by RootsMagic. Your citations and bibliography entries may be worded strangely, but all the information is still present.

For instance you could use your genealogy program to create a report listing only living individuals. You could then export the individuals in that report to a GEDCOM file and then run GED-GEN.

Keep in mind that if you update your family data, re-export a GEDCOM file, and re-run GED-GEN, the files generated may have different names.

If you add or remove families, or change which individuals are exported, your genealogy program might number the families differently. GED-GEN uses these family numbers to create unique web page file names.

See the discussion about Family Page References in the Help file for more details. Always test the links in your other web pages to verify they link correctly to your GED-GEN-generated files.

For example if the parents of a deceased child are living, and you exclude living individuals, the deceased child will appear on a family page without its parents listed. This creates a “gap” in the flow of your family pages for someone following the parental or spousal links. Such a page would only be reachable through the child’s name in the index.

A similar situation occurs if your GEDCOM file contains individuals that are not associated with a parental or spousal family. GED-GEN generates a family page for the individual, but it will contain no links to other family pages. Such a page is accessible only via the index.

Specify a death date for all deceased individuals. GED-GEN usually considers an individual living if no death date is given. If you have not specified a date of death for a deceased individual and you choose to exclude living individuals from your family pages, that individual will be excluded. For accurate results, if you do not know their date of death, specify UNKNOWN to indicate the event did occur.

Spell surnames consistently. GED-GEN compares exact spelling when it generates your surname and index pages. This means that names like “O'Brien” and “O' Brien” (with a space) will be treated as two different names. Be sure to spell them consistently.

Family Gallery

Follow these steps to create your own CSS file and add images to your links.

Step 1: Create or obtain your image files.

For readability, your images should be small. They should not interfere with the flow of text on the web page. If you don’t want to create the images yourself, I recommend the set of Silk icons available free at FAMFAMFAM. Once you download the set, browse through the icons and pick out some appropriate images to use with your links.

In this example, I chose pictures.png () for multimedia gallery links and script.png () for biography links.

Copy your chosen images to your destination folder. This is where GED-GEN places the web pages it creates.

Step 2: Create a CSS file.

Using an editor like the Windows Notepad program, open a new file. Use your mouse to select the sample contents below and copy it (press CTRL+C). Then in Notepad, paste the text using CTRL+V or the Edit | Paste command.

Change the file names and adjust the offsets as appropriate for your images. An image will appear as the background of the link anchor <a> element. The text of the link is padded on the left to make room for the image. For an image that is 16 pixels square, padding of 25 pixels works well.

When you are done editing the file, save it to your destination folder. This is where GED-GEN places the web pages it creates. Name the file custom.css. (You can choose any name for the file.)

Sample Contents for custom.css

/*
** Anchors for source, bibliography, individual
** and family multimedia gallery links
*/
.gg-asrc,
.gg-abib,
.gg-aind,
.gg-afam
{
padding-left: 25px;
background: url(pictures.png) no-repeat 5px;
vertical-align: middle;
}
/*
** Anchor for a biography link
*/
.gg-bio > a
{
padding-left: 25px;
background: url(script.png) no-repeat 5px;
vertical-align: middle;
}


Step 3: Include the CSS file in GED-GEN.

In GED-GEN, include custom.css as an external CSS file.

Click the Options button, then the Attributes tab. At the bottom is the field for External Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Click the Browse button next to this field. Locate and select custom.css and click OK.

Now you can re-generate your web pages and GED-GEN will include images in the links for multimedia galleries and biographies.

The above method is only one way of adding images. The use of background images avoids having to specify an image as part of the link label. It also avoids showing the link label underline under the image. One drawback though, if you print the web page, you must check the option to include background images.

You can make it easier to print your family group sheets by providing a separate Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file. This file optimizes the page display for printing. For example, since links are not clickable on a printed page, they are shown in normal font. Inter-page navigation links are hidden since they don’t work on paper.

Follow these steps to create your own CSS file and make your family group sheets easier to print.

Step 1: Create a CSS file.

Using an editor like the Windows Notepad program, open a new file. Use your mouse to select the sample contents below and copy it (press CTRL+C). In Notepad, paste the text using CTRL+V or the Edit | Paste command.

When you are done editing the file, save it to your destination folder. This is where GED-GEN places the web pages it creates. Name the file printable.css. (You can choose any name for the file.)

