Category Archives: Software

Finding Hebrew Fonts

Software, Technical, , ,

Even though I live in Israel, my computer operating system runs using English, and almost all the work I do is in English. That said, I occasionally have the need to do some work in Hebrew, which presents some problems. One problem is that I don’t have a lot of Hebrew fonts on my computer, and usually whatever project I’m working on requires something slightly different (requiring me to find an appropriate font).

For genealogists, one use for Hebrew, even for those who do not speak Hebrew, is to transcribe the exact text on Jewish gravestones, which are frequently partially (and sometimes completely) in Hebrew. When publishing books on your family history, having the right fonts to publish those transcriptions can be very important. Another use is transcribing family letters written in Yiddish (Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet). By the way, if you do want to transcribe Yiddish, an interesting tool online is called the Yiddish Typewriter and it lets you enter Yiddish in various forms, and it then outputs it into many more forms (including YIVO transcription, IPA transcription, PDF, Image (GIF, etc.) – it looks quite useful.

In this post I’m going to share some places you can find Hebrew fonts. Most of the sites I’m going to point out have free fonts, although I’ll also include a few commercial sites. Keep in mind I’m not going to explain how to use these fonts on your computer, that’s a whole different topic.

So first, I should point out that there are different ways to divide Hebrew fonts, and I’ll take a look at a few.

First, Hebrew fonts can be divided into three categories:

1) Fonts that support Nikudot (vowels) and Taamim (cantillation marks – also called Trop in Yiddish)
2) Fonts that support Nikudot (vowels) but do not support Taamim
3) Fonts that support neither Nikudot nor Taamim

A few things about these categories:

Category 1 is essentially only needed when one is reproducing a biblical passage, and not always. Taamim (cantillation marks) are used to show the reader of a passage how to pronounce that passage when reading it aloud in synagogue. There are other interpretations of the Taamim, but they are beyond the scope of this post.

Category 2 includes Hebrew vowels, which unlike in English, are not letters, but diacritical marks. In modern Israeli Hebrew, these vowels are usually not used. You won’t, for example, see them in most books or newspapers. Newspapers published for people new to Hebrew (such as immigrants to Israel) use vowels, as it makes it easier to read the Hebrew (one doesn’t need to figure out the word based on context). This is a niche market. Vowels are also frequently used in the publication of Hebrew prayer books. That said, if you plan on printing something in Hebrew that is going to be read by someone not fully fluent in Hebrew, including vowels is a good idea.

Category 3 is the largest category of fonts. Most modern Hebrew fonts will fall into this category, not only because Israelis don’t use vowels, but because implementing vowels as diacritical marks is a pain in the neck for font designers.

Here’s an example of Hebrew text with both Nikudot and Taamim:

Nikudot (Vowels) in Blue, Taamim (Cantillation Marks) in Red

This is a passage from Exodus Chapter 7 – roughly translated as “and the river will swarm with frogs, which will go up and come into your houses”. The font is called Taamey Frank CLM, part of the free Culmus font collection I mention below. The text with Nikudot and Taamim came from the Mechon Mamre web site.

As you can imagine, designing fonts that take into consideration the proper placement of all of those marks is complicated. Considering that Hebrew has the history it does, there are still many uses for fonts with Nikudot (vowels) and Taamim (cantillation marks). Recently, a new English edition of the Talmud has been started called the Koren Talmud Bavli, which is the first Talmud that I’m aware of that includes the full text of the Talmud with Nikudot in the standard Vilna page layout.

Like in English, there are also serif and san-serif fonts – and like English, sans-serif fonts are generally perceived as more modern. There are also monospaced fonts.

There are also handwriting fonts, and fonts in alternate Hebrew alphabet forms like Rashi Script (which was not used by Rashi, nor is it really script).

You might find handwriting fonts that include Nikudot, but I doubt you’d ever see one with Taamim since it’s a printing mark, and not generally handwritten.

Warning on using old Hebrew fonts

One more point worth making is that fonts in Hebrew were previously available in many formats that didn’t work well together. Windows had one kind, Macintosh had another, and each went through different versions that didn’t work even on the same platform. There are different ways of displaying Hebrew on the Internet as well, called visual and logical Hebrew. Visual Hebrew is the older format, still used on many Israeli sites. Logical Hebrew is the now standard format, which should be used by everyone. Old fonts were also encoded in different character encodings (like ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-8-i, or Windows-1255) instead of the more modern Unicode encoding formats (like UTF-8). I bring all of this up to point out that if you are scouring the net looking for Hebrew fonts, be careful not to install old fonts which might not use the latest standards. Look for fonts that mention Unicode, UTF-8 or UTF-16. If you have old Hebrew fonts on your computer – consider replacing them if they use one of these older formats – because even if they work on your computer you probably won’t be able to share whatever you create with anyone else.

