Smith DNA Project Community Forums

You are logged on. When you click edit when looking at a person (I), you will be taken to the person editing screen. If you click edit when looking at the family (F) , you will be looking at the family editing screen. As you might imagine, there is certain information that you add or change on a person, or certain information (such as marriages) that belong on a family. In other words, you wouldn’t add a marriage date and location  to a person, you add it to a family once the person has a spouse. You also cannot add children to a person, you add children to a family.

Here is the editing screen for the person

Notice that you in the brown menu towards the top, there is "Help for this Area". if you need help on any item, you can always go look at that tab. If you wish to have the page appear *collapsed* or shorter or you wish to expand all the options, click "Expand All" or "Collapse All".The "Test" option is to see what your page will look like in the browser. For example, if you add information and you want to make sure it looks correct, as others will see it on the internet, click "TEST" The "Add Media" item is to add photos, documents, histories, cemetery tombstones, etc. We do ask that you please name your files something unique, such as with your DNA kit # included.

In the next part you will see Save- Notes (if there is already a note on a person, you will see a green dot in the corner of the note icon), Sources, Associations.  You can easily add a note for a person, and it will display on the person page.

The next fields are mostly explanatory. You can set the person as living or private so that the person cannot be viewed by others on the internet. To the right of the details fields such as Birth etc, you will see a Search button (to find a place that might already be listed), a Plus sign for more information you might want to add, another notes field specific to that detail, and a sources item. Why do we have both the full place name AND the city/county/St/zip? The full place name is used by the map feature to geocode the person"s location and we use a specific breakdown of each field for other reports (like All the places that are in the United States in South Carolina, etc).

For a given person, you can add parents – Click ADD NEW

or

You can add a Spouse or a Partner. The # by the spouse indicates if there is already a spouse for the person. For example, suppose  a man named John Smith had been married 3 times. You would want to add a spouse for him, save him with that spouse as a family, and then go back and add another spouse for him, save that spouse with him as a family, and then do this a third time. He would, in other words, be part of 3 different families since he had 3 different spouses. You only add children

The options at the bottom of the page are how you would like the page to act when you get done editing, ie, do you want to go to a new family, return to the page or close the window.

Now, as we said, you cannot edit a family or add children until you make a family. If you don't know who the spouse was, you can still make a family but leave the spouse blank or put unknown. Once you have saved a spouse to the original person, you have created a family. If you want to check what was done, be sure to click TEST to see how it looks in the browser.

Repeating this as this is the most common action donw by anyone using this software. Someone puts in a family or adds children but does not TEST or refresh the page after, DOES NOT SEE THE CHANGES, and adds again. So always confirm that your changes *took* by clicking TEST from the editing screen, or, when you get out of the editing screen, refresh the browser. 

You can add events to the person or to the family. There are some events that are only associated with the person, and some that are only associated with the family.

Here is the editing screen for the family. Notice that you can tell that you are on the Family Editing Screen by the Title at the top. Note that there is a family id assigned to this tree (FXXX).  What you see on this screen are some options that get added for a family, such as marriage or divorce info. There is also a section for adding Events where you can add some census information as a note. (More about that further down). You will also notice where you can add children to the family.

Note that the options for Father/Mother are that you can find the person who is the spouse, if there is no spouse, you can CREATE the spouse, you can EDIT the information (which will take you to the person edit menu) or REMOVE the person. You cannot delete a person because these are collaborative trees, but if someone is in the wrong spot, you can remove them.

Example. Suppose that you had a family but there is not a spouse for the partner. If you find out who the person is, you can CREATE the (father or mother). If you discover that the wrong person is listed as the father or mother, you can REMOVE that person and then either FIND the correct person or CREATE that person.

You see that you can set whether the family information is living or private.

On EVENTS. You can add a census record for a family.

In the fields, once you have chosen census, you will see event type (census) event date (as in 1850, 1860, etc), event place, which is the full place description you see in the census and then county/state/country which is strictly for some census reports. In the Detail field, you can put the text of what is in the census record. Then save and the census record will show on the page.
Back to Step 2