With the help of many family members, I have a moderate amount (hundreds of names) of genealogy information in PAF that I wish to make available to family members (on both my paternal and maternal sides of my family, as well as my wife's family) with the least effort and investment of time as possible.


My major challenge is that I wish to include multi-media files (digital and scanned photos, videos, audio files,
Adobe Acrobat documents, etc) *and* link these files to the appropriate individuals in a family tree format so that names and basic genealogical information can be easily viewed and traversed, with some kind of indication when additional multi-media information is available. If more information is desired about a particular person, the viewer can drill down (so to speak) to read personal histories, view photos, hear funeral talks, watch videos, or see scans of original handwritten documents in Acrobat format, or link to a web page URL related to this person, and then easily return to the family tree view. I started out using Personal Ancestry File (PAF) but discovered that it does not support Acrobat documents or URL links. I am also having problems figuring out how to create a directory structure of PAF data files and linked multi-media files on a hard disk and then transfer all this data onto a CD or DVD and have the linked files still be accessible when the drive letter and possibly the directory structure names change when the files are transferred to CD/DVD. For that matter, I am not sure that CDs/DVDs are the best publishing vehicle. However, the complexity of doing something like this via Internet web pages seems very daunting.


A large amount of extended family genealogical information related to my paternal line has been uploaded and is stored on myfamily.com, but there seems to be no way to associate or link multiple items of information about the same person, other than very coarse categories dedicated for different branches of the family tree. There is also appears to be no family tree structure to traverse from one related family member to another or generation to generation. It is just a big database, with some limited categories. I have not found this website's search engine to be very helpful in finding information.


Another family member has attempted to solve this same publishing dilemna by distributing a CD containing an initial version of a small subset of family members where the family tree format is manually recreated by naming directories and sub-directories after family members, with all related multi-media content contained within the associated directory or folder. While this is relatively easy to do for a two or three generations, it becomes more daunting for each additional generation added, especially when these family relationships already exist in the genealogical software database. Another down side is that the standard genealogical information about each person would have to be manually exported or copied from individual fields within a program like PAF and then pasted into a text file within each directory where it would have to be manually maintained, which violates the fundamental database management rule of not storing the same information in more than one location.


Does anyone have any experience with PhPGedView? Even though the multimedia support seems somewhat limited, it also seems to be expanding. This program seems to have promise as a nice publishing and collaboration tool; however, I'm told that PhPGedView does not support LDS ordinance data, which would preclude it from being a useful collaboration tool for LDS members doing Family History.


Uncertainty as to the best way to publish this information has delayed progress for several years and I am anxious to move forward.


Recommendations, anyone?