Almost every major genealogy website has an ever-growing collection of online family trees, and many other websites exist primarily for hosting, searching, and linking family tree files. Adding your own trees is a great way to network with cousins and other researchers, make data accessible on the go, and contribute to the world’s genealogical knowledge. Whether you’re creating a family tree from scratch on sites like Ancestry.com or MyHeritage, or uploading data from your desktop genealogy software, sharing your research online is easy and inexpensive.
But a family tree creating or uploading for someone else’s genealogy website is like renting an apartment instead of owning a house. Ultimately, if you’re like me, you want more control over your tree’s home environment. (It’s not for nothing that my wife calls me “Captain Control”.) You want to be able to choose your own colors, layout and fonts. You’re not quite happy with the wiring of another site, so to speak: how their uploaded trees handle sources and notes, or how well it works with your genealogy software. Maybe you want more space to entertain loved ones with family stories and pictures, beyond the bare bones of family tree cards. Maybe you just want your family history to have its own address, like www.jonesfamilytree.com.
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Taking control and creating your own online family history website isn’t as complicated as you might think think. Here we walk through the construction process step by step and outline your options.
1. Share Your Tree
An old adage (well, as old as the internet) goes: “Online, content is king.” So the first step in building your own family history site is to decide which one Content you want to put online and prepare it for publication.
For starters, this probably includes your family tree. If you use a genealogy software program on your computer or tablet, you have many easy options for getting this content online. Programs like RootsMagic and Legacy Family Tree for PCs, or Reunion and MacFamilyTree for Macs render an entire website containing a clickable family tree. You can also create text reports (such as family group sheets) in PDF format, as well as chart graphics. It’s hard to beat the convenience of these pre-built tree pages, which quickly produce reams of pages that would take days to code by hand even if you knew how. (My original Fryxell family tree, released by Reunion, produced a whopping 3,305 individual files.)
If you’ve previously uploaded a family tree to one of the popular genealogy sites, you already know how to export data the universal file format GEDCOM. The process of exporting a tree to post directly to the web is similar (and the command to do so is probably similar to the GEDCOM export command in your software’s menu). But here you create HTML files – the universal language of the World Wide Web. Unless you have a high level of HTML coding experience, be careful not to tinker with these complicated and interconnected files unless absolutely necessary. Because HTML files are essentially just plain text documents, you can edit them with any word processor or even the simplest text editor. However, managing around 3,000 complex files is more than you want to take on – and not necessary since your genealogy software can do all the heavy lifting.
If you generate a site from your tree program, you have to consider the same issues as when exporting a GEDCOM file. Review the privacy options and decide how much to post about living relatives. Popular genealogy websites generally don’t show others the date of birth you entered for your living cousin Sarah, but you must be proactive in protecting this data when you publish your website. You’ll also have to make decisions about fonts, colors, and backgrounds—or will, if you’re a budding Captain Control—to the extent that your software allows you to customize web output. When in doubt, keep your design clean and simple and minimize background distractions.
If you just want to put one tree online, you can just take the resulting (large) folder of files and upload them to your selected one Domain and host – decisions we’ll cover in the next few steps. My initial Fryxell and Dickinson family sites (my mother’s site) were just that, using software called FTP (short for File Transfer Protocol) to put the files online. Even if you decide to go for a fancier home for your family tree, FTP is still essential to upload the HTML files generated by your genealogy software. You can use an FTP program to copy files from your computer to an online server, usually as easy as draggingAdd Additional Content
Once you’ve followed the steps below to host your files, you could stop here (I did that first). But as long as you create your own customized family history site, you might want to dig deeper with content. Family photos are ideal for sharing online, as are scanned or screen-captured source materials. In the early days of the internet, before broadband access, websites struggled to keep image file sizes as small as possible to speed up download times. The standard computer screen resolution of 72 dots per inch (dpi) was the norm. However, now you can easily use larger image files at 150 or 200 dpi, which can be the same resolution you use for the files on your computer.