@media print
{
/*
** Since links are not clickable on printed paper,
** convert them all to regular text for readability
** and do not display inter-page navigation links.
*/
a
{
text-decoration:none;
color:black;
}
.gg-body A:link { color:black; }
.gg-body A:visited { color:black; }
.gg-body A:active { color:black; }
.gg-thmlnk,
.gg-lnksur,
.gg-lnkidx,
.gg-lnkbib,
.gg-lnkrep,
.gg-lnkfam,
.gg-lnkmed,
.gg-idxjmp
{
display:none;
}
.gg-idxnav a,
.gg-bibnav a,
.gg-repnav a,
.gg-thmnav a,
.gg-sldnav a
{
display:none;
}
/*
** Try to keep reasonable page-breaks
*/
.gg-tblimg,
.gg-tblimgpic,
.gg-cap,
.gg-bar
{
page-break-inside:avoid;
}
.gg-tblimg > tr
{
page-break-inside:avoid;
}
}


Step 2: Override your own styles if necessary.

If you already use your own CSS files to style your website, you may need to adjust those settings for printing as well. You can override your own styles in printable.css. For instance if you have a menu system, or you divide your pages into columns using CSS, you may want to hide certain elements or change formatting for best results.

You may need to explicitly override certain style elements. Here are some suggestions:

• font-size: Use explicit font points rather than relative sizes. For example, use 10pt rather than 90%.
• overflow: If you use the value hidden, it may prevent the entire page from being printed. Consider changing this to visible.
• width: The width may need to be set to 800 pixels or less to ensure everything fits on the printed page.
• background: Consider setting your background color to white.
• border: Consider removing borders if they make the page less readable.
• margin and padding: Consider readjusting margins and padding to reduce empty space on the printed page.
• display versus visiblity:display:none; hides an element and the space it occupies. visibility:hidden; hides the element but leaves the space it occupied.

Step 3: Include the CSS file in GED-GEN.

In GED-GEN, you can include printable.css as just another external CSS file on the Attributes tab. However not all Internet browsers handle the @media print directive properly. Some browsers will not interpret your print settings in a CSS file linked in this way. Therefore they will ignore your print customizations.

Instead, the link to printable.css should have a media="print" attribute. To do this in GED-GEN, click the Options button. Click the Headers tab, then Advanced, then Standard Pages, then the <HEAD> Block tab.

Under the Before </HEAD> field, enter:

<link rel="StyleSheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="printable.css">


Now click the Multimedia Pages tab, then the <HEAD> Block tab.

Under the Before </HEAD> field, enter:

<link rel="StyleSheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="../printable.css">


If you use CSS to style your website with more complicated constructs like menus, you may also need to specify CSS standards mode for visitors who use Microsoft Internet Explorer. Otherwise some of your print customizations may be ignored. To do this, insert a meta tag with http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible".

On both the Standard Pages and Multimedia Pages tabs, under the After <HEAD> fields, enter:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">


Of course if standards mode is incompatible with your website, you should omit the above line.

Now you can re-generate your web pages and GED-GEN will include a link to your printable.css file. When you use your browser’s Print Preview command, you should see your print customizations. If the settings are not quite right, you can re-edit printable.css, save it, then simply refresh the browser page. There’s no need to re-generate your web pages each time.

Use a text editor like Windows Notepad and create a web page file, say Lincoln.html. Enter the following lines as an example. You may wish to copy and paste these lines rather than re-type them. Change the two links to be the address of your desired website.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>Sample HTML Redirection</title>
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
<!-- Begin
function Redirect() {
window.document.location.replace("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_(president)")
}
// End -->
</script>
</head>
<body onLoad="Redirect()">
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_(president)">Click here</a>
for a Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln.</p>
</body></html>

In your favorite genealogy program, add Lincoln.html as a multimedia item in an individual’s scrapbook (or a family’s scrapbook). Then export a GEDCOM file and run GED-GEN. When you generate your web pages with multimedia galleries enabled, your “local” web page will be included like any other multimedia item.

A visitor to your website who views your multimedia gallery will see the actual website on the slide page for this item.

The above method uses JavaScript to retrieve the actual web page. Your visitor must be connected to the Internet, and have JavaScript enabled. If JavaScript is not enabled, they can click the link directly. There are other ways to cause automatic redirection, but this example gives the general idea.

When you test your generated web pages by viewing them on your local computer, you may not be able to play the video or audio files in your multimedia galleries. Your browser shows a question mark where the video or audio should display. Other types of multimedia files might be affected as well.

This behavior is by design. Due to security concerns, many Internet browsers restrict access to local files on your computer. The browser will not play certain files to avoid running any malicious programs, even though the files are your own video and audio files.

Once you transfer your pages to your website at your Internet Service Provider (ISP), and view them over the Internet, you should be able to play your video and audio multimedia items.

This symbol is a placeholder for a link to another family page. It is displayed in place of a spouse’s name, when that name should not or cannot be displayed. This occurs in two cases.

If an individual’s spouse is living and you have chosen to exclude living individuals, then “>>>” is displayed as the link to the individual’s family page. The living spouse will not appear on that family page, and therefore his or her name is not used as a link to the page.

