Monthly Archives: February 2011

Don’t Trust What You Find on the Internet, and Cite All Your Sources

When you do research into your family, you need to cite your sources. Without sources for all the names, dates, etc. that you put into your family tree, your tree doesn’t really mean that much. Let me explain why this is the case.

There are millions of people worldwide who are actively researching their family trees. Some people consider it an occasional hobby, and others spend all their waking days looking into their families. No matter which side a researcher finds themselves on, or anywhere in between, the quality of the research done by these people varies greatly. In other words, some people do quality research, back up everything they find, and cite the sources for everything so they can go back and tell you how they determined the year a particular person was born, or what their name was before immigrating to the US, etc. Other people do lower-quality research, don’t record where they found anything, and just enter the names and dates they find into a database on their computer, or directly to an online family tree. I would venture to guess that there is little correlation between how much time someone spends on their family tree, and whether people are quality researchers or just name collectors.

So why is it a problem to just collect names and dates and throw them into a database? Well, primarily the problem is that you will make mistakes. I don’t mean that quality researchers don’t make mistakes and sloppy researchers do make mistakes – I mean everyone makes mistakes. There will always be times when you find a record of a person and you think it is the brother of so-and-so or the father of this-or-that cousin, and it really isn’t.

A good researcher will cite the source for the record, and most likely recognize that without more information they cannot conclusively say that the person is who they think it is. The good researcher might not even put the person into their tree, but put them in a folder for unconfirmed relatives until such time that they do find more information. If you don’t cite where you found out a piece of information, then when you do find more information, you will have no way to compare your new information with the old information.

For example, if you first calculated the birth year of a person by their age listed on their grave, but later find another record with the birth year on it, how will you know the relative strength of the new record versus the old record in terms of determining the birth year. Will you remember ten years later that you determined the age from a gravestone? What happens if you ended up recording the age of the wrong person? How would you confirm that without knowing your original source? Maybe you recorded the name of the person’s niece of nephew that shared the same name. How would you be able to tell?

Imagine a researcher just records names and dates as they find them. They don’t double-check anything, and couldn’t if they tried since they don’t know where their information originated. Using an example where someone recorded a nephew instead of the uncle, let’s say that same person finds a tree of the nephew online (which they identify since the spouse is the same). They copy and paste the new information into their tree, except it’s under the uncle instead. Now you have a branch of the family which is completely wrong. What does this researcher do next? They post their tree online with no sources. The next person comes along and finds someone who matches in their tree and copies the rest of the tree into their own, propagating the mistake.

There are really two lessons to be learned here.

First, don’t trust anything you find on the Internet, without independent confirmation. If you import a tree from a web site, make sure to check it out first.

Second, cite the source for everything you record in your own family tree, so you won’t come back years later with a new, different, piece of information and not know which is correct.

How To Cite Sources

When you were in high school or college you probably remember having to format your sources according to a citation style guide like the Chicago Manual of Style or the MLA Handbook. These guides defined where the title of the book or article went, how the author’s name was listed, etc. with examples for different types of citations – like newspaper articles, published books, unpublished dissertations, etc.

In the world of genealogy, there are many more types of evidence that one might need to cite in their research, since a scribble on the back of a an old photo, a listing in a commercial online database, the inscription of a gravestone, vital records of all kinds from all countries, etc. can be cited – all for the same person. The bible of genealogical citation is Elizabeth Shown Mill’s Evidence Explained. The book contains over a thousand citation models for just about any source you can think of that you will come across in your genealogy research. For example, do you know how to cite this blog entry? According to Evidence Explained (pg. 812) it could be formatted something like this:

Trauring, Philip, “Don’t Trust What You Find on the Internet, and Cite All Your Sources,” Blood and Frogs: Jewish Genealogy and More, 27 February 2011 (http://www.bloodandfrogs.com/2011/02/dont-trust-what-you-find-on-internet.html : accessed 27 February 2011)

It gives a two more options for different types of blog citations. It also has citation models for tweets, chats, discussion forums, podcasts and other Internet-based content that probably wasn’t listed in the MFA Handbook or Chicago Manual of Style the last time you used one of them. I’m pretty sure that even today you won’t find a citation model for citing a gravestones in the Chicago Manual of Style. Coming in at over 800+ pages, Evidence Explained is a much bigger book than those other style guides.

