Hello, and welcome to Family Circles!

Family Circles is a program that I originally made for myself after I inherited a number of old 8 mm film reels from my grandparents. While I was going through the process of getting these 8 mm films digitized and watching the videos to create a kind of order to them, I really wanted to be able to organize all the information I was finding in a more visual way that had all of the facts that I wanted in one place. I wanted to put all this up on a webpage and that meant that I had to go out and search for pieces that would be compatible with the format that I wanted.

For the display of this webpage, while each video was playing I wanted a timeline to be able to highlight where in history this was, a map to show where physically it was, and a little family tree to show who was in the video. The videos, now that they were digitized, were already compatible to being put on a webpage, so that left finding good displays for the other sections I wanted. I was able to find software that worked for the timeline knightlab, and for the map I was able to integrate google maps in, but I just couldn’t find anything that was able to display the people in the video to my satisfaction. Tired of looking in vain, I decided to just make my own program, which is the Family Circles that you see here today. To give you an idea of what I wanted for the 8mm films website this is a outline and example of what it looked like once I’d gotten everything connected:

In the above example Family Circles is represented as the People square. Family Circles is something that’s prime purpose is to show the relationships between people; by itself, Family Circles doesn’t delve into information about where people live, whether they’re still alive or dead, or even what relationships are the most current. However, the names that get put in these circles can easily be linked up to other websites that have a more comprehensive genealogical history like Ancestry, WebTrees, WikiTrees, Family Search or any other big internet data store of genealogy. Pictures can also be linked to the names that are on Family Circles, and these pictures will show up on the display alongside their names. Family Circles is a viewer/explorer rather than a store of information itself.

Perhaps if Family Circles garners enough interest I could revive an idle project called Family Web, which is more along the lines of a data storage. If I decided to do that, I would link it up pretty tightly with Family Circles so that the information about all the people would be accessible from Family Circles itself. For now though, Family Circles can only link to other informational sites, not hold information about the people on its own.

Please enjoy this project, and any donations towards this program are greatly appreciated.