If a child on a family page has children, ordinarily the name of the child’s spouse is used as a link to their family page. However, if the name of the spouse is unknown (i.e., empty), then “>>>” is displayed as the link. To avoid this situation, specify UNKNOWN for the names of any unknown husbands or wives in your family data file. Using this convention also allows unknown individuals to appear in the index.

If the text on your family pages is misaligned, or appears centered on the page rather than left-justified, or if some words appear exceptionally small or large, chances are it’s the headers and/or footers you specified.

Click the Options button, then the Headers tab. If you included any HTML formatting, be sure that you specify a closing tag for every beginning tag that requires one. For instance if you centered your family page header using <div align="center">, then don’t forget the corresponding </div> closing tag.

When you click the View button, GED-GEN attempts to launch your Internet browser to display a web page. An Internet browser is a program like Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. You may see the message: “This file either does not exist, it is not accessible, or there is no Internet browser associated with files of this type.”

First, the web page it is trying to display may not exist. If you click View before you have generated any web pages, there may not yet be a file to display. Secondly, a file is inaccessible if another program has it opened exclusively. This might occur if you are editing a file with another program and then try to view it at the same time using GED-GEN.

Otherwise your computer may not be configured to associate an Internet browser with web page files. Normally files with an extension of “.html” are automatically associated with an Internet browser. To make this association, follow your Internet browser’s instructions, or configure the file types in your Windows operating system. Check your computer’s help facility for instructions.

Probably not, but you can specify a different destination folder and then re-generate your web pages. GED-GEN uses relative folder paths when it generates the links between your family web pages. If you were to copy the generated files to another folder, chances are the relative paths would be different and the links would be invalid.

Why isn’t my web page background image visible?

Chances are you have not specified a proper relative folder path for your image files or the background image file. Verify that the image file exists in the relative folder path you specified. Also remember your image files when you transfer your GED-GEN pages to your website at your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Why doesn’t the link to a biography page bring up the biography web page?

Chances are you have not specified a proper relative folder path for your home page or biography pages. GED-GEN assumes relative paths for the links on the web pages it generates. Once you transfer your web pages to your website at your Internet Service Provider (ISP), an absolute folder path would probably not work.

For instance if you specify your home page file as “\public_html\index.html,” GED-GEN will generate a link using that path and file. However at your ISP, the “public_html” folder may really be “\users\account\yourname\public_html.”

A relative folder path is always relative to the destination folder you specify on the Files tab in GED-GEN. Thus if your destination folder is “C:\public_html\groups” and your home page is in “C:\public_html,” the proper relative path is “..\index.html.” The link on a web page in “\public_html\groups” would move up one folder to find “index.html.” This link will work on your computer and also after you transfer your web pages to your ISP.

The easiest way to specify a relative path is to click Browse next to the input field where you specify a folder or file name. This assumes you have already specified a destination folder.

If you include links to GED-GEN web pages on your own web pages, they may become invalid if you re-generate using a different GEDCOM file. Each time you export a GEDCOM file, your favorite genealogy program may renumber the families. This may happen if you add or delete families or you change which individuals are exported to the GEDCOM file.

GED-GEN uses a family reference number as the file name for each family page it generates. If this reference number changes, the name of the family web page file will also change. Consequently the link you define on your own web page must change too. You should always test the links in your own web pages after you re-generate web pages. Note the links in and between GED-GEN web pages will always be correct since they are re-generated each time.

If you choose to include source citations on the Features tab, you have the option of displaying footnotes either at the bottom of the family page, or in a separate frame window at the bottom of your browser. If you choose to display them in a separate frame window, then GED-GEN generates three Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files per family.

The first file instructs the browser to use two frame windows. The second file is the family page that is displayed in the top frame window. The third file contains the footnotes displayed in the bottom frame window. If you want to generate fewer files, then select the option for displaying footnotes at the bottom of the family page. Then only one HTML file is generated per family. It contains both the family page and the footnotes.

You have not entered dates in the date of death fields. GED-GEN usually considers an individual deceased if the date of death is not empty. If you do not know when an individual died, specify UNKNOWN before you export your GEDCOM file.

How you do this depends on your genealogy program. Some may use the terms DEAD or DECEASED. If it is another term, you should also run GED-GEN and click the Options button. Then select the Program tab. On the Program tab, select the GEDCOM tab and enter the term your genealogy program uses in place of DEAD or DECEASED.

You can also enable a cut-off year under “Privacy Filters” on the Features tab. Individuals born in or before the cut-off year are considered deceased. This method is less accurate because such individuals may in fact still be living.

If you choose to exclude living individuals on the Features tab, then living individuals will not appear at all. In this case GED-GEN will only process, and count, deceased individuals. If all individuals in a family are living, the whole family is excluded. An individual is usually considered living if there is no date of death specified.

