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Help/How To Navigate

How To Navigate This Site

Getting Around The Trees Searching Editing/Correcting Media/Photos
Other Features FAQ's

Welcome to our website. This page will give you a short overview of how to get around and get the most out of our site. This section will hopefully give you the basic navigation tools needed to make your visit both enjoyable and informative without a lot of difficulty. Please keep in mind that this section is in no way a complete how-to guide, and you may have to be a registered user and logged in (use

link above left) to see/use some of these features. Also, if you find any errors or want to make corrections or suggestions, you can learn how (see Editing/Correcting below).

Many of us use one genealogical program or another and nearly all of them have a very graphical look to them. You can see your family group sheets, display charts, etc. This website is much the same except that, instead of it being on your computer, it is on the internet. This walk through will introduce you to the primary functions of the site. This will work best if you open a second window and follow these steps in that window while referencing these steps in this window or, if you prefer, you can just stay here and use the links embedded in this page. In either case, open a new window to our home page (this link will do it for you!) to see the features there.

On the home page you will see links to the various sections of the site, links to Roni and Jerry's ancestors and to descendant lists of pre-selected ancestors, and a Search box on the right side of the page. The montage photo (upper right) of some of our ancestors may also be used as a link (by clicking on the photo of an ancestor) to a list of that ancestor's descendants.

How to get around the site:

To begin, click on any link and you will notice that every page contains a set of five icons directly under the site header. The function of each icon link is straightforward:

        Home - Takes you to the front page of the this website.
        Search - Takes you to the Advanced Search screen (see below).
        Print - Prints the page you are on to your printer without all the menu items.
        Logout/Login - Logout of your session or Log back in.
        Add Bookmark - This lets you keep a list of your favorite pages on this site. (Try this link above to save and bookmark this page.)

On the right hand side of the header, you will see three drop down menus: Find - Media - Info. Use these to quickly access any area of the site. If you hover the mouse (not click) you will see drop down boxes that give you 22 more menu options to help navigate this site (see the 22 icons below).

Surnames

Bookmarks

Places

Dates

Cemeteries

Photos

Documents

Headstones

Histories

Recordings

Videos

Albums

All Media

What's New

Reports

Statistics

Notes

Sources

Repositories

Help [This file]

How the trees work:

In the search box (right side of home page), put "Seibel" (without the quotes) in for the Last Name and "Joseph" (without the quotes) in for First Name and press <enter>.

This will give you a list of the results that were found to match. On this list, click on the name of the Joseph whose Person ID is "I1084" (Born 4 Apr 1912, New York, New York).

You are now at his individual page.

Take a few minutes to orient yourself with the layout. This is where the "meat and potatoes" of the website reside. All of the pertinent information can be seen in one view. Note that the page is divided into three sections -- the Personal Information for the Individual, his/her Parents, and his/her Spouse and Children (if any). Clicking on the "Group Sheet" link next to the appropriate Family ID will bring up either the parental Family Group sheet (parents and siblings, with the individual as a child) or the individual's own Family Group sheet (spouse and children, with the individual as a parent). Try these out.

Now let's look at the 6 tabs next to the "Individual" tab: Ancestors, Descendants, Relationship, Timeline, GEDCOM, and Suggest.

1) Click on "Ancestors" and you will find a dynamic chart The default view is the "standard" view (4 generations). (Note that each generation is shown in a slightly different shade, getting progressively lighter with each older generation.) Clicking on any of the names on the chart will take you to the individual sheet for that person.

You will notice that there are little blue arrows pointing down beneath many of the boxes. If you hover your mouse over the arrow (not click!) a mini-group sheet for that person will open. And, you can click on the names in that sheet to go to their tree entry. Clicking on any icon will show the next generation above (ancestors), and clicking on the icon will show the ancestry starting from the next generation below. Wherever you see the pedigree icon , you clan click to show the ancestry from that individual.

Also note that in the teal/green bar just above the chart, you can specify the number of generations you want to display (beware that the page will get increasingly wider and longer, requiring more scrolling, with larger numbers of generations), as well as various preferences regarding the chart.

Try out the other Ancestor views by clicking on the other types of ancestor charts: Compact, Box, Text, Ahnentafel, and Media. The latter displays both lines of parentage for any individual (check out Roni's and Jerry's ancestries from the home page) -- and lists that person's grand-parents, great-grandparents, and so on -- as far back as is known. The icon means that at least one photo, history, or other media item exists for that individual. The Ahnentafel chart (also known as an ascendants table) lists all the generations in tabular form, complete with all children and birth, marriage, death, and burial details if known. [See Wikipedia article on Ahnentafel for details.]