There has been an effort by some to try to standardize genealogy citation models around those in Evidence Explained, and indeed some genealogy software programs have offered the ability to use Evidence Explained citation models when citing sources in your program. I think that it’s good to have a standard for citations, and I hope all the major genealogy software companies adopt Evidence Explained as their citation model. If there isn’t a standard for citations, then sharing citation between programs becomes difficult.

The Debate

While there is no debate in the world of genealogy that there is a need to cite sources, there is a big debate over how to cite sources. Do you really need to follow strict citation standards like those advocated by Evidence Explained? Therein lies the issue debated amongst genealogists, how important is it really to use a citation model? Isn’t it just important to convey the information to find the source cited? Do you really need to follow an 800+ page book explaining every possible citation model you could need?

I’m not going to go into this debate in depth. I’m simply going to give my opinion that as long as you convey the correct information in an understandable way, the style is not really important. I think it’s great to use a system like Evidence Explained if you can, but if there’s a chance you won’t enter the source because it takes too long to figure out the right citation model for the source and you think you’ll get back to it later (which you won’t) then just enter the citation however you want. As genealogy programs add better source citation tools, this won’t become as big an issue and it will actually be easier to cite them properly when it is automated.

Jewish Genealogy Basics: Ancestral Town (Shtetl) Information

[Update: This article was written in 2011, and I launched the B&F Compendium of Jewish Genealogy in 2016. If you’re researching specifically Polish shtetls, definitely check out the Polish Cities list in the compendium with more than 25,000 resources for over 1400 towns in what is now Poland (this includes towns that were in Germany before WWII and are now part of Poland).]

One of the first steps to doing genealogy research is to find the town that each person in your tree was born. For most Jewish researchers, this means tracking back to towns that may no longer exist or have not had any Jewish population for generations. Certainly the Holocaust was the cause of many of these disruptions.

A Jewish ancestral town is sometimes generically referred to as a shtetl, which in Yiddish simply means town. Shtetl is sometimes used more specifically to mean small towns in Europe with large Jewish populations. Finding your ancestral town is a different topic (or rather there are many topics related to finding one’s ancestral town), and an important one, but for the purposes of this article I will assume you already know the name of the town from which your family originated.

So you’ve found the name of the town, now what? I think the first step in doing research on the town your family came from is to find out where the town is, and what it is/was near. This might seem simple, but many of the towns Jews lived in in the past had the borders switch around them amid the wars and dealings of the empires (Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Prussian/German) that ruled them.

There are several resources that can help you find out more about your town. Two important databases on JewishGen are the Communities Database and ShtetlSeeker. These two databases are not the same, and I’ll explain the differences.

JewishGen Communities Database

The Communities Database contains information on known Jewish communities across the globe. If your town is in the database, there is a page that contains a lot of basic information on the town, as well as links to other data on the town. The resultant page is largely generated automatically. It will show you which country and region the town existed in during different time periods, as well as which towns are nearby. Knowing which towns were nearby is very important, because while you might only search your town, your relatives might have moved to the town nearby and there might be records in that town for your family that you could miss. It’s always worth looking into the nearby towns, searching the JGFF and searching for records in the nearby towns, as you are likely to find you family didn’t all live in one town.

The Communities Database does not let you search using an exact match, so it will show you results on all similarly sounding towns. If you’re searching for the first time and you don’t actually know the modern spelling of the town’s name, this can be very useful. If you know the exact current spelling of the name, then you’ll just need to scroll through the results until you find the correct name.

For example, if you were to search for ‘Kanczuga’ you would get results like the following:

JewishGen Communities Database Search Results

There are six results, from several countries. If I had specified Poland as the current country then there would only have been two results. Of course, you may not know which country the town is in currently, so if you are not sure then do a broader search to see all the possibilities. Only one result has the exactly spelling I searched for, which if you know the spelling means it’s easy to figure out which one is correct. Also note the other information shown in the results. It gives you the district the town was in during different periods and the number of listings in the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF) database.

If you move your mouse over each town name, you’ll see a pop-up box giving you basic information on the town:

Mouse-over pop-up details

This can be useful if you’re not sure which town is the correct one. When you click on a town name, it will take you to a page summarizing information on that town:

JewishGen Community page for Kanczuga

If you click on the image above it will load it full size and you can see my annotations showing what to look for on the page. The key things you should notice are the alternate names for the town (useful when searching for records in databases that don’t know alternate names – like on Ancestry.com), the country the town was in during different periods (so that while you know the town is now in Poland, you now know for example to look for ‘Austria’ as a country in records because it was in the Austrian Empire), a direct link to the JGFF search, a list of nearby towns ordered by distance, and a list of other resources. Some of these pages will also link to the town’s ShtetLink page if one exists, although for some reason this Community page does not. ShtetlLinks is discussed below.

