Site Navigation
The pages on this site are organized in an hierarchical tree structure with the "Home" page in the top level. All pages are formatted using a single uniform layout for consistency. So on any given page, the same set of complimentary navigation menus provide users a way to easily navigatate the site. At any time, users can view the entire hierarchy by selecting a Site Map link, located near the top and bottom of any page.
- Primary Navigation
- Primary navigation is provided by the horizontal menu bar at the top of each page, located just below the page header. This pull-down menu provides easy access to the top level page catagories for the site.
- Breadcrumb Navigation
- As a convenience, located below the Primary Navigation menu, is a "breadcrumb trail" that allows users to establish where they are in the site's page hierarchy; and provides another way to navigate up that hierarchy. The breadcrumbs are a series of text links where each link is for a page that is one level higher in the page hierarchy than the link on its right. The rightmost breadcrumb text always refers to the current page being viewed.
On desktops and wider mobile devices, the leftmost breadcrumb link will refer to the "Home" page.
On smaller mobile devices, only the three most rightmost breadcrumb links will be shown, for brevity. - Local Navigation
- A Local Navigation menu is always located at the top of the left sidebar. It provides a menu of links to the current page's parent and child (subcatagory) pages, if any. Selecting the current page's title menu link, located directly under the "Local Navigation" label, will take users to the parent of the current page. Any menu items below this one are for pages located directly below the current page in the site hierarchy. Again, the entire site hierarchy is available on the Site Map page.
On smaller mobile devices, the Local Navigation box will be displayed following the main content of the page. - Footer Navigation
- At the bottom of every page is a collection of links to a variety of useful pages on this site as well as links to information about this site and its contents.
- Site Search
- A search box is conveniently located at the top every page. Visitors can use this to search the pages of this site.
- External Links
- Links to external web sites are provided as a convenience and for informational purposes only (see Disclamers). External links on a page appear different from internal links. For example, External Link should be followed by a special icon and highlighted with a different color.
- Database Access
- Over a dozen collections of genealogical records are available to this site, one has over 64,000 records. Each collection of data has a series of web pages associated with it. These pages share a common interface that allows a visitor to browse, filter, and paginate through the associated data. The interface elements are:
- "Clickable" Preface header: located above each data table, this typically contains a description of that data collection; often this includes the definitions of coded values that may appear in specific columns. Clicking on the Preface bar will toggle between showing and hiding the contents of the Preface.
- Sortable tables: selecting a column heading link will reset the filter to the default (Show_All) and then sort the data collection on the selected column, in ascending order.
- Sort column filter: selecting a filter character (link) will return only records where the first character of the sort column matches the selected filter character. Selecting the '*' filter character will return any records where the first character of the sort column does not match any of the other filter characters. Selecting Show_All will show the entire collection of data, the default.
- Pagination: vistors can browse through the returned pages by selecting the Previous page, Next page, or specific page number links.
- Search: visitors can use the general site search box, located at the top of each page, to search for specific keywords.
Note: a more advanced database search facility is planned for the future.
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