The news is basically - we've gone private!
We no longer have the My Family websites which were completely private. Which website is that, you ask? Exactly. The ones no-one looked at or asked to join. They were $60 a year and it was a waste with no-one using them so they went.
The main Horswill Family Photos site is a public website anyone can see. We need people to be able to find us! So is this blog, of course, and our Facebook groups.
The big changes are to the family tree sites. The My Heritage site is now completely private. The photos were already private but it was a pain having updates on the home page showing who added what, birthdays, tagged photos etc. If you are logged in you can see all of this. In fact you won't notice any difference.
Anyone who is not a member will not see any updates or photos and WILL NOT be able to see the tree. The page they get to when they type in www.horswillfamilytree.com will invite them to look at Horswill Family Photos to see who we are and they can then ask to be members of the My Heritage site. You can also invite members to the site yourself through the invitation system.
If you haven't logged in for a while take a look - there are hundreds of photos and digital scrapbooks on there and the tree is growing.
I paid the price-of-a-small-country fee to upgrade the My Heritage site so you can upload as many full resolution photos as you like and you can also download full resolution photos. They will download as a zipped file. Just ask if you don't know what to do with that! I'll put full instructions on the main site but basically to ADD photos:
1) Go into the photos/videos section.
2) Click on Add Photos
3) BEFORE you find your photos REFRESH the page and make sure you can see a line at the bottom asking you which album you want to put them in (it also gives you the choice of starting a new album).
4) Find your photos on your computer and upload them.
Please do NOT add photos from Facebook. You should never let sites talk to each other anyway but Facebook photos are completely useless for our project as they're very low resolution. I suggest you don't upload them from Flickr either. I hit that button and stopped it just in time as it was about to put the 20,000 photos I have on Flick onto the MH site!
Need to know more about resolution? Click HERE.
You can always send me a disc or actual photos!
Now to Ancestry ...
Scroll down a couple of posts and you'll see we've been the victim of Ancestor Rustling. This is what the genealogy geeks call it when someone adds your ancestor to their tree even though they're not related - and then keeps taking more and more ancestors and all the photos. In this case the ancestors were Nanny Hills' family and the photos inlcuded on I have copyright on as I restored it. I have a legal battle going on with Ancestry US office. Long and stupid story .... Basically genealogy has its share of morons, as does any hobby.
So the Ancestry tree is now private. If you've had an invitation to look at it you can, of course, still look at it. Nothing has changed. If you want to see it just let me have your email address (or Ancestry name if you are a member) and I'll invite you. There are no photos or copies of documents on Ancestry, they are all on My Heritage. NOTE you don't get to add to the tree on Ancestry unless you're an experienced genealogist. Please go to the My Heritage site to add people to the tree.
Now for some good news! I managed to find a way to hide the flash burn on the photo of George Horswill's family. The photo we have is a photo of the framed one when it was hanging on the wall. George was born in Bigbury in 1851 and is my great grandfather. My Grandad, Tom Horswill, is in the front row on the left.
Click on the small image in the right hand column of this blog and it will take you to a (random) gallery of scrapbook layouts)