JewishGen ShtetlSeeker (Update: as of Aug 2011 this is the JewishGen Gazetteer)

The ShtetlSeeker is a bigger database that contains information on towns everywhere, even if there is no known Jewish community that existed there. It also contains geographical names, such as the names of mountains and streams. Whereas an open search above for ‘Kanczuga’ returned 6 results, an open search on ShtetlSeeker returns 303 results including Kamchikha, a section of a town, Konchuga, a town, and Kunzhuga, a stream. If the place in the list is also in the Communities Database, it will have a small flower icon next to the name of the place, and you can preview the town info with a mouse-over and click on it for more information like in the Communities Database search itself. In this case only four results have the icon next to them. Why aren’t there the same six results from the Community Database before? I have no idea.

The information in the search results is also a bit different in ShtetlSeeker. For example, this is a portion of the Kanczuga results:

Part of ShtetlSeeker search results for Kanczuga

If you take a look (you can click on the image to enlarge it) you can see the flower icon next to Kanczuga, indicating that it is in the Communities Database.

After the name is a column defining the name as a ‘populated place’, or as a stream, mountain, etc.

Next is a column showing the map coordinates for the location. This is actually a link that will take you to a Resource Map for that location. The Resource Map is a very useful map that shows you what resources (such as records in JRI-Poland, names in JGFF,  etc.) exist on the JewishGen site for everyone in the immediate area. This is very useful, even more so if your town is not in the Communities Database, as you will be able to see what towns with known Jewish communities existed nearby, and you can then see what resources exist for those communities.

Kanczuga-area Resource Map

In the map above, I’ve selected Kanczuga and it has popped up a bubble showing what resources exist for Kanczuga. If I had selected any of the other little tree icons around the map, it would show me similar information for those. If you look along the top of the image, you can see that you can select what type of resources you want to see on the map, although the default is to show everything.

Going back to the search results page, the next column has links to various mapping web sites, showing you the location on each site. The mapping sites include Expedia, Mapquest, Microsoft Bing Maps and Google Maps.

Next the search results who you the current country the town is in, it’s distance from a reference point (usually a large nearby city) and a bullseye button that will take you to a new set of search results that show all towns within a 10 mile radius of the town on whose line you press the button. 

JewishGen ShtetLinks (Update: As of Aug 2011 this is now KehilaLinks)

ShtetLinks is a large collections of town-specific web pages developed by real researchers who know about the town. You can think of them as the hand-made version of the Communities Database. Depending on who worked on the ShtetLink page for your town, it might be a simple one-page site with a few links, or it could be a full-blown web site with multiple sections, photo albums, historical documents, etc. It all depends on how much time and effort were put into the site by the volunteers who put together the pages. Sometimes a page was developed by someone who is no longer involved, and it hasn’t been updated in years. In these cases sometimes the administrator of ShtetLinks will post that pages need new administrators to the JewishGen e-mail list.

If you town does not have a site as part of ShtetLinks, you can of course volunteer to create one yourself. This is a great way to give back to the genealogy community.

Virtual Shtetl

JewishGen is not the only organized source for information on Jewish communities. Another site is the Virtual Shtetl, a project of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is currently under construction and planning to open in 2012 in Warsaw. The site contains basic information on over 900 towns, but is meant to be a collaborative effort to collect information on the towns. Users can upload documents on the towns to share with others, and they can ‘like’ a town, similar to how someone ‘likes’ a page on Facebook. Users with interest in the same town can communicate anonymously through the site.

As the site is intended to be used both by Polish people, as well as their descendants, it is available in several languages. Some content is not yet translated into all languages, so you might find a town’s information only in Polish. Information on towns can include history, synagogue info, cemetery data, places where people were killed in the Holocaust, legends, stories, memories of the town, as well as contemporary information such as transportation, hotels and restaurants.

The Virtual Shtetl is a work in progress, and most of the resources are not yet in English, but by the very nature of its location in Poland and the attempt of the hosting museum to attract many local Poles to the site, it has a lot of potential to be a unique resource on towns in Poland.