Okay, that all said, where do you get Hebrew fonts?

If you have no Hebrew fonts and want to get a variety of fonts quickly, there are two sites which have collected free Hebrew fonts and bundled them together for download.

The first is the Open Siddur Project, which has a Font Pack which includes 8 fonts with Nikudot and Taamim, 14 fonts with Nikudot, and 46 other Hebrew fonts (without Nikudot or Taamim). Note that all of these fonts are free and in Unicode format so you know they will work on modern computers and are interchangeable with other people. There is a PDF available that shows samples of all the fonts in the font pack. A few examples from the PDF:

A selection of fonts from the Open Siddur Project’s Font Pack

The second is from The Bold Edge | Jewish Design Central, which has a Free Hebrew Font Collection. I’m not sure how many fonts are in this collect or what kinds there are, but it includes 50 different font files (although some may be in the same font family). I’ve requested they put together a PDF showing which fonts are included, so hopefully they will add that eventually.

Next, there is the Culmus Project whose goal it is to provide free Hebrew fonts for use with Linux and Unix systems. Even so, these fonts should work on Windows and Mac as well. There are 14 font families includes currently (full list – lists Latin counterpart fonts when they exist). In addition to some standard fonts that are serif, sans-serif and monospaced, they also have display fonts (Fancy) and fonts that include all the Nikudot and Taamim (Taamey). The Taamey fonts are downloadable individually, but for the rest, you need to download a file from their download page (at the top you should see a link right next to the text “Looking for the latest version?” and that’s the file you need.

One interesting font is called Alef. It’s a new font designed from the ground up to be used for both Hebrew and English, and on the web. I don’t see any reason it can’t be used in print as well. It’s a free font licensed under the SIL Open Font License (see below). It was designed by a group of Israeli designers including Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michal Sahar and HaTayas (Danny Meirav) who together make up the HaGilda font foundry, and Nir Yenni. One of it’s intentions is to replace Arial as the default choice for Hebrew web sites.

Scholarly Fonts

Another source of fonts worth nothing are those developed by different organizations for use by biblical scholars.The first is Ezra SIL which was developed by SIL International, a non-profit organization that carries out linguistics training and research globally, and is based on the font used in the BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia)  The font is Unicode and contains Nikudot and Taamim. There are actually two versions of the font, Ezra SIL and Ezra SIL SR, the difference being in the style of Taamim. The regular Ezra SIL follows the format of the BHS, while Ezra SIL SR follows a more traditional (in Jewish usage) rounded style of Taamim.

Ezra SIL fonts also support OpenType, and take advantage of some OpenType features like ligatures (aleph-lamed ligature) and positioning to position the Nikudot and Taamim better. To use OpenType features, you need a program that supports them (such as Word 2010 and later on Windows, Mellel on Mac, or Adobe InDesign). There is something else special about the Ezra SIL fonts – they are open source. They use a license called the SIL Open Font License. You can freely modify them and re-distribute your changes (however, you can’t use the world Ezra or SIL in the new font). This has led to other Hebrew fonts based on Ezra SIL.

An example of new fonts that derive from Ezra SIL are the Shlomo Fonts. These fonts are modified from Ezra SIL SR, and change some of the letters to make them easier to read. Some letters in Hebrew are very similar (ד/ר and נ/ג for example). Shlomo Fonts try to modify these similar letters so they are more easily distinguishable at first glance. An example of the difference:

Note the difference between the second letter from right (ג) in each font

Another font designed for academics is Cardo, designed by David J. Perry. It also uses the SIL Open Font License, although it is not, as far as I can tell, derived from Ezra SIL (although possibly the Hebrew part is). The font also includes Greek and Latin characters. This font is still being refined, and new versions do occasionally come out (the last released version was in 2011). Cardo is also an OpenType font. Cardo actually comes with a 57-page PDF user manual, which is useful to read if you want to get the most out of the font. The manual is included in the font file download.

