About the Site: Help
This website provides a broad range of genealogy related services,
generally focussing on, but not limited to, south-western Ontario.
- A family tree
of tens of thousands of individuals whose families have
passed through south-western Ontario, and in particular Middlesex
County. This is not a static family tree but rather a dynamic
entity that can be contributed to by anyone interested in these
families. Since the facilities to update the tree are provided
on the web, users can contribute to the tree from anywhere in the
world, using any form of access.
- Access to the contents of the database in machine readable form,
for use by applications
running on this and other sites is provided by the pages
getRecordXml.php and
getRecordJSON.php.
- A wide range of transcriptions of original source documents.
All genealogy sites support links from information in the
Family Tree to original documents. These are called citations.
A unique feature of this site is each item of transcribed
information from original source documents is also linked to
the individual in the family tree that it documents. This
permits quick identification of which original documents have
not yet been analysed for incorporation into the family
tree, and therefore where there is work remaining to do.
All pages in this web site include a header and trailer section.
These sections display information about the page and services
that you can access.
The most important element of the page header is the menu button
displayed in the upper left corner of the page. This appears as three
thick horizontal lines and is sometimes referred to as the
"hamburger patty" icon.
Clicking on this button displays a menu of
services including:
- The hierarchy of pages from the top of the site down to the
immediate parent of the current page.
- An item which tracks your current status
as a user of the web site. When a user first enters the web site
item displays the text "Sign On".
Clicking on the item in this mode displays a
user signon/registration dialog.
Identifying yourself to the web-site
makes many additional features and services available.
Once you have registered and signed on this item changes to
display your user name. If you
click on the item now it takes you to an
account management dialog.
- A list of items identifying each of the alternate languages
for which the current page has been translated. For example if
there is an item Français then you can choose to communicate
with the site in French.
- A link to general help about the current page as a whole. This is
as opposed to the item specific popup help that is displayed
when you hold the mouse over an item.
- A link to general information about the site as a whole.
The trailer section contains a link to send a message
to the site administrator(s) and any other users associated with
the information on the page in a secure manner.