Your GEDCOM file contains individuals who are not associated with any families. Since these individuals do not appear as children or as spouses on any family page, GED-GEN creates a family page for them. The only way to navigate to one of these “extra” family pages is via the individual’s name on the index page.

This situation may occur when you use your favorite genealogy program and do not enter a spouse or children for an individual. It may also occur if you restrict which individuals are exported to the GEDCOM file. Suppose you have entered an individual and their spouse to form a family, and only the spouse is living. When you later export only deceased individuals to a GEDCOM file, the spouse is not included. In this case the exported individual is not associated with any family.

If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer and you click on a link in a family page (or surname or index page), you may find that nothing happens. The web page doesn’t appear and there is no error indication displayed by the browser.

This problem only occurs if your web pages are on your local computer, before you transfer them to your website. Internet Explorer implements tighter security controls. It will not open a web page that is located on your local computer if it contains active content, such as scripts. However once you transfer your web pages to your website on the Internet, you and your visitors should have no problem viewing them.

In order to test the links on your pages before you transfer them to your website, you must tag each web page with the “Mark of the Web.” This is easily done in GED-GEN by clicking the Options button. Then click the Headers tab followed by the Advanced tab and then <HEAD> Block. In the After <HEAD> field there, type the following line:

<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->

Now click the Multimedia Pages tab and then <HEAD> Block and repeat the above line in the After <HEAD> field there too.

This will mark each web page generated as if it were downloaded from the Internet and thus bypass the local machine security mode. For more information, visit the Microsoft Developer’s Network and search for MOTW.

Transferring hundreds of files, one file at a time, with a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program can seemingly take forever. An alternative, if you have “Shell” access to your website account, is to use a file compression program like ZipGenius.

Compress all your web page files into an archive file and transfer that one file to your website. It’s a big file, but since it’s compressed, it will transfer much faster than all the files would individually. Then at your website, uncompress the file.

If your Internet Service Provider (ISP) runs the UNIX operating system, you can try the following steps. This is only an example. Your ISP may have different procedures or utility programs that accomplish the same thing.

1. On your home computer, use ZipGenius to create a g-zipped TAR file, named files.TAR.gz, containing all your web page files.
2. Transfer files.TAR.gz to your website using your favorite FTP program. You will want to place this file in the directory where your web pages will reside, say public_html/gen/fam for example.
3. Log into your website account at your ISP and bring up the command shell. You can use the Windows Telnet program for this. Or, your FTP program may allow you to issue UNIX commands directly.
4. In the command shell, change the current directory to the directory where you placed the archive file. For example you might issue these UNIX commands:
   • cd public_html/gen/fam
   • ls

   You should see files.TAR.gz in the fam subdirectory.

5. Issue the following two UNIX commands to uncompress the archive file and set the file permissions appropriately:
   • tar -zxvf files.TAR.gz
   • chmod 644 grp*.*

   This assumes your web page files have a prefix of “grp” as in grpmain.html, grpbase.css, etc.

Yes. I accept payments through PayPal. Please use the payment button on the Registration page. It is pre-configured with payment details and you will automatically receive your registration code.

When transferring your web pages to your website, remember to transfer the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file. GED-GEN automatically creates this file in your destination folder. It is usually named base.css, but will have the same file name prefix as the other pages (e.g., grpbase.css). If this file is missing, your family pages will appear without the colors, fonts, text positioning, and background image you specified.

Also remember to transfer all associated image files (.gif and .jpg) and your biography and narrative web pages to your website. These files must be transferred to the same relative folder paths on your website as they were to the destination folder on your own computer. If these files are missing or if they are in a different folder, the links to them will result in a “Page not found” error message.

In the un-registered mode, GED-GEN is limited to generating family pages for 500 families. When you register the program, this limit is removed.

There should be no upper limit to the number of individuals and families that GED-GEN can process. It depends on your computer system. The faster your computer processor, and the more memory it has, the faster it can process a large GEDCOM file. However a larger GEDCOM file will result in several megabytes worth of web pages. Keep in mind that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may also limit the amount of space for your website.

GED-GEN users report they successfully processed GEDCOM files containing more than 30,000 individuals. One has more than 79,000 individuals in 23,000 families.

No. GED-GEN creates web pages in family group sheet format. This format displays more information, and yet is still easy to navigate by clicking on the name of a parent or spouse.

Yes, the Multimedia Galleries feature will create gallery pages of the multimedia items referenced within your GEDCOM file. Gallery pages display small thumbnail images. Click on a thumbnail to display a slide page, which displays a larger view of the image. You can also link to the original image itself. In addition, you can display “primary” images as portraits for both individuals and family groups.