Another academic Hebrew font is SBL Hebrew. SBL Hebrew is also Unicode and supports OpenType features. It also has a PDF user manual, which is 23 pages long. It seems that to some extant SBL Hebrew is positioned as a newer more advanced version of Ezra SIL. Indeed, it seems Ezra SIL and SBL Hebrew share at least one creator in common, John Hudson. Unlike Ezra SIL and Cardo, SBL Hebrew is not licensed under an Open Font License, but is freely usable for non-commercial purposes. For commercial use, it can be licensed from Tiro Typeworks.

Commercial Fonts

Some commercial font foundries that sell Hebrew fonts include Ascender and Adobe (Adobe’s Myriad Hebrew is particularly interesting because it is a large set of Hebrew fonts that match up with the much-used Myriad Pro font in English). There are several Israeli foundries like Masterfont (see them also on MyFonts.com or fonts.com in English interfaces), and FontBit (I can’t find them on an English site). There is also a site called Webmaster.org.il (in Hebrew) that collects fonts from many smaller type designers around Israel and links to them.

There are several Jewish software companies (I mean Jewish in that their software is Jewish-oriented) that offer Hebrew fonts. Davka offers a set of 116 Unicode Hebrew fonts called Hebrew Font Portfolio. Unfortunately, none of them support Nikudot. Davka also offers a set of 30 fonts that do include Nikudot and Taamim called Hebrew Font Gallery Deluxe. I’m not clear if these are Unicode or not. Kabbalah Software offers K-Fonts Collections with various types of Hebrew fonts like Body Text,  Calligraphy, Design, Headline, Invitation, etc. They are all Unicode, however for some reason they are listed as working on Windows only. Definitely do not buy their ‘Classic Mac’ fonts which are not unicode and will not work properly on modern systems. The site looks a little out-of-date, so I’m not sure if this is an active company.

Hebrew-ish

One last thing, there is a class of fonts which are not Hebrew at all, but for lack of a better term I’ll call Hebrew-ish. They are English fonts that use Hebrew letters that are repositioned, flipped, warped, whatever to make them into English letters. In other words, you can type in English and get English words that look vaguely Hebrew. This is a gimmick popular for graphics for Jewish events, etc. I’m not recommending this, I just thought it was interesting that there is a whole class of fonts like this. There are many fonts like this (probably more than a dozen easy to find). Below you can see four of them – Jerusalem, Peace, Shalom, and Ben Zion:

“Hebrew-ish” Fonts

I hope this post was useful. If you have other good Hebrew font resources, please share them in the comments. I hope to follow this up soon with an explanation of how to get Hebrew working on your computer, including a neat trick for using Hebrew with Adobe InDesign without having to shell out the extra money for the Middle East edition.

Mac indexing software for World Archives Project

Software, Technical, ,

I wrote previously about the World Memory Project (WMP), a collaboration between the USHMM and Ancestry.com to index USHMM-held records using Ancestry.com’s indexing software from their more general World Archives Project (WAP). In fact, if you look at the World Archives Project site, you’ll see all the World Memory Project projects now are listed as part of their large World Archives Project list.

One of my earliest blog posts (just over two years ago) was on the topic of Giving Back Through Indexing, and suggesting volunteering for online indexing efforts as a way of giving back to the genealogy community. At the time FamilySearch’s was the largest effort (and probably still is) and Ancestry.com had yet to launch WAP.

The World Archive Project also lists as partners many genealogy societies, including (among Jewish groups) JewishGen, JGS of Los Angeles, and JGS of Southern Nevada.

Ancestry.com makes all databases indexed through the WAP available for free through their site, although access to images is not free, and sometimes not available at all on Ancestry.com. In some cases, like with USHMM records, the images may only be viewed at the host organization itself.

One of the criticisms I had of the Ancestry.com’s WMP and WAP projects when I wrote my earlier article was that they didn’t have Mac indexing software. As a Mac user I was especially disappointed in not being able to participate in these projects.

Apparently, back in October Ancestry.com launched the Mac version of their indexing software (they call it the Keying Tool). I hadn’t noticed that until now, so I downloaded the software and gave it a spin. Like the similar software for FamilySearch indexing, the user interface is a bit clunky. My biggest problem

Another look at GRAMPS

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Back in January I took a look at the free genealogy program GRAMPS. GRAMPS started on Linux, but is now available for Windows and Mac. I was looking at it specifically for use on the Mac, as that’s the platform I use. At the time, at version 3.2.5, it was not yet stable enough on the Mac to use. Indeed there was at least one major issue which I submitted as a bug to the developers, but I haven’t had time since then to fully test it again. Recently version 3.3.0 was released, and I decided to give it a spin once again. As I mentioned back in January, I really like the idea of a free open-source cross-platform genealogy program, and I’m rooting for GRAMPS to be competitive with other genealogy programs out on the market.

