With so many ancestors being shared by so many would it be possible to have an option to add private, personal notes to profiles in your direct line of ancestry - similar to the Curator notes but visible only to an individual Geni user?
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Votes
9 comments
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Jim Sieks ...similar to my suggestion, a notes area for a pro would be helpful to store or retain information about a profile that is not ready for prime time
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Chad Alan Woodburn This would definitely be a MAJOR plus for me. Right now I have to keep all those kinds of notes elsewhere on my computer, which makes it much harder to track and forces me to go elsewhere when doing ancestry study. Some of the kinds of notes I would put in are those which are distinctive to me and would have no interest to others. For example, I might put in a note as to how my wife and I are descended from the same male ancestor, but through different wives. After researching something like this, I have no place to store this information in GENI. Or, like what I just found out that two of my ancestors (unrelated to each other) came over on the same ship in 1634. This personal notes field would especially be helpful when the manager of the profile has blocked all comments so that even information and links that would be of interest to others (and certainly to myself) cannot be stored in GENI. These personal notes also should be searchable.
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Yao Liu ...or visible to one's family group, which would be a new use of a (nearly) defunct functionality. Color shaded perhaps (I'm thinking of text in About, but could also work with private photos).
In fact, I come to think of it as a very important feature: Those who are firmly against collaborative genealogy (wanting to keep his own tree, private information, etc.) would have nothing to say. Even celebrities who have become MP'd can maintain his or her own profile, with things that are not yet "in the public" hidden from other users.
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Bjørn P. Brox There was once mentioned and demonstrated a third-part add-on for Geni you could use to add and maintain research information to a profile, but I don't remember what it was.
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Liam Glynn C'mon . This facility is needed..........
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Jim Henderson I don't think this is as important as other requests.
Also, I am a computer programmer, and I know that this would require a lot of extra work and changes to the database software. These private notes would need to be private to the particular manager who added them, and perhaps to that person's family. (This is because many ancestors have many managers. For example, https://www.geni.com/people/James-Henderson-1st-of-Fordell/5184614184300086565 has 19 managers!) This would involve a set of extra tables of documents, one for each manager for each profile. The mind boggles! And all of this would need to be rigorously tested.
A better solution, I think, would be for us to set up folders for our own notes, on Google Drive if we want to share our work with others (they give you 15 Gigs of free space when you get a free gmail address). The files could be named with the last two parts of the addresses of the profiles. For example, for the profile above, the file could be called
James-Henderson-1st-of-Fordell_5184614184300086565,
with the "/" changed to "_".Here's a link to a file that I made as a proof of concept:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=13nlsEdD4EizHdiClDZMQqb-DLNU2geH8WqE6SeGHbDoIt seems to me that staff at geni don't read these comments, so I doubt a major task like this would happen. I hope this suggestion goes some way to a solution to this request.
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June Barnes I like this idea - would appreciate some more detailed instructions on how to go about it and share with other managers.
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Jim Henderson Well, June, I started on a set of steps, but it turned out to be pretty long.
For me, working with Google Docs comes naturally, and for others like me I think the description that I gave above would be enough. Others would probably find the steps a bit much.
Then I thought of a way of using the Documents system that Geni already supports, which users might find easier to follow. Here are the steps:
- With the profile open, click in the Address Bar to highlight the whole URL. Tap the right arrow key to unhighlight, then hold down Ctrl (or Option on a Mac) and Shift and tap the left arrow key enough times to select the profile name and unique ID number. (Or you can use the mouse, but the keyboard is always quicker :-)
- Fingers off the keys, then hold down Ctrl (or Command on a Mac) and tap c to Copy those into the clipboard.
- Scroll down in the profile till you can see the tabs and click Sources.
- Click the link on the right called Add Source.
- In the dialog, click Add A New Document.
- Click the button on the right, Create a New Document.
- Click in the Title field and hold down Ctrl (or Command on a Mac) and tap p to Paste. This will insert the name and unique ID number as the Title of the document.
- Type in _note as the rest of the title.
- The Title now has a slash character "/" in it, which is not allowed in document names. To change it, hold down Ctrl (or Option on a Mac) and tap the left arrow key to get to the beginning of the number. Tap Backspace (or delete on a Mac) to rub out the "/" and type "_" in its place. Tap the Enter key to save the Title and create the note.
- In the editing window, type in the text of your note. You could also open other web pages, copy text there and paste it into this window.
- When you have finished editing for now, click Save.
- Beside "Unknown date", click Edit.
- At the top-right, locate the check box called Public. If you want others to be able to read your note, make sure there is a tick there.
- Put the current date in the Date field and set any other information you want to.
- In the Description field put something like "tentative note" or "private note" as appropriate.
- Click Save.
- So that you will be able to find the document easily, cite it in relation to a fact such as Last Name. To do this, on the right, under the name of the profile, click facts.
- In the citation dialog, click the document that you have just made, then click the checkbox for some fact, and in the Note field, type something like "tentative note" and click Save.
- Click the profile name on the right, and in the Sources tab you'll see the document you have just made. You can edit it many times, and if it becomes "ready for prime time", you can give it a suitable name, cite it in relation to more facts and make it public. Or you can copy its contents to the clip board and turn it into an entry in the Overview tab.
See if you can read and edit the tentative note that I added to
https://www.geni.com/people/Harry-Henderson/6000000021937811238#/tab/source .Can you read the private note?
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June Barnes This create document is something I have used frequently - and yes I can see the note. I understand the Google docs concept but was really wanting to know how you would draw attention to it on the profile/project. I created a document yesterday to try - see documents linked to https://www.geni.com/projects/Projects-June-Barnes/35554
Perhaps using the inbuilt docs would be better- not sure how you make them private/limited to the managers or family though. I tried both - linking to the google docs is two step as you need to visit URL to see the doc. Not sure if there is a better way of linking a Google doc.
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