If you scanned family photos at 300 dpi, you can use image editing software such as Use Photoshop Elements or Affinity Photo to adjust this resolution as well as the overall image size. Grandma and Grandpa’s framed wedding photo may be 8″ x 10″, but 4″ x 5″ is probably enough to put online. Don’t worry too much about the size at this point, though, as you can usually further scale images in a web page creation program. Save your images as JPG (.jpg) files for maximum compatibility. Use image editing software to resize and resize old photos before uploading.
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Scanned or downloaded source material can be treated similarly to old photos. You may want to use photo editing software to crop and enlarge (or zoom and crop, if you even take a screenshot) the portion of your family on a census page or other document. You can even add arrows or circles to indicate important facts. Also, consider sharing your research notes. Remember that you can easily integrate links to online documents and search results on other websites. (Most web building tools make it easy to add links, but the HTML to do this is super simple:
If you’re not ready to create a full website, you can temporarily “point” your newly purchased domain to any address on the Internet. For example, you could redirect your domain to your uploaded family tree on Ancestry or MyHeritage; Just go to your family tree and copy the entire (very long) URL from your browser’s address bar and then paste it into the form at your domain registrar. You could do the same with a genealogy blog that you create on sites like Tumblr or Blogger. Users typing bueller.com will then be invisibly redirected to your Bueller Tree or Great Bueller Blog.
4. Build your website
When you’re ready to build a full website, you’ll need to sign up for hosting, either with your domain registrar or another service. Increasingly, hosting services also provide some sort of tool that you can use to create your website. Other companies like Wix, Squarespace, WebFlow, and Weebly emphasize their simple, powerful website building tools — no coding required — and usually include hosting as part of the package. Prices for such a combo start at around $14-$16 per month. (You can also find cheaper services that will place ads on your site.)
Remember that the main purpose of creating your own family tree website is to share your family tree. Not all website building services will cater to this type of (rather uncommon) application; For example, many target web commerce instead. You may only use the tools to create a home page and a few other pages about your ancestors and sources, and then link to the files your software outputs. In this case, there is no point in paying big bucks for site building services – your main need is hosting to store those thousands of small files via FTP.
You can probably do site building as well -Skip software on your PC or Mac instead of in the “cloud”. Many such programs (like Adobe’s defunct Dreamweaver) have fallen by the wayside anyway in the face of competition from cloud-based services and free or low-cost offerings from hosting companies.
However you start creating websites , you can take advantage of templates and drag-and-drop tools that simplify creation. It might be useful to understand a few basic HTML coding commands, but nowadays you can certainly create a basic website without coding.
5. Get creative with WordPress
During my first attempts at my Fryxell family site, I tried a number of different tools. In all honesty, they were cumbersome and lacked the all-important control I was looking for. Too many relied on templates that lacked customization options; others just felt too complicated. Frustrated, I did what any smart father would do when faced with a technical problem: I asked my daughter, Courtney Graziano. Luckily, she builds websites and runs social media campaigns to make a living as the director of digital strategy for a global consulting firm.
Courtney recommended WordPress, which I learned was the most widely used Web publishing platform is the choice of everyone from People magazine to the New York Times to PlayStation. Best of all, it’s free. With this you can set up a blog (similar to Blogger or Tumblr) or a website. Such a website could be hosted at WordPress and have a wordpress.com URL (although you can of course point to it from your own domain). Or you can download the WordPress tools to use on your own domain.
However, it is likely that your hosting company already has the WordPress package and you just need a few clicks, to install it for free. Once I found the “WP” icon on my host, it guided me through the process and I was done in minutes. (Note that to take full advantage of WordPress features, you should also create a free account on the WordPress website. This is separate from your “admin” account for your own website.)
Once you After installing WordPress and logging in with the username and password you chose during setup, you’ll find the basic skeleton of a pre-built website. First, you will be taken to your dashboard, a kind of “home base” where you can add pages and control the look of your website. You should make some basic design decisions before you start adding content—but don’t worry, you can always change your mind later. (Almost magically, WordPress can reformat your entire site to reflect these changes.)
