From Family Tree Maker to the Web

Q. Will I be able to set up my own Web site with the aid of Family Tree Maker? Or will I have to subscribe separately for my own site? Any suggestions as to a good site?

A: Family Tree Maker, or more accurately, Genealogy.com, does offer Web site space for genealogy information. For those who own the Family Tree Maker program, the ability to upload genealogical reports and information has been streamlined. Once you have created the report or book that you want to upload, you select the appropriate publish to Web option within Family Tree Maker.

The publishing is streamlined. You have the ability to select the theme of your Web site, and you can have up to five reports (and a book can be one of the reports), as well as an InterneTree on the site. You are also able to upload pictures, making the site an excellent place to share digitized documents that support the information shared in the family tree.

While this is all streamlined and built into the Family Tree Maker program, it means that you are not able to create a Web site to upload elsewhere, perhaps the RootsWeb.com (www.rootsweb.com) or one of the other sites offering free Web space like AngelFire (www.angelfire.com).

For those interested in taking their genealogy data in Family Tree Maker and posting it elsewhere, it will be necessary to save the specific reports to a Rich Text Format. Rich Text Format (RTF) offers a file that retains all the special formatting such as superscripting or italics, two formatting features used in the narrative styled Genealogy Report. Once the report has been saved to an RTF file, you can do one of two things. If you have one of the most recent word processing programs like Word or WordPerfect, you can open the file in that and then use the Save As feature to save the file as a Web page.

Another option is to open the RTF file using the Arachophilia program (www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.html). This free program can read the RTF file and create a Web file, that is an HTML file, which you can then upload somewhere else.

The reason that few people go through these steps is that once you have created these Web files, you must have some understanding of the HTML process to create the necessary links to go from one Web page to another, and this is intimidating to some individuals. After all, we want to spend our time researching the family history not tackling a programming issue. You must also understand how to upload these files to the Web space you finally settle on. That is why many who use Family Tree Maker do not worry about taking their pages off-site. With the click of a button in the program, they have created a site and can go back to the search.