Introducing Family Line Highlighting

We have just released a new feature that traces bloodlines within family trees. Just pick a list of names whose bloodlines you would like to highlight and designate a color for each name. Now, whenever a name that is a Descendant, Ancestor or Related by blood (depending on which option you choose) to any of these names appears anywhere in your family tree website, that name will be highlighted with the corresponding color and "bloodline" icon. 

Click the "Bloodline" icon next to the name and TribalPages will compute and display a Graphical Relationship Map depicting how they are related. Each name and photograph (if available) in the relationship chain is displayed along with the narration of the relationship.

TribalPages is pleased to announce its new Reporting features for all its Family Tree websites. In addition to the realtime graphical ancestor, descendant and family charts, TribalPages members can now generate various printable reports (with pictures) for any name in their Family Tree. Some of the Narrative Reports being offered are Ahnentafel (aka Ancestor), Descendant and Family Group Charts.

Printable Narrative Reports

While graphical charts are easier to navigate on a computer screen they do pose some printing challenges.  Large charts, spanning several generations, are difficult to fit on standard printer paper.

In addition to being easier to print, our narrative reports contain a great amount of detail.  Included in each report are dates and places of birth, death and  marriage of ancestors, descendants, their spouses and children. They may also contain Events (like Christening, Religion etc), Sources and Citations.

TribalPages members can now customize their homepage by changing its layout and adding custom widgets.

Layout Manager

 Choose between the classic layout or the multi-column layout. With the classic layout your homepage flows from top to bottom. The multi-column layout adds a sidebar to the left or right of the main body of your homepage. You can add, remove or configure several custom widgets on your Homepage. To use this feature, login to your site as administrator, click "Home" in the menu, then click the "customize" button.

Tampa, FL (PRWEB) November 27, 2007 -- TribalPages.com, home to over 175,000 family tree websites, today announced the Beta release of their new Genealogy Maps. These new tools take location information already present in GEDCOM or online family trees, and provide a unique graphical view of a family history to answer some fundamental questions:

• Where Did We Come From? - The Ancestor Map shows all known locations from an individual's ancestors. Showing many generations at one glance, this map quickly show where a person's past lies.
• Where Did This Family Live? - The Family Map displays where the Parents and Children of an individual were born, allowing the family historian to walk step-by-step through the family's past just by following the links to each family member.
• Where Did They Go? - The Descendants Map provides a single view of how an ancestor's offspring spread throughout the world, and provides a fascinating view of how broad an impact a single individual can have.

We are enabling a new feature for our larger sites: Auto-Complete Direct Name entry.

On our smaller sites (less than 2,000 names), users can "jump around" using a drop-down list above the menu bar on their Tree pages (Family View, Ancestors, etc.). Here's a photo of the field on a small test site:

The problem is that as the number of names in a site grows, that drop-down list gets difficult to use, and then it starts to impact site performance (10,000 names in a drop-down list just doesn't work). For that reason, we've had to disable the drop-down for sites over 2,000 names.

TribalPages is very happy to announce the availability of our new Privacy Levels for all 200,000 Family Tree Websites.

This new feature allows site owners a tremendous amount of control over what information on their site is available, to whom, and under what conditions. This is a project that has been months in the making, and we want to thank the very patient and helpful Feedback Group who helped us get where we are.

Among many other options, sites can now allow public access to deceased relative information, while protecting living relative data with a Visitor Password.

Now that we can upload our photos by mail, let's really leverage that and make some magic happen. Many Applications let you send photos by mail. Our last installments looked at Picasa and iPhoto, but let's step a bit outside the box and do something really slick.

We're going to use one of the coolest applications out there: Google Earth. You've probably heard of it, and maybe even used it, but wait until you see how handy this can be for your Family Tree Site.

In fact, in less than 5 minutes, we're going to find a free aerial photo of a small-town church from my family history, and we're going to upload it to my TribalPages family tree site without ever leaving Google Earth!

In our last installment, we showed how the Picasa software from Google can be a huge help in managing your family photos and sharing them with TribalPages. We're huge fans of Picasa, and for the Windows platform, there really aren't many free competitors. However, for users of the Apple Mac platform, things are a bit different.

Modern Macs come with a set of great tools called iLife that help with all kinds of creative endeavors: iTunes for music, iMovie for creating home movies, and, most importantly for us, iPhoto for managing all of your photos. This great application provides the same type of photo manipulation and organization that we saw with Picasa, with the added benefit of already being installed and ready to go on every Mac out there.

In this part of the tutorial, we're going to show how to use iPhoto and our new Email Tool to send all of your family history photos to your TribalPages site.

Sending your photos to your family tree website by email

In case you haven't heard, TribalPages now lets you upload your family photos to your TribalPages site via email! After setting a four digit PIN for your account, you can send photos to your site, just like you send them out to your family - with your favorite email program!

What's great about this feature isn't just how it makes it easy to upload lots of photos quickly: it's all the different tools and websites out there that you can now use directly with your family tree website!

In this series of tutorials, we're going to walk you through some of the most interesting and exciting ways we've found to use the new email upload feature. If you've found something even better, just drop us a note, and we'll add a column about it. If you have trouble, just let us know in the Technical Forums.

Getting Organized: Picasa brings sanity to family photo collections

Picasa is Google's tool for finding, organizing, and managing your photos. And it's simply wonderful. And with our new Email Upload tool, you can use it to manage your TribalPages photos as well!

Tampa, FL May 8, 2007 -- TribalPages.com, a leading online genealogy hosting service, is now providing two powerful tools to help customers manage their family photos and genealogy records. Released today, their email upload tool lets family history buffs add photos and images to their family tree website as simply as they send pictures to their family.

"At TribalPages, we pride ourselves on how easy our free family tree websites are to use -- it's really what sets us apart. This new tool lets our users attach pictures to an email and send it just like they would to their parents or grandkids," explains Vandana Rao of TribalPages, "We also love the way it lets our site owners make the most of programs like iPhoto, Picasa, Google Earth and other great tools that let you send pictures by email very easily."