Other Sites

There are many many other sites online with information on specific towns, regions and countries. Many people have created their own web sites with information on their ancestral town, or started a Yahoo Group or Rootsweb mailing list for their town. Try searching for your town name and seeing what you find. Use the alternate names from the Community Database in your searches as well, as you never know which version of the name a person used online. Keep in mind that some of these groups and mailing lists may not have a lot of people, or a lots of message traffic in them. That could be good or bad depending on your perspective. As long as there are knowledgeable people on the lists, it doesn’t really matter how often people post to it, as long as there is someone who knows how to answer questions posed on the list.

Figure out which region your town was in, as there may be regional sites as well. Kanczuga, the town I used as an example above was in the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before WWI. That means the Gesher Galicia organization is a great place to look for information. Gesher Galicia even has a sub-group for the specific region of Galicia Kanczuga was in, the Kolbuszowa Region, which has its own web site. On Rootsweb there is an Austro-Hungarian-Jewish list, and on JewishGen there is a Gesher Galicia mailing list.

Google, beyond the straight web site search which you should do has two other sites that you can use to research your town. Google Books contains the scanned contents of millions of books from all over the world, and will show you which books mention your town. If the book is out of copyright, you may even be able to download the whole book. If it’s still in copyright, you still might be able to search inside the book and find out information, depending on what the publisher allowed Google to do. Google News Archive is a site for searching news sites including some that you will need to pay for if you want to read the whole articles. Again, this is useful just for seeing where your town may have been mentioned.

There are also some web sites with lists of location-specific Jewish genealogy links. Some of those sites include Cyndi’s List, Jewish Genealogy Links, and Genealogylinks.net (for some reason the Europe link isn’t working right now but here are links for Poland, Belarus and Hungary).

Helping Out

Once you find which sites contain information on your town, see if there’s a way that you can help. Do you have photos or documents from that town that your can contribute? Are you a web designer that can improve the look and function of one of the sites?

If there is no site for your town, consider starting one. Starting a group on Yahoo is a good way to organize researchers from the same town, and allows you to share photos, documents, links and other information is a neat organized way (and doesn’t require any web design skills).

When you have an address but not a name…

It might seem strange that you could have an address for a relative, but not their name. It’s not as strange as you think. Addresses require a level of accuracy that names historically have not had.

For example, I know that my gg-grandparents lived in New York under my gg-grandmother’s surname and not my gg-grandfather’s surname. That has caused no end to problems in tracking down evidence that they lived in New York at all during the years I know they lived there around the turn of the last century. The fact that they lived under my gg-gradmother’s surname indicates perhaps that there were other reasons not to list their real name. Perhaps they did not arrive legally in the country. I don’t know the answer to that question yet. I’ve tried without success to find reference to them in the censuses that happened while they lived in New York, but have never found them under either surname. Searching by name on the commercial databases like Ancestry.com works very well these days, so if they were in the census records under either name I should be able to find them, yet I haven’t found them yet. It could be that they used even another name, that their name was transcribed incorrectly, or that they’re just not in the census records.

This brings up what used to be the way people searched census records, before they were indexed by name. You would find where your ancestor lived, then based on the address figure out the enumeration district that address would be in, then go through all the pages of the census for that enumeration district until you found the address, and then look for your relatives.

Recently I found a document that listed my gg-grandfather’s address in 1902 in New York. Now, of course he could have moved there just before listing that address, but it was sufficiently close to 1900 for me to look into that address during the 1900 US Federal Census.

So how do you go about doing that? First, you need to figure out the enumeration district in 1900 for the address. In this case the address is 60 Cannon St. in Manhattan. This address doesn’t even exist today, as the streets downtown in New York have changed, but you can get around that fact by looking at old maps of the city.

For New York luckily there is a street atlas from 1899 that has been put online by the New York Public Library. If you go to the link, you’ll see thumbnails of the pages in the atlas. You can’t search the atlas by street name, but there is an index page that will tell you the page number to look for:

Manhattan Street Atlas from 1899 hosted by the NY Public Library

If you click on the index page and zoom in, you can find Cannon St. and see which pages it shows up on:

Close-up of index page of 1899 NY street atlas

As you can see, numbers 2-104 (even) and 1-105 (odd) are on page 15. Now actually figuring out which thumbnail is page 15 isn’t so easy, but if you search for ’15’ it will come up as one of the options and a little trial-and-error will get you to the correct page:

Page from 1899 NY street atlas showing Cannon St.

