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Welcome! Our Family Tree is a full-featured online genealogy collaboration website intended both for people browsing, and a tool for researchers to maintain and collaborate on their research efforts. When browsing different websites it is inefficient for many people to be researching some of the same ancestors, all stored in separate parallel systems, rather than everyone contributing directly to the same system. This website hopefully encourages people to collaborate and work together on common ancestors, and eliminate duplicates copies of each person. Down the line somewhere we're all in the same family, so why not work in the same tree?
This is and will always be free of charge. This system is constantly growing and evolving based on your needs and feedback.
The basic concept of the system is that each record has a "moderator" with the ability to make any changes needed, and can add other moderators. Anyone else who is not a moderator can submit suggestions for additions and changes, but it is up to the moderator(s) to accept the changes for public display. Those people who are not moderators may be moderators of other records in the system.
To find out more and get started, read through the rest of this guide, browse around the site, register for an account (free), and login. Before adding your own branches, it would be good to look around at other branches already here to see where you can contribute, rather than adding the same families again.
But above all, we want you to share what you know, so that everyone may benefit!
Enjoy!
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Here is a list of some of the features built into this system:
Viewing Information
- 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
- 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
Other than by joining and contributing information, you can also help:
- 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
Other features to be added as needed -- just ask!
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Some more information on the rationale behind this system....
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
This website and genealogy database is intended to be a successor to the traditional, individual genealogy database, not just an additional tool. It may be a big paradigm shift from researchers may be used to... but I believe it is an important shift to enable these and other features, bringing our previous generations to our next generations.
Plus some more background information from my Myers Briggs INTJ profile -- this explains a lot of the motivation behind the site and my intentions!
But this is all only possible with your participation!
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| Date |
Description |
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| 1-23-12 |
I see several Thomas Tinsley's, but none are "Thomas Tinsley b. 1638, Yorkshire, Eng." You can find the correct person by going to the very bottom of the page, and "Contact This Researcher". Several areas will be highlighted in yellow, including the name of the person, where to email them, and where to post discussion information for this person. |
| 1-22-12 |
I would like to chat with the person who posted the parents of Thomas Tinsley b. 1638, Yorkshire, Eng. |
| 1-14-12 |
Added at the bottom of each person's list of links  are new links to places. These link to search results of this person's surname and each states or states and counties where he or she lives. This was inspired by FindAGrave.com, which has something similar.
After entering a new person I often want to see who else is living in the same place with the same name, to see who else they may be related to. This provides a quick way to get there. |
| 1-10-12 |
Like the options to mark parent and spouse relationships as questionable, added is the option to mark child relationships as questionable. Edit a parent, go to "Walls", and check the checkbox next to a child's name.
It's the exact same result as going to the child, and checking his or her parents as questionable, except that you can check this for children of other people's branches. |
| 1-7-12 |
An improvement in formatting -- the first picture of a person posted will now show at the top of the page next to their name. Nothing different needs to be done in adding photos -- in the attachments section, the first of type "person" will automatically be displayed at the top, followed by all others at the bottom.
Remember to use the type "person" only for pictures of individuals or couples. For anything else, use the other picture types. This keeps the top picture limited to only pictures of that person.
If you have multiple photos posted and want to change which one is at the top, edit the person in question, go to the "Attachments" tab, and drag & drop the desired photo to the top of the list. |
| More What's New |
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Partnerships
 Other websites can be setup to extract and display data from Our Family Tree, making the data available in more places and bringing traffic back. Here are some of these website partnerships.
Trails to the Past -- Some state and county websites in the Trails network are setup to show state and county data.
Partner Websites:
- Sharp Co, Arkansas TTTP
- Apache Co, AZ TTTP
- Coconino Co, AZ TTTP
- Graham Co, AZ TTTP
- Greenlee Co, AZ TTTP
- Maricopa Co, AZ TTTP
- Mohave Co, AZ TTTP
- Pima Co, AZ TTTP
- Yavapai Co, AZ TTTP
- Yuma Co, AZ TTTP
- Alameda Co, CA TTTP
- Alpine Co, CA TTTP
- Amador Co, CA TTTP
- Butte Co, CA TTTP
- Calaveras Co, CA TTTP
- Colusa Co, CA TTTP
- Contra Costa Co, CA TTTP
- Del Norte Co, CA TTTP
- El Dorado Co, CA TTTP
- Fresno Co, CA TTTP
- Glenn Co, CA TTTP
- Humboldt Co, CA TTTP
- Imperial Co, CA TTTP
- Inyo Co, CA TTTP
- Kern Co, CA TTTP
- Kings Co, CA TTTP
- Lake Co, CA TTTP
- Lassen Co, CA TTTP
- Los Angeles Co, CA TTTP
- Madera Co, CA TTTP
- Marin Co, CA TTTP
- Mariposa Co, CA TTTP
- Mendocino Co, CA TTTP
- Merced Co, CA TTTP
- Modoc Co, CA TTTP
- Mono Co, CA TTTP
- Monterey Co, CA TTTP
- Napa Co, CA TTTP
- Nevada Co, CA TTTP
- Orange Co, CA TTTP
- Placer Co, CA TTTP
- Plumas Co, CA TTTP
- Riverside Co, CA TTTP
- Sacramento Co, CA TTTP
- San Benito Co, CA TTTP
- San Bernardino Co, CA TTTP
- San Diego Co, CA TTTP
- San Francisco Co, CA TTTP
- San Joaquin Co, CA TTTP
- San Luis Obispo Co, CA TTTP
- San Mateo Co, CA TTTP
- Santa Barbara Co, CA TTTP
- Santa Clara Co, CA TTTP
- Santa Cruz Co, CA TTTP
- Shasta Co, CA TTTP
- Sierra Co, CA TTTP
- Siskiyou Co, CA TTTP
- Solano Co, CA TTTP
- Sonoma Co, CA TTTP
- Stanislaus Co, CA TTTP
- Sutter Co, CA TTTP
- Tehama Co, CA TTTP
- Trinity Co, CA TTTP
- Tulare Co, CA TTTP
- Tuolumne Co, CA TTTP
- Ventura Co, CA TTTP
- Yolo Co, CA TTTP
- Yuba Co, CA TTTP
- Colorado TTTP
- Chaffee Co, Colorado TTTP
- Montrose Co, CO TTTP
- Park Co, CO TTTP
- DC TTTP / GenWeb
- Clay Co, Florida TTTP
- Duval Co, Florida TTTP
- Iowa TTTP
- Illinois TTTP
- Ogle Co, Illinois TTTP
- Indiana Trails to the Past
- Jackson County, Indiana TTTP
- Massachusetts Trails To The Past
- Maryland TTTP
- Nebraska TTTP
- Chautauqua Co, NY TTTP
- Garfield Co, Oklahoma TTTP
- Logan Co, Oklahoma TTTP
- Pennsylvania TTTP
- Rhode Island Trails To The Past
- Prince William Co VA TTTP Site
- Vermont Trails To The Past
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