Thursday, February 6, 2014

The Eliza Metzker Hudson Story

The Hudson Family circa 1869
 L-R Elizabeth, William Alexander Hudson holding William Jr, Eliza Metzker Hudson holding Isaac

The latest snow storm in New Jersey, gave me the opportunity to play with a new to me feature in Ancestry.com, the Story. Story takes the information you have entered about a person and creates a chronological historical picture book. Now if Ancestry took all the timeline entries I made on Eliza and included them in the story view, I would have been ecstatic. It's unclear how Ancestry decides what goes in the timeline besides, census information. It looks like if there is an Ancestry.com source then it appears on the timeline. Other entries being included seems to be a crap shoot. All pictures attached to the ancestors file get uploaded, so you can create your own entries. There are severe limitations with the picture file in my opinion since it will only let you use a picture once. I add children's births to a mother's timeline so I need to use the "it's a boy/girl" multiple times. Ancestry is also erratic when pulling descriptions from the timeline view to the story view. Net result, instead of having a well rounded story on the first take, I had to re-create the majority of events before Eliza's story could be told. My final pet peeve of the story view is it can't be saved as an infographic, only as a web link. If anyone has figured out how to save the story view to an infographic, please let me know. For the moment at least if you would like to learn about my 2nd great-grandma Eliza Metzker who married William Alexander Hudson in 1866, you will have to use this story link. Update, the above story links no longer work. Now called LifeStory it can be printed or saved as a pdf. Eliza Metzker Hudson's Life Story 

No comments:

Post a Comment