Unfortunately the zoom function for this particular site is really not so easy to use. It makes you look at a very small section of the page, and move around by bumping the view left, right, up or down a bit. However, once you zoom in on Cannon St. you can look for #60:

Close-up of 1899 NY atlas page that shows the address we’re trying to find

As I mentioned, the zoom function doesn’t work so well so you need to look at what you can identify easy, such as the big 328 for the block, and then zoom out so you can see the cross streets:

From this view you can see the block of interest, and the cross streets

Now we know that the cross-streets are Rivington (above the block) and Delancey (below the block). Why is that important? Because the next step is to figure out the enumeration district, and those cross-streets will help.

Now we go to SteveMorse.org, a veritable swiss-army knife of genealogy tools to go to the page titled 1900-1940 Census ED Finder.

SteveMorse.org 1900-1940 Census ED Finder

As you can see in the image, I’ve selected 1900 at the top, then New York for the state and Manhattan for the city. I’ve then added the three streets from the block. If I had just entered Cannon St., the list of districted would have been very long. By adding three streets it should come down to one or two districts. In this case as you can see it has determined two districts, 288 and 291. Why are there two districts for one block? The reason is easy to figure out – Cannon St. on that block must have been the border between two districts. In one district we should find odd number addresses, and in the other we should find even number addresses.

So where do we go to look for the census images for these districts? There are a few options, but I’m going to show how to do it on Ancestry.com which is what I use for census images.

Ancestry.com allows you to search by name, but as I described that didn’t help me in this case. If you’ve used Ancestry.com to look at census images, you may not have noticed that it also allows you to browse by enumeration district:

Selecting an enumeration district on Ancestry.com

In the above image I’ve already chosen the 1900 census to search exclusively. On the left side is the search interface that most people use, but on the right side (in the red box I’ve added) is a panel that allows you to browse by enumeration district. You can see I’ve selected New York for the state, New York for the County and Manhattan for the township. It then lists all of the enumeration districts, and I can select which one to view.

If you were to select enumeration district 288 first, and scan through the pages to find Cannon St., you would notice that all the addresses are odd numbers. That fits with my guess on the street being the border of an enumeration district. If you skip over to enumeration district 291, you will see that the numbers are all even. Oddly there are a few street numbers from Cannon St. at the beginning of the census file, then it jumps to another street, and then back to Cannon St. later.

60 Cannon St. in the 1910 census

Up until now I’ve been showing you how to take an address and find the census records for that address. The second lesson I want to teach here at this point is to keep your records organized an to always refer to your notes before jumping into a research project like this. If I had done so I would have noticed that I have another document from 1901 (a Declaration of Intent to Naturalize) that lists a different address. In fact the 1903 Petition was also in an entirely different address, so three addresses in three years. I guess they moved around a lot. If I had not jumped into the research before looking at what other documents I had, I would have saved a lot of time. It still makes for a good example for this blog, however, so I hope it was helpful.

To end the post I should add that the address from 1901 was on the other side of the same block (i.e. the next street over) on the same map page I found for Cannon St., and the address showed up in enumeration district 288, the same one that had the odd street numbers for Cannon St. (this address was even numbered) and unfortunately also came up empty. Considering they lived at different addresses in 1901, 1902 and 1903, I guess it’s not too surprising that they lived someplace else in 1900 as well.

What’s your favorite online family tree site?

Once you’ve built a family tree, it makes sense that you would want to share it with other family members online. There are a lot of good reasons to share your family tree online, including showing it to family members scattered across the globe, which can help you to get updates on your information from those same relatives.

The idea of making your family tree public on the Internet scares a lot of people, however, and for good reason. There are a lot of privacy issues with sharing information on family members online, including legal issues in some countries with sharing any personal information of living persons.

There are also many different ways to share family trees online. You can output a static web site from your desktop genealogy program, you can upload a GEDCOM file to one of the online family tree sites, or you can build one from scratch online. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these approaches.

The biggest family tree hosting sites are Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, and Geni.com. All of them allow some form of free family trees, and all offer subscription services on top of those free options. There are also other sites, like AppleTree.com and WikiTree.com.

I want to start building a chart to compare these sites, from the perspective of hosting a family tree only. Do you use one of the above sites? Do you use another family tree hosting site? Do you build your own site using desktop software? Post in the comments what you like and don’t like about the sites you’ve used for putting up your family tree online.

