HOW DRAWMYFAMILYTREE.CO.UK WORKS ONCE YOU'VE LOGGED IN

The system automatically analyses the information about each person and makes links between people based on the Father, Mother and Spouse selections, instantly making family groups. It then draws the family tree based on these family groups. Key event dates are shown for each person and, if pictures of the individuals are available, these are shown in the tree beneath each name. Changes made to the information are immediately reflected in the family tree.

To show an individual and their descendants, select them from the 'Select a Person' dropdown. To see a list of everyone with the same last name, select from the 'Select a Family' dropdown. You can also use the 'search for' box (see below).

Any name can be clicked to make the tree start from that person. Direct-descendant males are shown in blue and females are shown in red. Spouses are shown in green.

The tree is driven by the male line, following tradition. Where there is a crossover to a female line, a link is shown to tie the families together. Similarly, where there is more than one descendant line from a family, only one line is continuous with the others being shown beneath as links. This layout ensures that the tree should be printable on standard A4 paper.

If there are antecedents for the person currently shown at the head of the tree, clicking the symbol moves up a generation.

ENTERING INFORMATION

Summary details about the person currently at the head of the tree are shown above the tree. Clicking the 'Edit' button in the summary opens a screen in which all the details about the person can be entered. So to edit any person, first click their name so that they appear at the head of the tree, then click the 'Edit' button. To add a new person, click the 'Add a person' button next to the 'Select a person' dropdown at the top of the screen.

You can enter as much or as little information as you like but, if you want the system to draw a tree, you need to ensure that you select a Father and/or Mother when entering the details for a child. You should always enter a last name. It's also a good idea to make sure you select Male or Female so that the person's name appears in the correct colour.

Don't forget to click the 'Save Changes' button when you've finished.

MARRIAGES

Marriages are always entered by selecting a partner in a female's editing screen and the system will automatically make all the right connections. Re-marriages within the tree can be entered by creating a duplicate entry for the re-marrying spouse. It is also possible to include single-sex marriages by following the instructions on the editing screen.

ADDING OR REMOVING A PICTURE

A picture can be loaded for each person from your computer when editing that person's details. A thumbnail will appear in the tree beneath the person's name and this thumbnail can be clicked to show the original, full-size picture.

Head-and-shoulders portraits on a light background are very effective. You can create these in an image editing program by cropping from a larger scene. You can load jpg, gif or png images up to 1.5MB in size.

PREVENTING A PERSON APPEARING IN THE TREE

If you want to prevent a person appearing in the public snapshot of your tree, untick the 'public' box at the bottom of the editing screen and click 'Save Changes'. Use this if you are publishing a tree which includes living people and their immediate antecedents so that their privacy is not inadvertently compromised.

If you want to retain someone's details in the summary but do not want them to appear in the tree at all, ensure that no parents or spouses are selected for them in their details and that they are not selected as a parent or spouse in anyone else's details. If you want to retain their parent and spouse information, type a reminder into their 'Notes' box.

REMOVING A PERSON

Click the 'Delete' button when editing that person's details. If you respond 'OK' to the request for confirmation, that person and all their details will be permanently removed from the system. You will need to re-add them and re-enter all their details (including their picture) if you need to restore them later.

PUBLISHING YOUR TREE ON THE INTERNET AND LINKING TO OTHER TREES

Ensure that you untick the 'public' box at the bottom of the editing screen and click 'Save Changes' for any living people and their immediate antecedents in your tree so that their privacy is not inadvertently compromised.

If the public box is ticked, the person's last name will be available for listing in the dropdown on the website home page and will be listed there if there is more than one person of that last name. Some of their details will be shown when someone selects that name on the public website.

Publicly-listed people are also available for all logged-in users to include in their own trees. They appear listed in an information box at the top of an editing screen for any person with the same last name. Clicking the [+] button next to the name adds them to the list of people available for inclusion in the tree.

People 'owned' by other users are marked with an asterisk in the list. Their details cannot be edited but they can be used as parents and male spouses by linking to them from your own entries. If you require more flexibility, create your own new entry using the public entry's details as a starting point.