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First, you should choose a “Theme”. This controls the basic layout of your pages, fonts, and overall appearance, similar to the templates offered by other website builders. One key difference, however, is that WordPress’ openness means there are thousands of pre-built themes available. Many themes are free, and even more are available for just a few dollars. To start exploring themes, just click Appearance and then Themes. Among the free themes, Courtney recommended “Twenty Eleven”, one of the special themes WordPress releases annually (this was from 2011 – hence the name).You can find tens of thousands more themes on the WordPress website and on sites like ThemeForest.com (around $10 and up).
Installing your chosen theme is as simple as clicking activate; You can also click to view a “live preview” before committing. You don’t like your chosen theme? Just click to activate another one.
Next you should customize your page header. WordPress thoughtfully provided me with a nice image of a pine cone, but I figured something more relevant to my family might be better. Since the image has to be horizontal—in this case, 1,000 pixels wide and 288 tall—I dismissed the idea of old family photos. (Grandma and grandpa would have to have their eyes and nose cut off or horribly crushed.) I went with an old map of my ancestors’ original haunts in Sweden instead. I chose Appearance, then Header, then Add New Image, uploaded my file, cropped it slightly, and applied it to my pages. Be sure to click SaveThat told the web to look in a folder called Reunion for a file called wc_toc.htm (“toc” as in the table of contents). Note that all other pages in your software-generated HTML files will likely link back to this page, so don’t change the filename. (These “local” links don’t need to be changed after they’ve been uploaded via FTP, as long as the files all stay in the same folder.)
Once I’ve uploaded the thick folder of files, in the WordPress Dashboard I went to Appearance, then Menus and pasted my external URL under Custom Links along with the link text “View Tree”. I chose to open the link in a new tab so visitors can easily navigate back to the main page. The result was that a new clickable option, Tree View, appeared next to the link to my home page.
7. Share With the World
Depending on your hosting provider, your WordPress site may be “live” once you start working on it. Some providers post a “Coming Soon” page and let you choose when you’re ready to go. To ensure that your website cannot be seen while it is “under construction”, use a plugin like Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode or use Elementor’s built-in maintenance mode. Once you’re “live”, click the “Publish” button in WordPress to make future updates and additions to your site visible.
Finally, it’s time to let your family members and fellow researchers know about your site to inform. Spread the word via email, Twitter, and on your Instagram and Facebook pages. Ask other family members who have genealogy or other sites to link to your site. If your last name is the subject of forums like Ancestry’s, post a link to your website there. If you also have a blog, link to your family tree site early and often.
Before you know it, your site will also be showing up on search engines like Google or Bing. To make Google’s bots scan your website faster, add the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. By signing up for Google Analytics, you can track your website visitors.
But don’t stop there. As you make new family history discoveries, share them with the world with new posts or pages on your website. Remember to regularly update your website’s tree area to reflect changes in your desktop version: the easiest and safest way is to issue a whole batch of new HTML files and use FTP to fully restore the old online folder substitute. (Trying to find out what’s changed or manually editing online files is a recipe for disaster.)
That’s all there is to it. Her family history is now online in her customized “Home Sweet Home”.
Home Maintenance: WordPress Tools, Plugins and Widgets
Add or improve features on your WordPress site, Improve security, secure your website and simplify website administration. Try these plugins, widgets, and help sites, most of which offer at least some features for free:
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- Jetpack: Security, site optimization, and more.
- ManageWP: Ideal if If you have multiple websites, ManageWP lets you backup, update and scan for malware from one dashboard.
- WordFence security: keep an eye on your website and block potential intruders.
- AkisMet Anti-Spam: Filter out spam comments.
- Disqus: Improve the built-in comment system.
- WP Google Fonts: Expand your theme’s font repertoire.
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