Frequently asked questions
The Macquarie Dictionary defines genealogy as "an account of the descent of a person or family through an ancestral line".
Some of the information on individuals which can be recorded in Igbo Family and Genealogy Records are:
- birth
- marriage(s)
- divorce(s)
- death
- other events in their lives
- children
- parents
- military
- deceased biafrans
- facts about them and
- multimedia files about them.
A database of genealogical information of people related to each other is sometimes called a "family tree", though it is probably more properly called a "family web".
All of the information for a single family tree is stored in a single Nigeria Family Record.com database on a single computer. This Nigeria Family Record database is accessed via an Internet web browser, such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera or Internet Explorer.
As designed, access is collaborative, allowing several people to be looking at or adding to the same webtrees database from anywhere in the world, at the same time.
Most of the information found here has been collected through public records:
- Nigeria and Federal Census
- States and Local Government
- US State and Federal Census
- Death Certificates
- Marriage Licenses
- Social Security Death Indexes
- Birth Certificates
- Baptism & Christening Records
- Cemetary Records
- Individuals
- Genealogists and Hobbyist Genealogists
Most all of the other information has been contributed by people whom we have contacted or been contacted by. If there is any information that interest or concern you as to its source, please contact the site administrator.
- Registrants should be relatives, albeit a distant cousin in many cases, however somehow related to someone already listed or someone who should be listed on our site;
- Registrants should be prepared to regularly visit and contribute to this site, at a minimum providing us with your personal and immediate family information and later - modifications, augmentation, amplifications and additions to our existing data;
- Registrants must pledge to protect the privacy of the data on all living persons on the site, and, as noted above, contribute their own personal information. Violations will lead to immediate termination of access privileges and may be cause for legal action. We take the possibility of identity theft or information abuse seriously. Please see the Privacy Section below for more details.
If you qualify for registration and agree to abide by these rather simply policies and procedures, please feel free to use the registration form built into our site. Please use the comments field to answer ALL the information requested on that page, explaining your relationship to relatives contained within the existing site, a brief lineage to that person and also clearly confirm by affirmation your acknowledgement of your intentions to abide by our policies and access rules. We will then review your application for approval. Please be patient as proper review and verification may take some time and effort and we may be away for several days. Incomplete applications will be held until we receive the confirmation of relationship, enter you into our database and receive your promise to protect privacy and all data on living persons.
1 - Every person and / or every event in that person's life should include a source reference. The concept is very simple. If you have a piece of information about someone, you MUST have got that information from somewhere. That "somewhere" is the SOURCE. It might be something sophisticated like a database, a Parish register, or a book. It might be something as simple as "Aunt Mary remembered....". These are both valid sources, but the more information you can give about a source, the easier it will be in ten, twenty, or more years time to look and say, "Ah, so that is where we got that bit of information!"
2 - All information must be factual, or described in a way that clearly indicates how accurate it is. If, for example, you know a person's age, from a census, but not their actual birth date, then you cannot say AS FACT that they were born in a certain year. There are issues of rounding, possible error on the census page, or even in some cases people might have misrepresented their age. In these cases, the use of date qualifiers like ABT (about), or EST (estimated), or CAL (calculated) to show how you arrived at the birth date you entered would be appropriate. Another good example is finding a birth, marriage or death on the UK's registration index pages. These only record events within a quarter (3 month period) so the closest you can record the date is, for example, BET JAN 1850 AND MAR 1850, meaning "in the Mar quarter of 1850. Entering a date like that is easy in the software we use - just type "Q1 1850" and it will be converted to the full text required for you!
3 - Information should accurately reflect what it really is, and what you really know. This means that the date of a baptism found on a Parish Register, for example, should NOT be entered as a BIRTH. It is a baptism or christening date. If it is the only record you have for the person's birth you should either not enter a birth (the baptism will be used instead in any age calculations), or enter the birth with a date of BEF (before) whatever the date of the baptism was. That clearly shows that the only thing we know for certain is that the birth happened before the baptism, but we don't know if it was 1 day, or 10 years before! The same applies for Parish register burials. They are not a death event, so the death would be better recorded as BEF the date of the burial.
