• Information is online as soon as entered - no uploading or creating webpages.
• Customizable pedigree and descendant charts color-coded by birthplace
• Family timeline chart including births, marriages, children, deaths, censuses, deeds, wills, color-coded by place
• Integrated with references to historical events
• Integration with Google Maps for plotting locations, descendant, and pedigree charts
• Finding the relationship between any two people
• On-the-fly country, regional, and state maps showing the place distribution of surnames 
• On-the-fly country, regional, and state maps showing the place distribution by researcher
• Automatic change of place names when boundaries change
• Flexible and customizable search options; saving search options for later
• Statistics graphs showing the average lifespan, average age at marriage, and numbers of people by birthplace, for all of a researcher's branch of data
• Statistics showing the total numbers of ancestors and descendants of any selected person.
  
  Management
• Maintaining complete control over the data you enter
• Notes fields including WYSIWYG text editing; private notes that only you see
• An option to include living people for your own use, but hide them from public access
• Auto-filling place names to save typing
• Attaching photos and other images, Attaching documents
• An unlimited number of sources
• An automated link checker to report out-of-date source links
• A separate entry for recording document texts, and linking each to multiple people
• A full change log, recording who, what, and when anything is updated
• Date feasibility cross-checks, with on-the-fly and email reporting of issues
• An automated check for duplicate people across all branches
• An automated check for people living at the time of a census year, but for whom a census document of that year is not recorded here.
• Integrated to-do list for keeping track of all the work you want to do
• Statistics counting how many times and when your records are viewed online
• Flexible custom reports
• Automatic backups by the hosting company -- no need to worry about your own backups
  
  Customizing display
• Home dashboard display to show the information you want to see, and in the layout you want to see it in.
• A choice of displaying surnames in upper or mixed case.
• Customizable color and font settings for how your data is viewed by yourself and other people
• Choosing which columns you want to see in search results, and in what order
  
  Collaboration
• Automated suggestions for updating other people's entries
• An automated check for potential new relatives in other researchers' data
• Discussion posts by anyone
• An Email-a-Friend option for sharing data with others
• Online real-time chat between researchers
• Many pages have an option to open the page in a PDF format, which can then be saved offline or emailed to a friend.
• Message board for users to discuss the site and offer help to each other
• Automatic feed out to many state and county websites, linking their sites to your data
• Ability to mark brick walls in your branch
  
  Research helps
• Integrated links for searching other popular genealogy sites
• Links for surname resources
• Links for county resources, covering all of the U.S. where a county has people linked to it.
• Integrated Y-DNA test results

• If you are skilled at writing documentation -- looking for ways in which this documentation can be improved to be more helpful and intuitive
• If you are skilled at interface or graphic design -- looking for ways in which the webpages and interfaces can be improved to be more helpful and intuitive

1. Duplicates:  When searching other online databases, I often find dozens up to hundreds of matches for a name.  Some of these may be complete and accurate, some may be incomplete or inaccurate, and some may have additional details that I do not have.  Having all of this information to dig through is time-consuming.  One goal of this system is to eliminate all duplicates across all branches of the trees here.  So one record will hold all information that the contributing researchers have on the individual, and will hopefully be reliable.
   
   
2. Expertise:  Each researcher has usually has thousands of leaves in their tree, and it may not be feasible to research each leaf thoroughly, and a researcher may not have access to resources for a given family or geographic location, or might not know much history of a region.  By having one common tree, this system makes it easier for a researcher to concentrate in areas where they have the resources and expertise, and to leave other branches to other researchers.  With many millions of possible leaves to research, this is more efficient than everyone duplicating their efforts to try to cover everything.
   
   
3. Brick Walls:  In my own family I have many brick walls where I might have a few pieces to an ancestor's puzzle, but not enough to find answers.  It is my guess and hope that others out there are researching the same people, and might have other pieces to the same puzzle.  By bringing all of the pieces together and putting them into the same record for each person, pieces might start fitting together to enable new discoveries.
   
   In message boards and email lists the most frequent question is "does anyone have any information on... ?" and this site in an ideal world makes this question obsolete.  If every researcher who has any information on any one our ancestors puts all of this information in only one shared place, one page per ancestor, then there's no need to go hunting for who has what information.  It would all be right there.  Yes, we have a long way to go to get there, but it's a worthy goal to have and work towards.
    
   
4. Data Online:  Many researchers want to put their data online for others to be able to find and use.  Rather than maintaining an offline database (such as FamilyTreeMaker, PAF, and others), and then uploading changes, here any researcher can maintain their data, with all of the functionality that offline systems have.  As soon as a change is saved, it is online for the world to see.  No other software to install, no uploading, no experience in maintaining a website needed.
   
   
5. Why genealogy?  To many people, the information about distant ancestors, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other relatives may be like a dry barren lifeless land -- nothing of interest or relevance to inspire further time and investigation.  Putting this information online, and adding to it pictures, stories, place information, and the ability to find distant relatives you didn't know you had is like overturning the dry soil, and adding to it seeds and water.  Then it may become rich with life and relevance for who we are today and where we go in the future.
   

• choose "Edit" from the Actions menu, or
• click the corresponding button at the top, or
• Alt+H or Alt+W for husband and wife, or
• from the "last name" box at the top, use left or right bracket symbols, [ for Husband or ] for Wife

• adding most country and 50 US state flags (other provincial flags to come eventually)
• formatting changes to make things more consistent from page to page.

Suggestions welcome!