Fun Stuff You Can Do with Weebly

Well, okay, you can almost certainly do this with other web hosting companies, too. But it’s really easy on Weebly, and that’s why I’m doing it.

I’ve been playing around with using Weebly to create a family tree/genealogy toolbox website - Greta’s Genealogy - about my ancestors and my husband’s ancestors. I am not using my genealogy program to do this, but am creating it page by page, link by link. This way, not only do I not have to wait until I can update my program to the latest version and learn how to use it to create web cards, I can tailor the pages the way I want to.

While it probably would have been enough just to put up the family lines, hanging out in the genealogy blogging community has had its effect: I knew I should somehow deal with the issue of sources.

But how? A number of genealogy programs that can be used to build a family tree website incorporate ways to include footnotes, where you can click on the footnote number and it will take you to the source citation.

I wanted something like that. I figured I would set up a source page, insert the footnote numbers on the family pages, and link them to the source page. But I decided I would like to add something more.

When I was creating family tree pages, I noticed that there are four different kinds of links that can be made:

1. Links to another website,
2. Links to another page on my website,
3. Links to a file on my website, and
4. Links to an e-mail address.

Number 3 was the one that interested me. You can, of course, insert images on the pages, but I don’t want to include too many images that will clutter up the pages; most of the images I will be using directly on the pages will probably be photographs.

So here’s how the links work:

Family page with footnotes (they are the small red things in this picture) (or you can link to this page here):

Clicking on the footnote number takes you to the source page (or you can link to the source page here):

The footnote is in turn linked to the image of the source (or you can see the source here):

So far I have just done one footnote, to see whether this works the way I want it to (it does). I can’t say that I’ll be adding every single footnote right away; I’m still doing a lot of experimentation, and I really do want to get the names out there as soon as possible. And that is working, too - I got my first Google Alert from the site the other day. As a matter of fact, it’s the first Google Alert I’ve received since I set up several earlier this year, so now I know that Google Alerts is working, too.

I am actually using my Reunion program for some of the items at Greta’s Genealogy. Right now I am using descendant reports for the pages of the siblings of my direct ancestors, and later I would like to have some cool charts to use, such as those Linda McCauley of Documenting the Details has put up on her family tree website, McCauley, Lanier, Hankins, Hopkins & Taylor Families. And she is not the only blogger I plan to steal ideas from emulate: Valerie Craft of the Begin with Craft blog has some neat features on her site, Begin with Craft - in particular I like the Google Maps there.

Sheesh, what a geek I am.

And that is my disclaimer: Weebly did not pay me anything to write this. They didn't have to; I just wanted to geek out. And to think - I probably wouldn't be doing any of this stuff if I hadn't started hanging out with the genealogy blogging crowd.