This time, things went a lot smoother than my first attempt. For one, everything installed easily and I didn’t see any error messages when loading the program. Oddly the program loaded on my second monitor, which is very unusual. It’s possible I had moved the application to my second monitor back in January and this version accessed some preference file from the old version, but in any case I’ve never seen an app boot directly to my second monitor.

Exporting and Correcting a GEDCOM from Reunion

The first thing I did was export a GEDCOM file from Reunion to load into GRAMPS. Knowing from previous attempts that GRAMPS would not recognize the relative paths used int the image file locations, I opened the GEDCOM first in a text editor and did a find-and-replace on the relative path:

GEDCOM excerpt showing relative path to an image file

In the above image (click to enlarge) you can see the relative path on the line that starts with FILE starts with ~/ which is supposed to point to my home directory. This is a UNIX shortcut, which makes it is surprising that GRAMPS doesn’t know how to deal with it. In any event, on the Mac your home directory is located at /Users/USERNAME/ or in my case /Users/philip/ and as you can see in the Find box, I replace all instances of ~/ with /Users/philip/.

GEDCOM excerpt showing absolute path to an image file (after Replace All)

In the above image you can see that 935 instances of ~/ were replaced, including in the image location shown in the GEDCOM.

One other thing to notice in the GEDCOM is that Reunion output not only the image location, but a line called _CROP which gives coordinates of how the image was cropped within Reunion. Reunion lets you re-use images with different people (or even multiple times with the same person) and for each instance of the image you can crop it how you’d like. For example, if you have a family photo that shows two parents and four children, you can assign that photo to all six people, and crop the photo for each person so when displayed will only show the head of the person you want. This is a very nice feature, but GEDCOM doesn’t have a standard way to deal with it. I don’t even know if GRAMPS can handle per-instance cropping of photos, but in any case it certainly doesn’t know how to import Reunion’s cropping information. Hopefully the efforts to improve/replace GEDCOM will in the future include a standard way to share that kind of information, and hopefully GRAMPS will add this feature as well.

Importing the GEDCOM into GRAMPS

Once I made the replacements in the file I wanted to load it into GRAMPS. For those used to standard Mac user-interface norms, GRAMPS doesn’t try to match them. This has been a complaint by other users of GRAMPS, that they should try to adapt to the user-interface ‘widgets’ of the operating systems they are targeting. Beyond the look of an app, there are also usage norms of which Linux users, Mac users and Windows users all expect something different. That said, I’m not sure if some of the user-interface issues are due to the fact that the program originated on Linux, or are just the user-interface decisions of the developers. When getting started, GRAMPS makes you create a new family tree, then load the new tree (which oddly takes more than a few seconds) and then lets you import a GEDCOM. The GEDCOM import was quite fast, and in my case importing 1800 records took only few moments. Why couldn’t I just import a GEDCOM into a new family tree? No idea.

GRAMPS Views

GRAMPS offers several very interesting views of your data – People, Relationships, Families, and Ancestry. GRAMPS also lets you look at your Events, Places, Geography, Sources, Media and Notes. These views are great, as they let you look at your data in some very useful ways very quickly. One thing that is very interesting, for example, is to be able to see all the Places that are present in your family tree. As Reunion does not standardize place names, in my case the list of Places shows some of the many duplicate and inconsistent names I’ve used in my tree. It also lets you easily correct the names and then merge duplicate names so that they link to a single reference. Thus, if you choose to change the name of the town later, the change will show up in all records that reference that location.

I also tried the Geography view which starts out as a map of the world, but somehow I zoomed out so far that I couldn’t see anything and I couldn’t get it to go back to a normal view of the Map. In fact, the coordinates shown for my location on the map was:

Geography view coordinates

Now I wasn’t a geography major, but I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to go to W 16534˚ on a map. Now the way I zoomed was using the multi-touch trackpad on my MacBook Pro, which the developers who use Linux might not be familiar with, so perhaps this bug isn’t possible to reproduce on Linux, but it definitely exists on the Mac. A map reset button might be good here.

In any event, I like that with each view there is a Filter panel that lets you search within the view and reduce the number of records shown to match what you’re searching. Reunion lets you search lots of fields, probably more than GRAMPS, but it does so from a single search window, and you either search one field or all fields at once. GRAMPS’ filtering seems more useful for quick searches within the view you’re currently in.

