So after a year of trial, error, failure and just not liking anything out there for a private Family Tree that could be only accessed by subscription of the society members. I have given up this model of income generation by the society. I am now suggesting that we use the open and free wikitree dot com where I already have a lot of the tree located anyway. I would like everyone to open an account there and message me your profile URL. I will add your profile URL to my Society member spreadsheet.
The goal is to then get you connected to the main tree on the site. The main way to do this is for everyone to get their lineage in front of them and then search wikitree to see who in your lineage is already there with a profile. The profile ID is at the end of the URL, mine is Lemons-34. Once you find a person in your lineage already on wikitree write their profile ID down. Now you need to connect your profile up to that person by creating a new person for every direct ancestor up to them. Once you get to the child of the existing person you do not create a new person but enter the Profile ID as the child's father or mother. Now you are linked to the existing ancestor. There should never be more than one profile per person. I think this will be the best way for us to have a family tree. As to what is on each profile page, we only want the bare minimum of detailed facts. Birth and Death dates/locations, marriage date, children, link to Find A Grave page.
The plan is to have professionally written research documents done for each person in the tree over time. As these documents are written they will be for sale on main society website. We can provide a link on the wikitree profile page for people to get the research document if they want more information about the person. This is how the society will earn income to stay sustainable. Here is John Liming's profile at the top of the tree. http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Liming-117 You can also just search for Liming, Leming and all the other variant spellings.
