Regular visitors may have noticed that Tonia’s Roots got a new look today!  I hope you like it as much as I do.

Reasons for Redesigning

• Although I really liked the old look, I was getting somewhat tired of it.
• The footnote plug-in that I use was not playing well with the old theme and occasionally caused really weird output on the home page.
• I wanted a cooler color scheme for summer (the old one was making me hot when I looked at it).

How I Did It

I’m somewhat comfortable playing around with colors and fonts in CSS, but when it comes to structural changes (moving a sidebar from one side to the other, for example), that is beyond my skill level.  I knew that there were WordPress frameworks available now that have a lot of customization capabilities, so I started checking them out.  Most have a fee, which I’m okay with, but then I found Atahualpa.  It’s a customizable WordPress framework that has well over 200 options.  And it’s free.  I decided to download it and take a look before I went with a premium theme.  With the aid of Firefox’s Web Developer Plug-In and the fabulous Atahualpa forums, I was able to make the new theme look pretty much exactly the way I wanted.

What’s Changed

Other than the color palette, not much is different.  A few things have moved around.  There is now a right sidebar on all but the Family Tree page.  The blog search and tag cloud have both moved over there.   A new Archives page contains the monthly archives that used to be available via drop-down menu in the left sidebar.  The left sidebar still holds the category menu, my twitter feed, and a cute new twitter icon courtesy of (MySiteMyWay), which can be clicked to follow me on Twitter.  The About page and the Family Tree page can be found on the top menu bar, instead of via tabs in the header image.  I’ve also moved the RSS feed subscription link to the top menu bar, which makes it much more visible than in its old position on the sidebar and I’ve added an email subscription link.

One of the changes I’m most excited about is the ability to include image thumbnails as part of the post excerpts on the home page.  A downloadable script is available that will let you do this, but it’s built right in to Atahualpa.

Previous Versions

This is actually the fourth redesign since I first launched Tonia’s Roots.

The first version was a straight-out-of-the-box (almost) TNG template.  I don’t have a screen shot of my own site, but here’s the template demo image:

This was okay and worked great for the first year.  But I started really wanting to add a blog to the site.  I had created a separate blog on Blogger and I would link back to this site, but I really wanted it all integrated.  I also wanted to use WordPress instead of Blogger.  Then I found someone who had created a CSS style sheet that could simulate the integration of WordPress and TNG.  This mashup didn’t work for me straight out of the box; I had to do some research to figure out how to fix the bugs and this is also when I learned how to customize CSS.  This version worked fine for about nine months, but every time there was a TNG upgrade, I had to do a lot of work on the integration.  Since I don’t write code, I sort of had to learn all over again every time, which was tiring.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an image of my WordPress-TNG mashup, but it was a really pretty soft blue with yellow accents.

Then, the TNG-Wordpress plug-in came out.  I was hesitant to use it at first, and frankly, it’s not perfect, but it is SO much easier to implement than the mashup.  I found a WordPress theme with a layout that I liked, and then used what I had learned about CSS to change the color scheme and personalize a few other things.

I’m still really proud of that version, but like I said, I was starting to get tired of it.  All of the above experiences led to the new Tonia’s Roots.

I will be futzing around with a few small details over the next few days.  If there are features you wish were here, or things you think would make this site easier to use, please let me know, via a comment below.

The software that I use to run the genealogy portion of this website (the excellent TNG), is fairly intuitive, but sometimes it helps to have instructions.  All the genealogy data can be found by on the “Family Tree” tab and these instructions apply only to that section of the website.

The most common question people have is “how do I find the person I’m looking for?  There are several ways to find people in the genealogy database.

Browsing surnames is one of the easiest ways to see individuals who are included in the database.  The main “Family Tree” page offers several ways to browse through surnames.  The bottom right portion of the screen (see the highlighted portion of the image below) displays the 30 most-common surnames in the database. (Tip:  Click on the  images to see larger versions.)

Click on any surname to see a list of all people with that surname.

If you would like see all surnames starting with a specific letter, you can click two places.  Then, click on any surname in the resulting list to see all people with that surname.

If you would like to see more than 30 of the most common surnames, you can choose how many surnames to display here, then click go.  The default is 100, but you can change that to any number.  You can also click on “Show all surnames” to get an alphabetical list of all surnames in the database.