Based on the input people give in the comments, I will construct a chart showing the features as perceived by users of each site.

I’ll start here by saying what I like and don’t like about the sites I’ve tried.

Geni.com

Geni.com probably has the slickest interface of all the sites. It’s flash-based and works fairly well. You can start from scratch and build a tree fairly quickly. You can also upload a GEDCOM file, although I haven’t done that on Geni myself. You can also download a GEDCOM of your tree (although I believe this is a Pro feature). There is no desktop software that can connect to Geni.com, but they have created an API to allow such connections, so perhaps in the future there will be support for connecting via desktop software.

Upside or downside depending on your perspective, Geni is really trying to be one big tree. That means it’s not really possible to have a private tree that only you and your family members can use. On the other hand, since everyone can find everyone, you can connect to distant cousins very easily. Once you find your cousin, you can merge your trees, but you can never un-merge your trees so you need to be careful. In my experience, I’ve found more distant cousins using Geni.com than on any other site. Geni.com also has some interesting features like Surnames and Projects, which let researchers work together on common topics.

Geni.com supports uploading photos and organizing them in albums. You can tag who is in each photo, and select the faces of each person so someone looking at the photo can see who is who. I don’t think there is any kind of limit on how many photos you can upload which is really nice.

Geni.com is big on the social-networking aspect of their site, where you other family members see what you’re doing on the site and can post comments on photos and send ‘virtual gifts’ on birthdays and anniversaries which sounds kind of corny but is actually nice. Of course, in a world where we’ve gone from sending real cards to people by mail to sending e-cards online, this might be an even further decline to sending ‘virtual gifts’ instead. I don’t know, but I get virtual gifts from relatives that never sent me a card, real or electronic, so I guess there’s something to say for that…

One thing which I really do think sets apart Geni.com is their support. I’ve had very good experiences with their customer support, and they’ve been able to fix various problems I’ve had in building my tree there fairly quickly.

Geni.com’s Pro paid account, gets you the following features:

– Tree matches (i.e. while viewing your tree a small icon will appear in the corner of a person’s box showing there is a match with other people on the site)
– Advanced search
– Forest GEDCOM exports (i.e. exporting a GEDCOM of your extended family tree including those people who you did not add yourself)
– No banner ads
– Priority support
– Unlimited virtual gifts

For pricing it seems their Pro account is currently $12.95 per month, $99.95 per year or $149.95 for two years. Geni.com used to offer a lifetime subscription for $299 but I don’t see it now. Perhaps now that they have enough income they don’t need to offer that anymore.

A sample Geni.com family tree

MyHeritage.com

MyHeritage.com works a bit differently than Geni.com. There is a concept of separate trees. People sometimes upload multiple GEDCOMs to the site making separate trees in one account. While this can be good, in practice there seems to be a lot of duplicate trees on the site. MyHeritage.com has a feature they call Smart Matching which looks for matches between the people in your tree(s) and other trees on their site. It then gives you a list of trees with matching people, and shows you how many matches there are. Recently they added a way to confirm matches between trees, although I’m not certain what that does considering the trees stay separate anyways. I guess it just lets others know that the people are the same.

MyHeritage.com supports many languages, although in my experience, if you live in a country that speaks a different language than yourself, this can be problematic as the site will always try to use the language of the country you’re in (which it auto-detects). That’s more of a nuisance than a real problem, but a nuisance nonetheless.

MyHeritage.com also supports image uploading, although it is limited on free accounts to 250MB. They have one feature that seems to be unique among all the family tree sites – they can automatically match people in photos to people in your tree using face recognition. Pretty neat.

Speaking of limits on free accounts, however, I forgot to mention the biggest problem with MyHeritage.com’s free accounts – you are limited to 250 people in your tree. You might be able to upload a GEDCOM that has more than 250 people and get it accepted, but then you automatically lock out your account so that you cannot add new people to it. You can, however, get smart matches on the people in your tree. Note that even if you sign up for a Premium account, you are still limited to 2500 people in your tree. You need to sign up for the Premium Plus account to get unlimited people in your trees.

MyHeritage.com also has a free desktop app (Windows only) called Family Tree Builder. There is no limit to how many people you can add to their desktop software. It can also do face recognition on photos, etc. and it can sync a tree to the MyHeritage.com site. I haven’t done this so I don’t know how well it works, and if it is a two-way process. If you have used this, I’d love to hear about it.

