The family page in WeRelate brings all the people and places associated with this family together in one nice, neat package. WeRelate creates a family page for each parent combination. An individual with multiple spouses will generate multiple family pages. In addition, each person will belong to another family page as a child of that family.
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Here is a view of the top part of the family page for one of my Barker families. A lot of this content is generated either from my GEDCOM import or from information entered into the form area at the top of the edit screen for this family. The husband and wife are listed prominently on the page along with their vital information. Each person’s name is a link to their WeRelate person page. Places link to the appropriate place page. In small print just above the husband and wife’s names, you’ll see links to the family page for each one’s parents. So, it’s easy to move up and down the generations from these pages.
In the left sidebar, you see links to edit this page, look at its history, the trees associated with it or the other pages that link to it. You can see who’s currently watching this page and turn on/off watching for yourself. The list of people watching the page links back to their user pages so you can see more about them and make contact.
Below the list of children is where the narrative for this family begins.
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Just below the narrative is the image gallery and then the reference area. The images in the gallery may also be included in the narrative. The reference area contains both source information and notes included for this family.
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In this example, I’ve chosen a family with little associated research to make it easier to show the form’s layout.
The editing screen is quite simple. There’s fields to enter the page name for the husband and wife. Fields for marriage information – notice you can include links to sources, images and notes here. I don’t yet know the date of this couple’s wedding so I don’t have any sources or notes for them yet, but I do have a wedding photo. You see it listed in the images as I2. Once I have the marriage info, I’ll just enter “I2″ into the image box and it will be included with the marriage information. Sources and notes are also automatically numbered as you add them. You use those IDs to reference them in your forms and narrative.
Save page section
As with any page in WeRelate, it’s always good to include a note describing the changes made to this page. This information is recorded in the History section of the page. The example below shows what the history for this page looks like.
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Here you can see who made changes and when. You can follow the links to each contributor’s user page or talk page and see what other things that person has contributed. You can compare selected versions of this page and your can roll back the view to an earlier version.
It may seem like I’m skimming over the importance of the family page. To some degree I am. Next week, we’ll look at the person page, then we’ll start looking at how all this comes together and ways to put it to work.
Thank you for all the blogs you have written about WeRelate. I really like the way it works, much more so than other online family trees. I have registered but not posted any data yet and won’t until my organizational project is complete (several months, probably). My only concern about WeRelate is its survivability. I’m hesitant to spend a lot of time on it if it won’t be around years down the road. Email me if you’d prefer not to comment in your blog.
That is a concern – especially these days. First, they are backed by the Allen County Library and there’s an impressive group included in their advisory board. They accept donations and whenever I have a few bucks to spare, I hit the donate button. I don’t remember them ever doing a fund-raiser, so I’m hoping that means they are in good financial standing.