What is FamiliaOnline?
FamiliaOnline is an online family tree and photo/video album.
You provide the data: enter interactively names, relationships, dates, events, notes (or
upload your GEDCOM*), upload files (family pictures, video clips, etc.), add file descriptions and
link files to individuals.
We use your data to generate a dynamic family website.
* GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunications) is a standard
file format for exchanging information between genealogy programs.
How much does the subscription cost?
You are invited to test FamiliaOnline free of charge for 30 days. If by the end of that period you decide to stay with us,
you are kindly requested to subscribe for a year. The annual subscription price currently stands at US$19.95.
Alternatively, you can make a monthly subscription, at US$1.95 a month.
How much disk space can I use?
You can use up to 256 megabytes disk space for your pictures and data. This is quite a lot: at the time we write this page,
our own alexlena site occupies less than 3 megabytes.
You can also buy additional storage in 256-megabyte chunks, at $9.95 a year for a chunk.
The Your Account page shows you your current disk space allocation and its usage.
What you need is an up-to-date browser:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (or higher) or Mozilla Firefox. You can download them from the following links:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads, or
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/.
We suggest that whatever browser you choose, download the latest stable version (not a beta).
How do I start?
You subscribe to FamiliaOnline using our sign-up form.
You select your username and password and provide your email address.
We email you back a message with instructions, and you can immediately start administering your site.
Your site has two entrances, the "admin entrance" for you and the "guest entrance" for all visitors.
The admin entrance is password-protected. You use it to enter your family data, upload your files, edit descriptions
and set up your site. At
any moment you can view your site via the guest entrance and see how your changes are reflected.
Title Page: This is the page a visitor to your site sees first. It contains your site's title,
a description, your name and email address and links to further pages.
Index of Names: The list of all individuals you have entered (either directly or via a GEDCOM).
It can be ordered either by surnames
or first names (this option is often preferred in Spanish-speaking countries).
Personal Page: A page containing data about a single individual.
You control what data items are
shown for living and for deceased individuals.
Information Sources:
An S link
to the right of an information item on a personal page leads to a page with the source of
that information.
Outline Descendant Tree: For a selected individual, it shows his or her children, grandchildren and so on.
Each descendant
is shown in a separate line. The indent size is proporional to the person's generation relatively to the
selected ancestor.
CollapsiTree: Similar to Outline, but you can collapse and open each branch,
like folders in many Windows tools (e.g., in Microsoft® Windows Explorer).
Roots & Offspring: For a selected individual, it shows both the ancestors and the descendants.
Parents and grandparents are shown to the left of the individual; children and grandchildren
are to the right. Each person is shown in a separate box.
File Pages: Each page displays a file, its description and the list of individuals featuring in it.
For still images, our rectangle tool helps you to identify who is who in the picture: move the cursor over a person's name, and a rectangle lights up showing that person in the picture. If the file is a video clip, you can also move the cursor over a
person's name, and the video jumps to a frame showing that person.
File Lists/Thumbnail Galleries: You can display either the global file list
or the list of file with the given
individual. You can sort each list by date, place, etc.
Each list can be displayed either as a text table or a thumbnail gallery.
Text Pages: Place to put the history of your research, family stories, relevant links and so on.
How do I protect the privacy of living relatives?
You can select which personal data items (such as birth and marriage date/place. education,
occupation etc.) are hidden for living individuals. Alternatively, you can hide living individuals altogether.
As you have seen in the previous question, you can protect the privacy of living individuals. However,
it is not always easy for FamiliaOnline to decide whether a person is alive or deceased. If there is a
death date or place, then it is clear.
If a person was born, say, in 1965 and there is no information about his/her death, then it is also quite obvious:
we assume him/her alive.
If a person was born in 1865, we can safely assume that he/she is deceased, even if his/her death date is unknown.
But what shall we decide about a person 100 years old, with no death record? Here we have a problem.
Our solution is the "Maximum Privacy Age", at which FamiliaOnline stops hiding an individual's data,
even if we don't have his/her death record.
The default value of the Maximum Privacy Age is 90, but as a FamiliaOnline adninistrator, you can change it.
There is still a problem with individuals with neither birth date nor death record. In this case FamiliaOnline does not
protect their privacy (as if they have passed away). But what if you certainly know that a person is alive, you
just don't know his/her birth date? In that case you must have at least a vague knowledge about that person's age and
can set that person's birth date, at least approximately. To show that the date is imprecise, you can use
"About", "Before" or "After" prefixes.
