What can I use to create a searchable database of obituaries and cemeteries in a family website?

Try evernote. See evernote.com

I think your best bet would be to publish it via google docs and just put a link to it on the site. People can then just use control-f to find stuff on the page.

Excel (and the rest of Office) can “Save as Web Page”.

If you fuss with the formatting and column widths in Excel, you can get pretty good static web pages. As jordy240 mentions, browsers can use control-f (Windows) or command-f (Mac) to search.

You can also make a Google Maps mashup for the cemeteries, and just publish the link.

to help you better i would need to know as many of the following as possible:

1— searchable how exactly? so they show up on google and other search engines, or searchable on the site its self

2— how many of these sheets do you have?

3— does the domain and hosting come with any mySQL databases?

4— does the host support PHP?

5— do you know anything about PHP and/or javaScript?

This is for a family member with limited computer knowledge. I’m trying to encourage her to try the TNG7 software as its database driven and should work.

She wants it searchable on the site.
Her obit collection alone is 17,000 records
Yes she has mySQL and PHP

I know very little PHP/Java she knows none.

She has this mass of data she has been posting in static html pages for years and naturally its growing cumbersome. I think this software covers all her needs and other options seem to be out of our ability to pull off.

@Daethian well, i cant say im familiar with this TNG7 thing at all, maybe its cause im such a star trek gook, but as soon as i look at it i see ’‘star trek the next generation 7 seasons’’ joke

well, the reason i mentioned javascript at all is because it would be possible to create a search engine with it. a large collection of: if search field = x goto http. but with 17.000 entries this would be out of the question.

what you will need, if this TNG7 does not work out for you is some php and mySQL, you will need to create a database for all the files and wire it all up with php.

there is one more option that could possibly work for you. if all the data is made in to html so it can be found by google, and you make a detailed enough site map, you could look at embeding a google custom search engine on to your site and set it to search your site internally.

anyway, good luck with that, if you have any troubles just drop me a line in PM or something.

Thanks for such a thorough answer! She seems sold on TNG7 so I’m hoping that’s the answer for her as its far easier.