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.