Pining for a Pedigree Chart

I'm "back" home after three days as a virtual RootsTech attendee. While not as tired as those who traveled to Salt Lake City and are now traveling home, my head is still spinning. My thanks to the hundreds of people (at least) who produced such an engaging and enlightening conference and allowed us to attend from afar.

After watching Laura Prescott's Publish Your Genealogy Online on Friday I spent much of the next day rethinking my approach to my nascent website (started in 2010 and still not live - surely the longest gestation period ever). My website focuses on several different family groups of 3 or 4 generations. I use a free site (great price) but have been so frustrated in my efforts include graphic layouts or reports generated by my software program, Legacy.

I hadn't considered Legacy's web design capabilities. But after Prescott's presentation, I looked again at one of my favorite sites, Linda McCauley's Linda's Family Tree. Much of her material was generated by Legacy. Linda has been generous with advice and information and I knew that her choice of self-hosted site, and the option of uploading Legacy's web pages, was not going to work for me.

But I really liked the way her pages link through the small pedigree charts. I went back to Legacy and began experimenting with it's web page styles. I produced examples of each, examined them on my browser, and found the format I'd admired on Linda's site - the Pedigree style.

I realized I could produce pages for only the small groups I was working with. The pages generated were not exactly what I wanted, but they were far closer than anything I'd come up with before.

But there I stalled. The free sites I've been working with do not, as in DO NOT, accept ftp uploads, the only way I could transfer the linked pages as a unit to a web site. And while there are some sites that do (RootsWeb), I need the WYSIWYG "webpages for dummies" interface that Google or Weebly have.
I know almost nothing about HTML, the language used in web page design.

I stewed on this for quite a while before accepting the easy route of using pages produced by my software was a no go. But I was still fixated on that little pedigree chart at the top of the page. Had to have it.

In the end, I got it. It's not the easiest solution - I still have to generate each page and all the links - but I have a template that works well. In my next post I'll share how I did it.