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Welcome to the ONSshoebox demonstration site

and the GenesONS Customer Support site

http://www.GenesONS.com

Services for

Collaborative Genealogical Research

This is the demonstration site for the GenesONS Genealogical Research Data Management facilities, the safe on-line One Name Study 'shoe box' for your genealogical research data. Access to a number of ONSshoebox demonstration pages is available to all users from the menus in the left hand column. It is also the main support site for all the GenesONS services and Customer Support menus are also available at the bottom of the left hand column.

For information on the subscriptions available and how to sign up please go to the main web site using the link above.

The aim of the demonstration areas available from this site is to show how the ONSshoebox hosted service can be used by groups of family history researchers to help them collaborate in their research. This service allows their 'raw' research findings to be safely stored on-line and shared across the group in a secure and controlled manner.

Conducting family history research - especially as a full One Name Study - is usually an activity shared by several members of an immediate family group or by several researchers with an interest in the same family name. Often these groups of researchers are dispersed around the country or even across several continents, so sharing their research information in a secure way whilst still making it open and accessible can be very challenging. In addition valuable research information is often 'locked away' on a number of individual home PCs or several different shoe boxes! This makes it less accessible and susceptible to loss due to an inevitable PC/disk failure at some time - and we all know that we are rarely totally diligent in backing up our data in a robust way.

The GenesONS Genealogical Research Data Management facilities, the ONSshoebox, is one of the GenesONS services that address these challenges. The ONSshoebox provides an easy to use, inexpensive set of internet accessible systems that allow different forms of research information to be centrally stored. It enables all data to be readily shared and also encourages many ways of conducting collaborative research. Every member of the research group, with the right access permission, can upload all their key information to the system in a way that makes it readily accessible to the rest of the group as well as making it safe from local computer 'difficulties'.

The ONSshoebox service provides a dedicated, but customisable web site (just like this demonstration site) with all the systems and services pre-installed and configured to provide a flying start to using the systems for managing your specific information. Additional services for viewing and managing family trees (PhpGedView) and managing large numbers of images (Gallery) complement the ONSshoebox to make sharing your research and collaborating across a group of any size, extremely easy.

These ONSshoebox demonstration facilities are open to any visitor without any login - but as you will see these GenesONS capabilities allow you to manage groups of users that are any mix of 'fully closed' to 'fully open'. You can decide who sees, downloads or changes any of your group information.

To see how this works, login now at the box in the top left hand corner using the id/password of testuser/testuser and you will see that additional menu options become available. Then click through to the following page to learn more:

Use the menus in the left hand column, to review all the various ONSshoebox facilities or click this link Demonstration facilities

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