Genealogy Chat

TP Support have posted on their own discussion board that they are working on sources & citations included in a GEDCOM file to be reproduced in a Tribalpages site. Good. If they have it working properly, (and the staff do seem to be receptive to customer criticism and suggestions for additional features, unlike ....) then it will represent proabably the best place to maintain an online tree. Looking for dedicated date fields for baptisms/burials next, and for support to reproduce approximate dates: bef2006, aft2006 & abt2006.

Mary I use 3 or 4 **** between each of the references in my Familytree Maker files - ie births ****census **** deaths. These come through as **** on tribal pages thus separating the text Works well for me, Sylvia

OC: Your own home-grown sources list is exactly the way that the GEDCOM specification implements them. You create as many as you like and call them what you like. When you cite a source for a particular person, the file will contain an line of text for each citation as part of each individual record, cross referenced to the source ID which will be listed at the very end of the GEDCOM file. You can open a GEDCOM file (it's just a text file) using any text editor (Notepad is just fine) and see how the information is assembled for yourself. What is annoying about the Tribalpages approach is that they have done their own thing. I have included sources and citations in my GEDCOM. It wouldn't be so bad if the conversion process just ignored elements of the file it wasn't going to handle properly, but to see citations (but with no reference to the source) reproduced as part of the Notes (which are a different thing, and exist quite separately in the data file), and all merged together as one meaningless note, is just daft.

I find the code used for Tribal pages very annoying. The Notes all run into one another, not separated by paragraphs; the only way to separate them is to use html code. But if you regularly upload your tree to Tribal Pages from a family tree program, that means putting the html code into your family tree program, which looks terrible (I use PAF - I don't know whether the same problem arises with other programs).

Clive This isnt a problem for me because I always input directly into my TP tree anyway, but I agree it is annoying if the thing doesn't work. But - before they recently introduced this facility on TP, I made up my own Sources and Citations list, which I numbered myself. OK, this is not an automatic facility but it worked for me. I just invented a person called 'Source References' lol and listed them in there. OC

Several GR members have versions of their family tree on the tribalpages site too. Tribalpages recently added a sources/citations feature, but I have to report that it is not compatible with the GEDCOM specification. If you import a tree to tribalpages including sources and citations, the sources list will not become populated with the sources that you have defined, but the comments associated with the citation of each source will be merged together and appear as notes associated with each tree name. The result is a real mess, and is almost as silly a thing to have done as to introduce the updated family tree features here, which don't work properly either. Grr! Is there anywhere where you can publish a decent online site, or should I just create my own, and find some webspace for it?

See below.