Sharing Family Records

As mentioned earlier, the time has come where I hope you will be ready and able to add family records to the wiki section of the site. Naturally, as soon as I mentioned it I got questions from people who had read the Journal, checked the Family Records and found themselves confused!

There are times I despair of myself - because I haven't completed the "Help" section of Family Records to explain how to do it! I can - and to avoid my embarrassment will - use the excuse that I've been optimising the position in Google and other searches (we now turn up at about number six, I am pleased to say) and that it takes time and effort. The fact is, though, that I'd not looked at who is using the site or what they do.

How do I find out about visitors?

For most of the site, I set up analysis with the wonderful tools offered by our friends at Google. I make particular use of Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics kits. They let me give facts and figures about how many people, from where, use the website - even which bits they look at and when they look.

Over at Family Records, we have a wiki provided by someone else - by Wikispaces - since Google doesn't offer a wiki service. To be honest, if they did I would probably have chosen it to host records, but I'm glad that instead I looked around because I find Wikispaces a superb host that does pretty much what is needed - though there are a few ideas I could pass on to make life even easier!

One of the tools provided by the wiki services is an analytical set much the same as the Google toolkits. On the whole - though its a close-run thing - the Google tools are a little better, but both do the job. So with all these services available for the site, it is my own fault that I didn't actually bother to check them before asking people to start working on the site for the family.

So who uses the site?

If I had bothered to check, I would have found out what I need to know. Since this is supposed to be a family site for all the family, it makes sense to share the current status with you as well - so here we go.

Journal visitors currently come in at an average of:-

10 - 20 visitors per month
10 - 20 view older Journal entries
5 - 10 view Family Records pages
5 - 10 first read the House Preston page
75% of visitors are from the UK
25% of visitors are from the USA

House Preston visitors currently come in at an average of:-

10 - 15 visitors per month
5 - 10 view Journal pages
0 - 5 view Family Records page
75% of visitors are from the UK
25% of visitors are from the USA

Over at the Family Records, I can't track what sites readers came from, but we have a different story:-

300 - 350 visitors per month
45% of visitors are from the UK
55% of visitors are from the USA

Making sense of the statistics

I should have spotted that the records are used by a lot more people than anything else - and they don't get there from search engines or any other part of the site! What's more, they don't read any of the rest of the site in great numbers and its likely that the ones who do are the very same ones reading this page right now!

In short, the Family Records are driving the site, not the Journal or the House Preston pages - but I've been thinking it was the other way around!

Using the statistics

That means the records site needs to offer enough help and advice and not the journal pages - which is what I had been presuming. Like a fool, I offered a couple of pages and one family record as help - and now its clear I need to offer a lot more.

I need to show people how to add incomplete records so they can add information even with big gaps in the genealogy. Once that's done, I need to deal with storing records about Americans rather than British members. I even need to deal with so-called "slave names".

While writing this, I've been looking for a family to use as help. It isn't as easy as you might think, since it will be very much public and should only hold publicly available details. Given the large number of Americans, it would help if it was relevant to them rather than to English people. I say "English" because both Scottish and Irish may well have been involved in emigration to the USA over the years.

After much thought, I decided to store details of the Viscounts Gormanston and Barons Drumhaire since they are senior and very old members of Irish aristocracy and much of their genealogy is available publicly. It means our trans-Atlantic cousins may be able to look at it and say to themselves:

"Hey! That looks like it could be my great-great-great grandfather"...

...and find more of interest to them while I start to think about recording foreign members.

So, I will be very busy and may not even get around to posting this until later (and its already late in the month) if my editing and checking drags on and is messed up by collecting data on the Prestons of Ireland.

Over to You

The point has now been reached where we need to hope that you, dear reader, are about ready to contribute to the site. The point of all this work I've been doing is, after all, to encourage the House Preston families out there in the wide world to get together on-line so that we can all share our family information.

The site mash-up (as sites like this are delightfully called) was designed and put together from the very start in the hope that people out in the wider world would do more of the work than I will - and not least because once it is under way it should outlive any accidents that might befall me or any other regular contributor. It is built on my own pages, I actually own the pages that are linked into the site, and where payment is needed I make the payments - but under the skin this is all yours rather than mine.

Now the time has come for you to start using it more.

How you can contribute

At the moment, there are several ways you can, and I hope you will, contribute to the site. What I intend to do in this Journal entry is to encourage you to try one or more of those ways of sharing your own information with the rest of the Preston families all over the world.

Let me admit and agree right off, though, that there are several people who have contributed and who I hope will carry on doing so. Some of the ways that have been used are perhaps not as helpful as they might be since they come directly to me rather than to be shared with everyone else.

I do know that, in the UK at least, the way that the Guild of One Name Studies works is a little centralised and traditional. After all, my father did manage the One Name Study group for the Preston Family until his death - which is the reason I have such a vast quantity of paper records that I intend to transfer to the internet as this site builds up.

Unfortunately, tradition seems to be a major thing with the Guild and they still demand that name groups have one person, one postal address and paper records. A shame, in the modern world, and something that I simply don't have the time to deal with which is why I have created the site in the first place.

So that is the first way you can contribute - you can ask me questions. People have done it for a long while since I was always helping my father, especially in the later stages of his illness, to manage the One Name Study group but now I hope they will do it through the site rather than by direct postal or electronic mail.

Asking questions

It is simplicity itself to ask a question about the family: just look up to the top right of the page, where the site navigation is. Where you see the link "Contact the House" just point to it, click and it will use your own email software to let you write me an email.

Simple as that!

Comment on the Journal

For those who don't like to use email and perhaps don't even have an email address, the next obvious way to contribute is to send comments to the Journal itself as Purest Green (Sophia) did to a recent entry.

While the Journal is not intended to be any sort of general discussion group or forum for House Preston, this is the best way to deal with any general comments and points you might like to raise - such as Sophia's comments about the coat of arms shown at the top of this page and the arms shown in one of the Scottish castles associated with the family.

And this brings us to the next way you can contribute.

Pass on information

Using the same email link on the navigation section of the page, you can send me information you might have about the family - such as a description of all the different coats of arms used by the different branches of House Preston (of which there are at least five major ones).

Such contributions can include pictures that you want to see in the Journal though it is much better to use links to pictures that are stored off in the internet cloud somewhere since it will save space in the server we use for the Journal and let us put more into it later. You should make sure that such pictures are likely to stay where they are and - importantly - that you will be allowed to use them.

Don't just assume that the pictures can be used just because they are on the world wide web! That is not the way these things work: ask permission before you use something!

Link to the Journal

Very helpful to us are links to the site - any part of it, including the Journal. If you find something interesting anywhere on the site and you have your own web page, then please include a link to the page you found useful. Obviously, this will happen more and more as we add data to the Family Records, but please feel free to do it now to anything that catches your interest.

One of the easiest ways to add a link is to use the site button, like the one shown here, that you can find on the main page of the House site. It is a simple little picture with a built-in link and a snippet of web page code has been provided that you can just copy from the page and paste into your own page. Simple as that!

Follow the blogging

Finally - for now - you can add your name as one of those who follows this blog (the technical name for what the Journal is). This is the simplest of all the things you can do, since all you have to do is click the link over on the right of the page that says "Follow this blog" and follow the instructions on the screen.

Dead easy - and I hope to see you all adding yourselves to the list of followers over the next month while I go and visit your own pages out there in the internet cloud.

There are more ways you can and (I hope) will contribute to the site, but this has been a brief look at some of the simplest things you can do. So get working all of you! Let's make this site a truly useful resource for every Preston everywhere!