(AI enhanced by Perplexity AI)
If you’ve visited “News from Nan” over the years, you may remember our old “family pages” — a mix of photos, charts, and links that tried to keep everyone’s history in one place. Now those pages have had a makeover: they’ve become full-fledged, searchable family‑history sites built with WebHelp Responsive, each focused on one branch of a family group (Anna’s, Dick’s, Mike’s, and Rick’s).
Family knowledge bases
Behind each site is a “knowledge base” — a structured collection of facts, stories, and media about one family group. At a practical level, that means it’s easy for you to browse people, follow links to source material, and keep coming back as new items appear.
Family stories, front and center
In family history, facts and charts are important, but family lore is what people remember and pass around. Those stories now have a clearer home.
Stories already published on the new sites for your reading pleasure include:
- How Dick’s great-grandfather built the biggest Catholic church in Auburn, New York
- Tales of Rick’s ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars
- Anna’s favorite Fourth of July, when she came in runner-up in a pigtail contest and won a free airplane ride
- How two of Mike’s grandparents met working at a novelty manufacturing company in St. Paul, Minnesota
- How Anna’s great-grandfather abandoned his family and “disappeared” for 30 years
- How Dick’s great-grandmother abandoned her son in Great Britain and established a new life for herself in France
How did we do it?
- We collected and saved information in Family Tree Maker and related tools — the usual names, dates, relationships, and notes that go into a family tree.
- Dick then wrote a Python program that takes a standard genealogy export file (GEDCOM — basically a portable family‑tree file) and converts it into XML, and from there into DITA, a structured format that works well for publishing. You don’t have to know XML or DITA to use the sites; this is just the machinery that makes them easy to generate and update.
- We repurposed existing material — older posts on “News from Nan,” papers, and book excerpts — by turning them into DITA topics so they can be published right alongside the tree‑based facts.
- Finally, we wrote new stories (and, where helpful, used AI tools to draft or refine them) so that each person has at least one readable narrative, not just a list of dates. The stories and the facts now live together in one navigable place.
The result is something you can click through like a website, but that’s backed by a structured, update‑friendly foundation. When we find new information, or when someone writes a new story, we can fold it in without starting over.
We encourage you to take a look
You’ll find links to our four family history collections (Anna’s, Dick’s, Mike’s, and Rick’s) in the left-hand sidebar of the newsfromnan.com home page. Clinking a link opens a new, browsable window. Enjoy!
We’re offering a little help
We’re not starting a formal project or class, but if you’re a family member — or a fellow genealogist with similar motivation and reasonable technical comfort — and you’d like to try something like this with your own data, we’d be glad to talk. Our offer is simple: we can show what we did, answer questions, and offer informal, pro bono help as you think through your own version.
We’ll keep the “heavy lifting” (tree management, site structure, and publishing steps) to one or two people, but there’s lots of room for others to contribute short stories, photos, and memories. It’s a way to widen participation without turning every relative into a researcher.