You can get back to the Surname page from anywhere within the “Family Tree” tab by clicking on Surnames from the Genealogy Menu in the sidebar, by clicking “Home”, or simply by clicking on the “Family Tree” tab at the top of the page.

This post is part of an ongoing series about navigating and using the Tonia’s Roots website.  To see all posts in the series, click here.

The “Family Tree” tab (above) contains a database of all my genealogy research.  I thought it would be helpful to provide a navigational overview.

The Genealogy Menu is visible in the sidebar whenever you are in the “Family Tree” section.  It contains links to:

• Surnames includes a list of the top 30 surnames in the database, ordered by number of people, as well as links to all surnames alphabetically.
• What’s New includes recent additions and changes.
• Documents includes census images, military records, book excerpts, and more.
• Cemeteries shows where relatives are buried.  Drill down by location to see each cemetery and the people buried there.
• Headstones contains all the headstone photos I have, with links to cemetery and person pages.
• Places is a high-level overview of the locations where people lived, including the top 30 localities, ordered by number of places within that locality.  Click on the magnifying glass icon next to any location to see the people who lived there.
• Notes contains all my research notes.  Click on the link to see the complete family or person page to which the note refers.
• Dates and Anniversaries defaults to events that happened on today’s date in history.  You can search for any event on any day using the search fields at the top of the page.
• Statistics contains a summary of the database; see the number individuals, families, unique surnames, documents, sources, and more.
• Contact Us – click here to send me an email.

This post is #1 of an ongoing series about navigating and using the Tonia’s Roots website.  To see all posts in the series, click here.

My main genealogy software is The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding.  This software can be used as a stand-alone product or with a desktop genealogy program.  I use Legacy for a few things, but use TNG for all my data entry and storage.  If you want to learn more about the features and benefits of TNG or see a demo, click here.  To see how my data is displayed, click any of the links under “Genealogy” in the sidebar Family Tree in the menu bar above, then click any surname, the links in the Genealogy sidebar or the drop-down menus.

10 Things I Love about TNG:

1. TNG is extremely flexible.  If there are aspects that you don’t like, you can change the code.  For example, the default source citation displays the source short name; I prefer to display the long name, so a quick change to the the php files changed this on my site.  Disclaimer here:  I am not in any way, shape, or form a “programmer.”  There are great folks on the TNG Forums, instructions in a Wiki, User groups, and even a recently released book to help you make changes.  All I have to do is follow directions.
2. I have access to my records anywhere there is an Internet connection.  This means that if I don’t want to take my laptop to the library, I don’t have to.  Or if I’m at my mom’s house and a genealogy question comes up, I just pull up my website.
3. I can load a copy of the program on a USB drive, so that I also have access to my records if I”m somewhere without an Internet connection.   This requires a little extra work, but is very handy.  I took my laptop to my grandmother’s house last Christmas and spent the afternoon looking at files and answering questions from the family.  Maybe some (more) of them will get the genealogy bug!
4. The admin interface is very intuitive.  Adding new people, pictures, documents, etc. is very easy.
5. The advanced search feature is unparalleled.  Frankly, TNG’s search has spoiled me for all others.  It is SO easy to find who or what I’m looking for, from both the user side and the admin side.
6. I’m not stuck with out-of-the-box reports.  Other programs have good reporting features, but I can create almost any kind of report I want to with TNG.
7. There is an option to integrate Google Maps into your site.  I’m a visual person and just love being able to see the places that my relatives lived.
8. I can put as much or as little detail as I want to in my source citations.  As I’ve progressed in my genealogy research, I’ve become more vigilant (some would say fanatical) about citations.  I try to follow the Elizabeth Shown Mills methods, which I can easily do with TNG.
9. I can easily customize Ancestor charts to display more or less information, depending on my needs at the time.  Sometimes I only want to see names, sometimes I need dates and places, sometimes I need to export to pdf – all possible.
10. The Relationship Calculator – I really like being able to quickly calculate the relationship between any two individuals in my database.

TNG is not perfect; no program is.  But the changes I would make are very minor and Darrin Lythgoe (the author) is very receptive to user requests.  I’ve tried both Family Tree Maker and Legacy and they just don’t do it for me.  I love TNG.

I recently purchased a copy of Legacy Family Tree Software, largely because I wanted to try out its Source Writer feature.  I had read good reviews of the product; it was supposed to be easy to use, with a rich set of features, and advanced reporting options.