MyHeritage.com recently added the ability to print out charts, and added a Memory Game that uses photos of your relatives in the game.

A Premium account adds the following features:

– Tree size up to 2500 people (instead of 250 on free accounts)
– Storage 500MB (instead of 250MB on free accounts)
– Enhanced Smart Matching (not sure what the real difference is between regular Smart Matching)
– Priority Support
– Ad-Free
– Power feature: Timeline

Their Premium Plus account is the same as the Premium account, except you get unlimited tree size, unlimited storage and another ‘power feature’ called Timebook.

On the pricing side, MyHeritage offers their Premium account for $75 per year (or $120 for 2 years or $225 for 5 years) and their Premium Plus account for $119.40 per year (or $191.04 for 2 years or $358.20 for 5 years).

Overall I would say MyHeritage has more features than Geni.com, but they are less polished.

A sample MyHeritage.com family tree

Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com is more than anything else a site for doing record research. They literally have billions of records on their site, and if you’re researching family members in the United States, it is a must-use site. Of course, they offer many other features – everything from family tree building to chart printing to DNA testing, etc. I’m going to focus, however, just on the family tree building aspect of the site.

Of course, one of the best features of Ancestry.com’s family trees are the tight integration with its research features. When you build a tree in Ancestry.com, it will show you if it thinks there are records for people in the tree by placing a small leaf icon next to their names. Moreover, you can use the profiles of people in your trees when doing records searching, automatically filling in information on birth and location, etc. to help narrow down searches quickly. These are nice features to be sure, but not something that can be compared to other sites very well.

Ancestry lets you set up unlimited numbers of trees, each with different permissions, so you could have some trees public and some private, etc. You can invite family members to your trees, and give them different permissions on editing the tree.

I don’t host my whole family tree on Ancestry.com myself, but what I do use it for is creating small trees for research purposes. For example, if I find a family that I think is related, but I haven’t found the link yet, then I create their tree to the best of my knowledge and make it public on Ancestry.com hoping someone else will find it in a search and say they are related so I can find the link. I can’t do that in Geni.com, since you only have one tree and I don’t yet know how they are related.

Ancestry.com also has a desktop application that can transfer data to their web site, Family Tree Maker. On Windows, where is has been around for a long time, they come out with new version annually, the current version being Family Tree Maker 2011. On the Mac, they just released a new version after more than a decade out of the market, simply called Family Tree Maker for Mac. It is based on their previous windows release (2010). I don’t believe it is possible to sync data in two directions between the desktop app and the web site, so this functionality is limited. You can, however, see hints on documents that might be relevant to a specific person in the tree from within the application, which is nice.

For pricing, I find the comparison a bit awkward since Ancestry.com is not primarily a family tree site. It’s almost like their free family tree building is a loss-leader to get people to sign up for the rest of the site. I’m not sure what family-tree specific features you gain by subscribing to Ancestry.com, except the obvious which is access to their records. For some level of comparison, however, I’ll list their subscription pricing. The US Deluxe Membership is $19.95 per month, or $155.40 per year. The World Deluxe Membership, which adds access to Canadian, UK, Ireland and other international records, as well as quicker access to new records, is $29.95 per month, or $299.40 per year.

Interestingly Ancestry.com has been beta-testing a new site called Mundia.com which seems to be intended as a direct competitor to Geni.com and MyHeritage.com. As it’s still in beta there is no pricing set up yet, but they do have access to the trees on Ancestry.com, so it will not start out without anyone to match to when they launch. Perhaps when this comes out of beta, it will be easier to compare to Geni.com and MyHeritage.com.

A sample Ancestry.com family tree (note the leaves indicating record matches)

Other Sites

As mentioned, there are many other sites out there for building family trees online, including AppleTree.com and WikiTree.com, both of which look promising. AppleTree.com seems to be going after the Geni.com model of one big tree, while WikiTree.com is free and very focused on privacy concerns. I haven’t used either of these sites extensively so I won’t comment on them now, but if you’ve used them please comment on them.

So go ahead and tell me the best and worst of all the family tree sites you’ve used. What categories do you think are fair to compare against all of them? What is truly unique about any of the sites you’ve used? Feel free to champion the site you use.

If you work for one of the above mentioned sites, I welcome your input as well. Did I make a mistake in describing your site? Are there features I’ve left out? Let me know in the comments.

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