4 - Use of data and media - May I use information obtained from this site elsewhere? This site, its contents and presentation are all subject to varying copyrights and licensing. While much of what is written and exposed to casual visitors was obtained from public sources, some data is still of a personal nature and may contain notes written by us or others. If you copy this information elsewhere, it is important to document their source and provide appropriate credit. Visual images (photos, pdfs, documents, certificates, census images and more) are copyrighted by us or others. You are expressed forbidden from using images from our site on your own online or printed versions.
If you are intending to use any data or images on this site for commercial purposes, then do not even bother to ask as the answer is very emphatically - NO.
- First of all, you need to register for a free account. A link to register can found on the "Home Page" on the right.
- During your registration, please leave a note who in the tree you are related too, and that you wish to have editing access. If you are not related to anyone in the tree, but believe that you are related to someone who should be in the tree, please make a note of that also.
- You MUST request editor access, you will not be provided editor access by default.
- Once you have been given editor access, you can add, edit, and delete information.
- To edit existing information or to add facts to an existing person you must first bring up that individuals record. You can do this many ways, however, the simplest is to enter their name in the search box in the upper right corner of any page. Once you land on the individual's page, you will see the existing records. To edit the existing fact, click on the "pen" icon. To delete it, click on the page icon with the red "X". To add a new fact, click on one of the quick fact buttons in the "Add new fact" box or select a fact from the drop down box and click "Add". When adding facts, DO NOT GUESS. If you don't know a particual piece of information for certain, do not enter it.
- To add a person, you must first find a close realtive in the tree. You cannot add anyone to the tree unless they are related to someone else. Once you have brought up the closest relatives indivudal page, click on that persons "Relatives" tab. On this realitves tab, you will be provided with links to "Add a brother or sister" or "Add a son or daughter" or to "Add a new wife". I suggest that before you add NEW individuals, you do a quick search and make sure that that person isn't already added, especially when dealing with wives. It is certainly possible that a wife may already be in the tree as a daughter of another family. Once duplicate entries of an individual exists, it can become difficult to sort out.
- Also note, all changes, additions, and deletions will not become finalized until they are reviewed for accuracy. Temporary changes or additions that have not yet been approved will display with a solid blue box around them. Deleted entries will be displayed with a sold red box around them.
- Most of the exising information can be supported with documented sources. If you plan on changing something, please make sure that you have solid evidince is true. When adding facts, you will have the ability to add a source. Adding sources is helpful, but not necessary.
Your family is listed because they are somehow related to someone that is from Igbo heritage or Nigeria. While focused on Igbo genealogy, at times members have contributed details of their family lineage that branches away from Nigeria ancestry.
In lieu of having to draw a hard line in the sand that says, "you must be X number of hops away from an Igbo ancestor", all related ancestry is included. Your relationship can be quite distant, but if your family is listed in the tree, there is a relationship.
Adding an individual
Not all methods of adding an individual are stated here.
Step A - Find the relevant database
First, we must make sure we are using the correct family tree. Hover your mouse pointer over the "Home page" icon on the left side of the page. If no list comes up, there is only one family tree installed and no selection is necessary.
Step B - Find a close relative
A webtrees administrator is able to limit the extent of access to the information displayed in each family tree. They are likely to permit more access to someone who is logged in (a site member) than someone who may only be visiting or has not logged in. If you are not already a member and can not find an individual in the database, you may either register for membership to this webtrees installation if this option is offered or contact the family tree manager using the contact links in the footer. If you already belong and have logged in and you can still not find someone, or add or edit individuals when found, you may be restricted by privacy rules and will have to inquire of the family tree manager or site administrator.
webtrees permits you to add a new individual by defining that individual's relationship (e.g. parent, sibling, partner or child) to an individual who is already recorded within the database. Before adding someone to the database, you must find a parent, sibling, partner or child of that individual. Do this by using the search dialog box on the right side of the screen above the menu or by using one of the search options on the "Search" menu. When searching, you can use an individual's given name, their surname or both. Alternatively, you can select "Families" or "Individuals" under "Lists" on the menu bar, and browse for a person using their surname. Unlinked persons are usually discouraged because they are technically not part of the family tree being recorded, therefore they may only be added by a family tree manager or administrator.
webtrees search box and menu bar.