Note that publicly-listed people can be made private at any time without notice by their owners. If this is done, the person will disappear from your list and tree.

To remove a publicly-listed person from your list, select the person then click their edit button. A 'remove' button will be shown. This action does not affect the other user's original entry in any way, it just makes it unavailable to you.

You can also use this to build complicated trees in separate parts and combine them later. Just register each part as a separate tree and the final tree as another one. You might also want to use this if there are different people working on different parts of the tree.

PRINTING

The layout is designed to ensure that most trees will print on A4 paper. Always use your browser's print preview facility (usually on the File menu) to select whether portrait or landscape orientation is better for your current tree and whether 'shrink to fit' or some other scaling is most appropriate.

DELETING ITEMS

To delete a single item, use the delete button on that item's editing screen.

FINDING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PEOPLE

Enter something in the 'search for...' box at the top of the tree screen and click 'Go' to produce a filtered list of people. Search terms are not case-sensitive, so 'John' is the same as 'john'. If you enter more than one word (separated by spaces), the result will be a list of those people whose information contains all the words, not just one of them. Note that the words don't have to be adjacent to each other to be found.

For example, to find all the people whose father's name was John enter 'john' in the search box. To find all the people who were born in Bradford, enter 'bradford' in the box. Enter both items to find all the people whose father's name was John and who were born in Bradford. If no entries match the criteria, no results will be shown.

Parts of words as well as whole words can be entered. So you could find all the people who were coalminers or coalmerchants by entering 'coal' in the Notes box, assuming your notes contained such information about people.

TRANSFERRING DATA TO/FROM OTHER PROGRAMS

Click the 'Import/Export' button at the top of the tree screen for options to save or load data in gedcom format. Gedcom is one of the standard file formats used for exchanging genealogical data between programs.

This facility can also be used to view gedcom files from other programs without importing any data, but you do need to be logged in as a DrawMyFamilyTree.co.uk user.

When loading data, a preview appears first from which you can select the names to import into your own tree. Click the box at the top right of the preview to select all the names, but double-check that you have selected the correct data for import before clicking the 'Confirm import' button as it can be time-consuming to remove unwanted items. This is because to undo an import you will need to edit each imported entry in turn and delete it. Once you have imported the data into your family tree, you may need to edit the new entries to make any required connections to existing entries in your tree and to add any details that were not automatically imported.

If a person's description refers to other people, then import them all at the same time to preserve their connections. Importing them individually will mean that the connections will have to be remade by manually editing them.

Entries are shown in last name then date-of-birth order.

MAKING BACKUPS

Use the 'Import/Export' button to save copies of your tree as you build it. You can then import any items back into your tree if you have problems later.

Note that items imported from a backup will duplicate items already in your tree and will not overwrite them, so you will need to delete any unwanted duplicates and remake parent, child and spouse links when you have finished restoring from your backup files.

If you've just deleted some information in a single item and need to recover it, it may be simplest to preview your backup file using the 'Import/Export' button and copy-and-paste the required text from the backup to the item being edited.

FORGOTTEN YOUR PASSWORD?

The system will email you with your passsword when you click the words 'Click here if you have forgotten your password' at the bottom left of the login screen. If you have more than one tree registered to your email address, this can be used to produce a list of all your accounts.

ABOUT DRAWMYFAMILYTREE.CO.UK

DrawMyFamilyTree.co.uk was originally designed to support a family genealogy project and is now provided as a free service. It is not intended that the service should be charged for either now or in the future but advertising may be included from time to time on some pages.

FURTHER HELP AND SUPPORT

Please note that a support service is not currently provided for DrawMyFamilyTree.co.uk, however you can send a message if you're really having problems. We'll try to respond as soon as practicable, but this might take a few days.

CHANGE LOG

May 2011
Added gedcom file import and export.
Increased size of Notes field to 10,000 characters.
Improved handling of apostrophes.

April 2011
Behind-the-scenes technical changes to improve speed and reliability.
The method for linking trees is different and now includes automatic presentation of likely links.
New field 'Address at death' added, to match 'Address at birth'.
Various bug fixes, including 'adoptive mother' errors.
Unused accounts containing no data created before 2011 have been removed.