I found the data entry interface to be clunky and counterintuitive.  I spent a whole day trying to figure out how to find my way around and enter a few facts.  Contrast this with TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding), which I think is very user-friendly and which I was able to begin using immediately after installing.

While I won’t be using Legacy as my main database, it does have some very useful features, so I will keep it on my computer to use in an auxiliary capacity.  The features I have most helpful include:

1.  Source Writer is a template-based system through which one can drill down, making the appropriate selections and filling in the template to create perfectly-crafted citations for the myriad of sources that genealogists access, such as birth records, marriage records, property records, etc.    I didn’t like the way the citations uploaded to TNG, which is another reason I chose not to use Legacy for data entry.  What I’m doing instead is creating the citation in Legacy, then I can figure out how to configure the source in TNG.  They won’t always display in the exact same format, but I can ensure that all the appropriate information is included in the citation.  Here is an example:

Murray County Marriage Book N, 1907-1925, (Murray County Clerk of Probate Court, Chatsworth), 431, Kindrick-Whitner, 1922 (Reliability: 3), 26 Nov 2008.

2.  USA County Verifier verifies the validity of all US counties in your database and generates reports of errors, including places that have never existed as a county in that state and counties that were not in existence on the date of your event.  What makes this even better is that you can do a search, filtering the data however you choose,  then run the county verifier based on the search results.  For example, I ran a search on all Hemphills, then ran the County Verifier, which produced just over a page of errors that I can fix. 

3.  Search feature – While in general, I think the TNG search feature is beyond excellent, occasionally I can’t make it return the results I want.  Legacy is filling the gap nicely.  For example, I was preparing for a trip to a county probate office and wanted a list of all individuals married, born, and/or died in that county.  I can get the births and deaths easily with TNG, but not the marriages, whereas Legacy can produce reports of all three.  As an added bonus, Legacy prints the resulting report in tabular format with a row in between results; the blank row turned out to be very handy for taking notes while at the probate office.

Ultimately, the Legacy features I was interested in are the ones that I like and will continue to use, while maintaining my TNG site as my main database.

Inspired by DearMyrtle and following the lead of Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings, here is a quick review of last year’s posts:

Jan 2008 – Thomas Young Hemphill McEntire – I found an interesting biographical sketch on my 4x great-grandfather.

Feb 2008 – John Burgin, Esquire – I came across an ancestor (John Burgin, born 1777), who was styled, John Burgan, Esqr., in the 1820 census.

Mar 2008 – Revolutionary War Soldiers of Western North Carolina: Burke County, Volume I – I found a great source record last week at the library.

Apr 2008 – Columbus Public Library – On a recent business trip, I visited the Columbus Public Library in Columbus, GA.

Sep 2008 – Website Update – This summer, TNG came out with a new version of the software I use to power the family tree portion of  the website.

Oct 2008 – The Moral of the Story. . . – Since my last post, I’ve decided to completely redo both the genealogy site and the blog and now I’m left with a mess that includes not only a partially functioning database and loss of all my media links, but also a renewed determination to make this thing work like I want it to.

Nov 2008 – Where was the Ellis family in 1808? – Two hundred years ago my Ellis relatives were in Jackson County, Georgia, South Carolina, and possibly North Carolina.

Dec 2008 – Where Was the Wyatt Lankford Family in 1860? – This week I’m looking for ancestors of Leaty (Lankford) West, whose gravestone I found several weeks ago.

This was sort of fun -  looking back at the year’s posts, identifying gaps and patterns, and generating ideas for 2009.

Update:  I no longer use the mashup described below.  I’m now using the TNG/Wordpress plug-in available here.

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Finally, the new look of the website, with WordPress and TNG integrated is unveiled!

As I posted a few weeks ago, I was attempting to follow directions to integrate WordPress and TNG.  I had a few problems, but after playing around and implementing some workarounds, it all works exactly like I’ve wanted since I first set up this website almost a year ago.

If you decide to go this route, I highly recommend setting up a webserver on your local machine so that you can work on a test site.  I used Wampserver.  I’ve also found this setup useful for working in TNG when I’m in an offline environment.  From a development standpoint, it takes a lot of the stress out when you don’t have to worry about breaking the live site.

The problems I was having with the mashup were related to the include paths to point to files in the “other” piece of software (i.e. from WP to TNG or from TNG to WP).  On my local machine, I was able to set up an include directory and put all the joint files in one place.  This requires that you have access to the php.ini file in order to point said file to your include directory.  I couldn’t figure out how to do this on the live site, so I came up with another solution.  I simply placed a copy of the joint files in the wordpress theme directory and also in the TNG directory.  It’s not as elegant, but it works.

