Ancestorium.com blog moving back here

We’ve been wondering what to do with the blog on the Ancestorium.com family tree collaboration site that my cousin Hamish Maclaren and I co-facilite with other kith and kin. As mentioned there, part of the problem is that we were never able to fully integrated the TNG Family Tree software with the WordPress tool we use for the blog. And that has ended up with us having basically two different looking sites on the same URL.

160,000+ individuals now on Ancestorium.com

My cousin Hamish has been busy compiling a number of family trees which we have recently uploaded on to the Ancestorium.com collaborative family history project we have been working on with our not so distant cousin Kathryn Neville. The site combines a WordPress blog with the The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding engine developed by Darrin Lythgoe.

There’s over 160,000 ancestors now, and we are in the process of creating family index pages. The idea being that these family pages help provide some context about the branches being researched together with sources. And hopefully some anecdotes and other material to avoid the site becoming just a database of who begat who.

To kick things off we have complied the following pages as examples:

• Birtwistle Family
• Kirby Family

We’ll be adding more soon, hopefully in collaboration with those researching those families.

New site coming soon at Ancestorium.com

Just to let you all know that this site will be coming to an end soon. I am embarking on a new collaboration with my Hamish Maclaren and Kathy Neville. This will include a new site and you can see the prototype at Ancestorium.com.

What we are attempting to do is threefold:

1. Be able to publish blog posts and also create pages along sames lines as here
2. Incorporate a searchable database of those ancestors we have discovered and make these discoveries publicly available
3. Encourage others to join our collaboration and add/merge their family research

As mentioned on the new site, please bear with us as we work out how to integrate Darrin Lythgoe’s amazing The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG) engine.

We are just getting our heads round both the importing GEDCOM information (particularly how new trees can be added/merged) and also how the engine is better integrated into the site via the TNG WordPress Integration PlugIn.

Still having a little teething trouble but you can see the search box and links to other functionality here. And if you follow this link you can see an index for Birtwistle ancestors contained in the test GEDCOM file Hamish has uploaded.

So we’ve managed to get quite far in a very short space of time thanks to Darrin and support team at Simply Hosting he recommended. We haven’t managed to integrated TNG in WordPress as elegantly as plug-in co-author Roget Moffat has on his site here.

For starters, it would be great to understand how he modified that page to create front-end to Darrin’s TNG within his site. Plus it would be great to work out how we integrate the TNG menu into WordPress sidebar on rest of site, and optionally add a search box there, too. That has defeated us so far and so we might some help from someone a little more techie than us.

Hopefully, good news on that soon.