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Leaves on our tree: 168,825
Updated in the past month: 8910
Researchers: 1131
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Welcome! Our Family Tree is a full-featured online genealogy collaboration database 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?
Other online systems have had this approach, but some of the differences here are:
- This is and will always be free of charge.
- This system began many years ago as my home-grown genealogy system, has grown and improved over time as needs have come up, and for this project, I have expanded and improved on the same system to add still more flexibility and usability. If it's worked well for me, it may for you as well.
- Parts of this system are based on my previous public website interface, and I have received many gracious compliments for it. This system is even better and constantly evolving.
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
- 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 (new 3-6-10)
- 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
- 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
- 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
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 (new 2-28-10)
These are some of the things in the works, or planned for down the road:
- RSS feeds (probably only relevant for you if you know what RSS is)
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, I intend this site to be where 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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| 3-6-10 |
Added new option: Under Account > Link Checker is a page that goes through all of the websites listed in your sources, and checks each to see if they still exist. Each will be listed out on the screen with a green (it is found) or pink (there was a problem) code indicating the status of that address. You can click the link to the website to test it yourself. Also provided is a link to edit the source -- so that if you can find a corrected address, you can update it right there. An update does not appear immediately, but it is saved.
If the same address is quoted multiple times, it is only listed once here, but a number appears after the "edit" link showing how many times it is used.
Note that this doesn't guarantee that the website still contains relevant information, but just that it is still accessible. Cleaning up any bad addresses will help you to maintain your data and others as they browse your data. Please check your website sources when you can get to it, and check again at least every few months. |
| 2-28-10 |
For those of you who have had Y-DNA tests, or are working with relatives and their test resutls, the data here can now be integrated into the groups coming from the results. This is intended to pull together people who are as yet unlinked in the family tree but who are associated with other people in the same test results grouping, with the goal of helping to find the linkages in those as yet unrelated people. For example, see this example results page for the name BEASLEY:
http://www.worldfamilies.net/surnames/beasley/results
Each color grouping would be defined as a separate grouping here, and anyone testing into that group could be assigned to that group.
So several updates to enable this functionality:
Editing person: There is a new "DNA" tab at the top of the editing page. Note that this only works for males, as this is currently only applicable to the Y-DNA test. Here, select an existing group or add a new group.
Searching: In the list of searchable fields is a "DNA Group" option, listing all people assigned to a group.
Browsing: At the bottom of the main browsing page is a new tab for "DNA" which opens up a corresponding section to show the group that someone is in.
DNA Group page: Clicking the group link in the browse page goes to a new page showing the full details about the group, and all members assigned to that group, linking back to those pages.
All Groups: At the top of the individual group page is a link to the overall Y-DNA surname page, showing all groups for that name. Here is an example that I have setup for the BEASLEY name:
http://www.gurganus.org/ourfamily/dna/group.cfm?surname=Beasley
All of this will soon be integrated into the online Help, and more examples will be setup. For those of you who have Y-DNA results, give it a try, and reply if it is helpful or if you have suggestions for improving it further. |
| 2-22-10 |
An update for the pedigree chart: It still all the options it did before -- varaible number of generations, pictures, indicating researchers, etc. -- but one major enhancement is added: When clicking the arrows on the right to go to earlier generations, it now shows those generations directly on the current page. You can click as many of the arrows as you want, and even arrows expanding the newly shown branch. Not all will be able to show on the screen at the same time, but at least it's all shown together.
With each branch added, clicking the X button in the upper left of that branch will close it if you no longer want to see it.
Obviously I have not tested it with every possible pedigree on the site... so if you find any anomolies, let me know. If you have any questions or suggestions for further improvement, let me know! |
| 2-14-10 |
Added a new option under "Feasibility Checks" -- "Birth after Death". For any manual data entry there may not be any as this is checked at that time. But if you have had gedcom data imported, this was not checked after import. So check it and correct as needed. Thanks. |
| 2-12-10 |
I just corrected a bug that may have been preventing you from selected sources. If you were experiencing this, try again!
And remember, if there's anything that is not working like you think it should, let me know! I use the myself, but don't always see what you see. Thanks. |
| 2-11-10 |
In the main editing page, hotkeys have been added for the Title (T), First Name (F), Last Name (L), and Suffix (X) fields -- so if the cursor is not where you want it to be, this may help get it there, rather than resorting to the mouse. To access the hotkey, hold down the "modifier" key (ALT or ALT+SHIFT on Windows -- see this page, or OPTION on Mac), and then the letter in ( ). The cursor should move there.
The corresponding letter is also shown as underlined in each label on the screen. |
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