Thanks to Bridget for all the work on her own site and for generously posting her mashup instructions.  I couldn’t have done this without her work and I could not be more happy with the results.

Since my last post, I’ve decided to completely redo both the genealogy site and the blog and now I’m left with a mess that includes not only a partially functioning database and loss of all my media links, but also a renewed determination to make this thing work like I want it to.

The Backstory

From the beginning, I’ve wanted a website that included a blog as the home page and the genealogy database (referred to hereafter as TNG) as a subfolder, with the two linked together, so that blog posts could be accessed from TNG and the TNG menus could be accessed from the blog. This is not easily accomplished with TNG, because of the way the style sheets are set up (however, it is still the best genealogy website software available; I certainly don’t want to switch). At the time (December 2007), I couldn’t find any examples of TNG websites that worked like I wanted; several people in the TNG forums were working on solutions, but none had achieved the kind of integration that I wanted.

My first priority was the genealogy database, so I decided to focus on that and set up the blog at Blogger, with simple links back to each on their respective homepages. This worked fine for a while, but I soon tired of editing the static html home page on the TNG site and of logging into a separate application to make blog posts (hence the lack of blog activity over the past few months).

The Past Week

I stumbled across a website that integrates WordPress and TNG exactly the way I want (and also includes some cool TNG mods). What’s more, the owner includes instructions on her site for accomplishing the mashup. I can’t really code on my own, but I can certainly follow directions. Oh, if it were only that easy.

So far, I’ve installed and reinstalled WordPress four times. I’ve edited all the files as directed, but I can’t get the theme to work; it’s just a gray screen. On the TNG side, I’ve tried moving the files into a subfolder, deleting, reinstalling, restoring, repeat, repeat, repeat. Each time, I discovered one thing I wish I had done differently.

However, I made one–almost–fatal flaw. The last time I did a reinstall, I uploaded a gedcom backup. I had exported said gedcom last weekend, before I started the TNG upgrade mentioned in the previous post, so I didn’t think I needed to do another export, as I had made no content changes during the week. In the midst of the upload, I realized that I hadn’t included media links when I exported the gedcom. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t get them back. I’ve decided I can live with it; I’ll have to manually link all my photos and other media.

The moral of the story? Do a fresh backup of everything, absolutely everything, whether you think you’ll need it or not.

This summer, TNG came out with a new version of the software I use to power my genealogy website. I had put off upgrading, because, frankly, I was apprehensive; I was afraid I would “break” the site and I wasn’t sure how much time would be required to redo all the modifications I had made. I know just enough about coding to be dangerous.

Since the weather wasn’t great yesterday, I decided to bite the bullet. I downloaded the upgrade, transferred all the files to my host, Simply Hosting, using Smart FTP. I followed the instructions step-by-step, until I got to the point where I was supposed to open the instructions from the website, rather than my local computer. I couldn’t figure out how to do that. So, I forged on as best I could, but, sure enough, the site was broken. I played around for awhile and finally figured out how to open the file using Legacy File Manager, rather than File Manager in cPanel. This allowed me to click on a link to run a script and voila the site was fixed.

However, as I had suspected, many of my prior mods were gone. Rather than try to fix them, I decided to switch templates to create a new look and feel. I had been thinking about doing this for awhile, so it made sense to spend the time modifying a new template instead of the old one. (TNG users: I switched from template 6 to template 4.) I had always liked the layout of template 6, but I found the brick red color scheme too harsh. I had changed many of the colors in the old template, so I knew I could change this one also.

I’m happy with the new layout, but I still have some work to do. My next post will be about the specific changes I’ve made and how I did it.

It was a busy week in research, sourcing, and design. I added a photo of my great-grandparents, Newt Ward and Rachel Johnson Ward and I obtained a copy of Rosa Ellis Roberts’ death certificate.

Probably the biggest change is the mapping feature added to the website. I discovered that my web software, TNG, offers the ability to link places to Google Maps through GPS coordinates. I spent one day last weekend cleaning up the place names in my database and adding some GPS coordinates. This is a big job and will take a long time to complete, but I’m a visual person and am very excited about being able to see the locations of events on maps.

That wraps up the week in Tonia’s Roots.