2) Now click on the "Descendants" tab. This will give you a listing of all the descendants of this individual.

The default view is the "Text" list, also known as a "descendant drop chart." Notice that in many places there is a little white box with a minus sign in it. Click this box and that branch of this tree will collapse to this position. Try it! Also, once the descendants are displayed in this text format, you can show a graphic view (with photos) of a specific branch of descendants from that ancestor by clicking the descendant icon next to the descendant whose chart you wish to display. This chart includes the siblings of each ancestor. Thus, the younger the individual, the greater the number of generations in the chart; and the greater the number of siblings in a family, the wider the chart becomes.

Try clicking on the other types of Descendant charts -- Standard (a traditional "tree" with photos), Compact (without photos), and Register (list of generations in tabular form, similar to Ahnentafel)-- to see these different views.

3) The next tab "Relationship" allows you to generate a box chart to show the relationship between this individual and any other person in your tree. To see it, click on the "Find" button under "Person 2" and search for "Jerome Liebowitz" (remember, last name on top). Select my name and click "Calculate".

4) The "Timeline" tab allows you to view this person's timeline, including a list of important (and some not-so-important) events that occurred during his lifetime. Hovering over the timeline with your cursor will reveal that individual's personal events (birth, marriage, births of children, death).

Timelines for up to four other people can be added to the page to show the timeline relationship between this person and the others.

You can also populate a timeline by finding any 2-4 individuals manually and thereby compare them across the ages. This gives you a unique perspective to see what was going on in the world during the lives of our ancestors.

5) The "GEDCOM" tab is for generating a GEDCOM file of this family (for importing into genealogy programs or for reading with a gedcom reader). However, this may be disabled if you are not a registered user or do not have the "permission" to download.

6) The "Suggest" tab allows you to "Suggest" any changes or additions and then automatically sends the information to us, so that we can evaluate your suggestion and add it to the database. Information on which individual you are referencing is automatically attached to the message when you make a suggestion using the Suggestion tab.

Search and Find

Where the people are ...

There are two primary ways to get to the records of an individual:

Clicking on "Surnames" - this will give you the master listing of surnames in the database and allow you to drill-down by surname, which will give you a list of people to choose from. Click on "show all surnames" to get an alphabetical listing of all surnames in the database.
Searching for a name in the database.

Searching in a snap ...

Do you know who you are looking for? Well then, you are already halfway there! Just use the Search box on the right side of the home page (surname on top!), and you will instantly be shown all the records in the database that match your request.

If you need to be more specific in who or what you are looking for, use the "Advanced Search" feature on the home page or by clicking on the search icon in the upper left hand corner of every page. There, you can specify several different criteria to search against, including birth and death information as well as spousal information. This is how to search for a woman when you know only her married name (use the "Spouse's Last Name" field). You can even search by event or place.

Editing/Correcting

As described above, the "Suggest" tab allows you to "Suggest" any changes or additions (corrections, updates, comments, or any other information); it then automatically sends the information to us, and we will take your suggestion and add it to the database. Information on which individual you are referencing is automatically attached to the message when you make a suggestion using the Suggestion tab.

If you are a registered user and have "tentative editing" rights, you will see an edit icon next to the fields that can be edited -- birth, marriage, death, burial (and, when indicated, other fields such as namesake and occupation). Be sure to look on the family's "Group Sheet" as well as the Individual's page for the edit icons. (When an individual's birth, marriage, or death information is missing, the icons are located on the family's Group Sheet, for some reason, instead of on the individual's page.) Clicking on the edit icon brings you to a form that you can fill out. The information then waits for us to "approve" the edit. However, different from the way the Suggest tab works, we are NOT automatically notified that you have made a tentative edit. We do look for these edits periodically; however, to be sure we know that you have made such an edit, please contact us via email.

Media/Photos, etc.

[to be added]

Other Features

[including Google maps and Snapshots, to be added]

Obviously there is much more functionality on the website but this walk through will be a very good intro to the system. Feel free to poke around; you can't break it. But if you find anything wrong, or page errors, please let us know so we can fix it!

Don't forget to sign-up and then login (use link above left) to get the full benefits and to view information on living relatives in your branch of the tree! (The site can remember your login for the future if you check the box that says "Stay logged in on this computer.")

We also maintain a list of Frequently Asked Questions that you may find useful.

Appreciation

This entire website is made possible by the excellent TNG (The Next Generation) software from Darrin Lythgoe. Visit Darrin's website for more information.

Thanks and appreciation are owed to Eddy Belew, Bret Rumsey, and Steve Winslow, whose TNG genealogy websites' help pages inspired this page.