NOTE: MooseRoots is out of business.

Recently, I queried some members of a Facebook group, asking if anyone had tried out the MooseRoots visualizations options on their blogs and/or if they had used the Graphiq Search plug-in, which I believe is specifically for WordPress.

No one seemed to have experimented at all with it, so I decided to jump in and try it out.

I first learned about “visualizations,” as MooseRoots calls them, at RootsTech, during their presentation. I kept the handout, which explained how to embed items into a blog. These visualizations can be added to any blog, not just those in WordPress.

I decided to use J.H. Stufflebean, my husband’s great grandfather, who lived in Noble, Oklahoma from the early 1900s until his death in the midst of the Great Depression and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

If you have never visited MooseRoots, it is a free site and has a variety of genealogical records, including some censuses. I found that there are a couple of different ways to access and view these visualizations.

J. H. Stufflebean appears in the 1920 census in Noble, Oklahoma. The blue arrow pointing to the little <> icon in the upper right corner opens a page with the choices of Script, Iframe, URL or WordPress to be used to embed the image.  I don’t think I’d be wanting to embed something like this in my blog post when an actual census image is available.

However, MooseRoots also has a database of public domain historical information that can be searched either through names.mooseroots.com or places.mooseroots.com. This data can also be embedded in a post so I tried a new search for “Stufflebean” at names.mooseroots.com.

Up came a map with the notation that, as of 2000, there were 447 people named Stufflebean in the United States.

However, when I clicked on the same <> icon in the corner and then chose “WordPress,” I pasted the code here in my post and in popped the map.

I have to admit this wasn’t the easiest experience because the directions on the MooseRoots page, specifically the part that said “if using WordPress there was no need to copy the entire code snippet. Copying the URL inside the iframe tag would work” didn’t exactly work out and I couldn’t figure out how to make the visualization appear. I know less than zero when it comes to programming and code.

My long time friend and blogging buddy, Elizabeth O’Neal, shared code that would work and explained the text and visual boxes in wordPress to me, as I had never noticed them before. However, we also discovered that the “WordPress” option was the simplest way to go in terms of inserting visualizations.

Next, I wanted to try the places.mooseroots.com option and look for historical information about early Oklahoma. Information came up covering demographics, but there was no little icon in the right upper corner to embed anything. There was only  a SHARE button, but when I clicked on that, the icon appeared. Again, I copied and pasted the code in the WordPress option:

[graphiq id=”cIGISn4qQu1″ title=”Oklahoma in 1910″ width=”700″ height=”400″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/cIGISn4qQu1″ link_text=”Oklahoma in 1910 | MooseRoots” link=”http://places.mooseroots.com/l/138165/Oklahoma-1910″]

1910 Demographics of Oklahoma County, Oklahoma

I think it is pretty neat that the embedded image includes working tabs to toggle through the demographics information.

Besides demographics from the U.S. census, there are databases of historical information, from U.S presidents and other elected officials to geographical data.

The information and images on MooseRoots are all in the public domain. Some of the database information is a bit sparse, but if you have unusual surnames in your family tree, check out names.mooseroots.com. That was the most fun for me.