Step C - Select the relationship
Click on the "Relatives" tab, which is just below their highlighted image (photo), or alternative icon for their photo. The family record page then displayed will permit you to add to or create family units, parents, partners and children, of that individual. If the individual whose page you are looking at already has a parental or personal family created, you will also be able to add a sibling or child.
To add a parent of the individual displayed:
Click on either the "Add a new father" or "Add a new mother" link below the tabs.
To add a sibling of the individual displayed:
Click on the "Add a brother or sister" link at the bottom of the "Family with parents" section.
To add a child of the individual displayed:
Click on the "Add a son or daughter" link at the bottom of the "Family with (partners name)" section.
To add a partner of the individual displayed:
Click on either the "Add a new wife" or "Add a new husband" link near the bottom of the page.
Don't worry if the individual displayed already has a partner. When adding a new "wife" or "husband", a new family will be created.
Individual Screen, Relatives Tab showing add links
Step D - Complete the dialog box
When you click on any of the links mentioned in Step 1, a dialog box pops up.
It is not necessary to fill in every box, however, in completing the fields you should have already familiarized yourself with the conventions used by the family tree manager. Read the site's FAQs (listed within the HELP drop-down menu at the far right of the header) to see if the manager has established any rules, specified any conventions, or made any suggestions about the format of information you enter. Also, prior to starting data entry, you should navigate the site and observe the fashion in which data is recorded. Yellow-tinged fields are auto-complete data lookup fields and as you begin typing your entry, suggestions culled from data already contained within the family tree will be presented for your selection.
See earlier on this page for the definition of "pedigree". A pedigree of 'birth' is typically presumed where not specified.
When filling in the new individual's surname, look at some other entries in the database to see if that database uses a convention of capitalizing all letters in a person's surname.
At the bottom of the dialog box, you should add your source, and it is possible to add a note, shared note or a multimedia object. See the next section about adding a multimedia object.
Click on the "Save" button at the bottom of the page when complete.
Introduction
Site administrators who come direct to kiwitrees without the benefit of ‘learning the ropes’ on PhpGedView often struggle with some basic concepts which are second nature to more experienced ‘hands’. One such issue is the fundamental difference between two terms which sound very similar, ‘family page’ and ‘family tab’. An individual is normally represented in two or more family groups during their lifetime. All their family relationships are represented on the side-bar on the right of the individual page and they all appear again on the ‘family tab’ page.The ‘family tab’ is a tabbed area of the individual page which can be used, subject to normal editing privileges, to add individuals to the family group, these newly added members can be totally new individuals or already exist in the family hierarchy. Behind the scenes, webtrees creates bi-directional links between the new individual and the family, but these links cannot be maintained from the ‘family tab’ page.
The ‘family page’ is accessed from the ‘View Family’ link above the relevant family on the ‘family tab’ area; or from the ‘Family …’ link above the relevant family on the right side of the individual page; or from any one of the various “family” links available throughout the system. This page deals with the maintenance of the links between the individuals in a single family group as well as facts and events that are specific to a family group rather than a single individual, and is the place from which these linkages are changed or removed. This image highlights just some such links:
The editing process
- Access the ‘family page’ for the family group to be maintained, as described above.
- Select the ‘EDIT’ drop down menu from the top-level menu’s, notice the options presented are:
- CHANGE FAMILY MEMBERS
- ADD A CHILD TO THIS FAMILY
- RE-ORDER CHILDREN
- EDIT RAW GEDCOM RECORD
- DELETE
- ADD TO FAVORITES
Ensure the menu options are as listed, otherwise the ‘family page’ has not been correctly located.
- Select the option required from the EDIT drop-down menu
- Change the family group as required
- Save the changes.
