Online Genealogy project

The past few weeks while I’ve had quite a bit of vacation time, I’ve worked on putting some of our family’s genealogical information online. I installed PHPGedview and ask my mom, who is the keeper of the official genealogy for the family, to provide me with a GEDCOM file to try it out with.

It took quite a bit of effort to get the initial file imported. I think it’s because of the size of the file and the limitations of the shared server I’m hosting it on. It kept running out of memory, but once I figured out how to increase the limit,  it seemed to go okay. After some initial testing, we opened the site up to the rest of the family to review their records and make corrections. It was all going okay.

Once people started making changes, the question came up of how do we take changes people have made and get it back into my mom’s official record in Family Tree Maker. I decided to let her approve all changes and use the change report to select just those records that had changed, create a new GEDCOM file which could be re-imported. The only problem was that the change report seemed to be broken in the version I was using.

I decided to upgrade to the lastest version, but it has a bug in it which doesn’t allow you login with Internet Explorer. I filed a bug report, but so far nothing. Meanwhile, things kept trucking along.

The major problem came in when one of our relatives sent an entirely new GEDCOM that contained all of the information for that branch of the family. My dad imported the file into Family Tree Maker and tried to do an entirely new export of the entire database to overwrite the information in PHPGedview so that it would include the new data. That’s where things went wrong. I’m not able to import the new file and I’m no longer able to import the original file that worked before.

I have no idea how to proceed at this point. No matter which file I try to import or how I do it (fiddling with the memory limits), the import fails with a 500 server error. I even tried creating a virtual machine with VirtualBox and a LAMP appliance to do the import and so far it’s not worked either. It’s weird that it gets to 16% or so and then the progress meter goes back to 2% and starts counting up again.

Maybe I should give up on PHPGedview and try something else.