Managing your trees and media.

We at Ancestory understand how difficult it can be to remember where we file and how we name our digital photo’s, documents, phone videos etc. So what we’ve done, is provided a simple “Media snippets” navigation pane for you - our subscribers - to view or listen to all the multimedia snippets that you’ve uploaded and saved within all your trees. (Yes we have given you the ability to create as many trees as you like using the same subscription!)

After logging on, you can simply click on “Upload History” and you can view or delete any snippet of media that you have uploaded to any tree.

Adding People to your tree.

To add the first person to your tree click “Interact with tree” this will take you to your chosen tree. Then click “New Individual” this opens a form for you to add some basic information about the person in your tree. The fields marked with a red * are mandatory (they must be filled in), any other field is optional. Some fields may be locked, just hover your mouse over the lock and a bubble will pop up telling you what you must first do to unlock that field. E.g. “Date of Marriage” cannot be unlocked until you select “Married” from the drop down list. We have added some cool features to this form, such as an integrated Googlemap for selecting “Place of birth” or “Death.” You can use a city, street address or post / zip code if known and search the map, then select it, or simply navigate the map to the nearest place and select that, it will automatically put that place into the field on the form.

You must add a “Year of birth” (Mandatory) before you put in a “Date of birth” (optional) If you’re unsure of the year of birth, just use an approximate year and click the box next to it (This will display a “C” in your tree meaning circa or approximate). Once a birth year is added, the D.O.B. box becomes unlocked and a drop down calendar allows you to select a date from today back to 100AD

Just save the individual and you’ll be taken straight to your new tree. (You can edit the individual at any time by selecting them on the tree and at the bottom of the page select “Edit individual” and you’re back in the same form again, where you can add marriage, baptism notes or other details as you choose.

Once you have an individual in your tree, you can add a partner. Click on the individual in the tree and then select the “Add partner” button below the tree. You then select the gender of the partner, if it’s male, the tree entry will appear blue, if it’s a female, the tree entry will appear pink. Then add personal details to that character just as you did for the previous character.

As soon as you have a couple, click on either partner, then the “Add child” button will appear below the tree. Follow the same steps to add a child’s details as you did with the parents. (Due to this being a Beta test application at the moment you can only add up 3 generations descending). We intend to build a full application soon with infinite trees that can ascend as well as descend so watch this space!

Adding media snippets to your tree.

To add media to your tree simply click “Public trees” or “My trees”, select the tree you want to interact with, then click on the individual in the tree that you want to add media snippets to. Then click on the “Attach media” button just below the tree. Where it says “Add a new snippet” click “Choose a file”. This will allow you to search your computer for any media file, (video file and audio files are restricted to 20Mb in size), documents and pictures can also be uploaded. Once you have selected the file you can name the snippet (This does not change the file name) and add notes to it, then click “Upload”. That snippet is now attached to that individual, in that tree. To view the snippet you can either browse the media snippets window below the tree by selecting the snippets from the dropdown menu or you can hold your mouse over the individual in the tree and a bubble will appear with the individuals profile and a list of the recent snippets that have been uploaded to that individual. You can click in that bubble and it will link you to that snippet in the media snippets viewer below the tree.

For large pictures, these will not be viewable within the standard viewer so you will be asked to “Click here” and a separate window will open with the full sized image. For PDF and word or XLS documents you will be invited to save them or open them. For video and audio files below 20MB, a player will pop up and play them. If your video or audio format is not playable in our embedded player, Ancestory will attempt to launch the file in whatever compatible browser player you have as a plug-in installed in your Internet browser.