I have to say, having used Reunion for more than ten years, the views in GRAMPS seem a bit strange to me. Obviously one can argue over what views are best in genealogy program, and having many options (Reunion is really just one view) is a good thing, but I find the views somewhat redundant and inconsistent. For example, The Relationships view is a view that shows all the direct relationships of a person, such as parents, spouse(s), children and siblings. The siblings are a nice touch since most genealogy programs only show parents  and children of a person in a single view. That said, I generally need to scroll down to see all the information in this view, which limits its usefulness for quick navigation through family members. In Reunion, which is based on a Family view (a Couple is the center of the view, which shows basic information on each of the couple’s parents above them, and of all of their children below them), if I want to see someone’s siblings I click on the parents of the person, and the parents become the couple at the center of view, and the children at the bottom include the person I was originally looking at and all of his/her siblings. That isn’t necessarily the most natural way to see this information, but it works in a very consistent manner. Thus it is easy for me to navigate up and down through the tree using just this single Family view.

In GRAMPS, the closest thing to the view in Reunion is the Families view, except that its usage is user-interface-challenged. For example, if I go to the Families view I see a list of families, which is essentially a list of couples and their marriage dates if known. If I click on a couple I get a view that is similar to Reunion’s view that pops up in a new window (except it only shows parents and children, not the parents of the couple). In this new window, if I click on the one of the parents’ names, for example, nothing happens. There is a little document icon next to the names, however, and if I click on that icon I get a third window which lets me edit the person’s details (this is actually the same as Reunion except Reunion doesn’t use an icon but lets you just click on the name). Indeed this is the People view in GRAMPS, so you are seeing more than one view at a time). If I click on the childrens’ names, I get a different window which just seems to allow me to define the relationship of the child to the parent (birth, adopted, etc.). This seems like a waste of a window. If I was going to have a window like this, I would at least allow you to switch who the parents are of the child (such as when there are multiple marriages and you find that a child was born from a different set of parents than you thought). This raises a few other UI decisions I don’t understand in GRAMPS. In the view showing the parents and children, there is a minus sign that lets you remove one of the parents as a parent – but of which child? What if the father is the father of one child but not the other? In addition, there seems no logical way to add additional spouses in this view. Second marriages are common enough that this should be integrated into the view.

No Easy Navigation

The worst part of the UI seems to be that there is no way to easily navigate to other families through the view itself. Instead, I need to close the window, go back to the list of families and find the right family. That’s a bit absurd actually, especially if you have lots of people with similar names in your tree, or if you simply don’t remember the names of the parents. Reunion is a bit limited in its single view, but it is actually very easy to navigate within that view to find almost all the information you need quickly.

You might have noticed that earlier I said above that the user-interface in GRAMPS is inconsistent. Let me give an example. In the above mentioned view you can’t easy switch to the parents or children. In the Ancestry view, which is a kind of navigatable graphic tree, you can click on a parent of the person at the ‘bottom’ of the tree (it’s actually on the left side) to make them the bottom of the tree, but if the tree doesn’t show the children of the bottom person. There is a pop-up menu you can click on and then choose a child in order to make them the bottom person. This seems a weak UI choice. Why not show all the children of the primary person in the tree, to allow quick navigation of the entire tree. My main problem with GRAMPS is navigation-oriented, and when I see different (inconsistent) choices made in different views, and no easy way to navigate in a single window to information on different families, it is a big problem for me.

In the End…

After writing the above I decided to check out the different graphical views and reporting options, but ran into a roadblock. When trying to switch to a different Ancestry view (Timeline Pedigree) an error message was generated, and I was unable to continue. Indeed, this issue has prevented me from adding many of the screenshots I intended to add to the above to illustrate various features. I was prompted to submit a bug report which I did, but when I tried to re-launch GRAMPS and re-load my family tree I kep getting an error message saying the database was corrupt and to run a tool to fix it, but the program would crash before I could access the tool to fix the database. I suppose I could delete the tree and start over, but for the time being I’m going to wait. While this version (3.3.0) is much more stable than the previous version I tested, it clearly is not ready yet for everyday use, at least not on a Mac. I look forward to testing it in the future when these issues have been worked out.

For Memorial Day, BillionGraves App/Site Launches

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Memorial Day in the United States is tomorrow, May 30, 2011. In time for this day, app-developer AppTime has launched a new iPhone App/web site combo called BillionGraves.

The concept is quite simple – provide a way to use camera-equipped phones to photograph gravestones and upload them to a central website for transcription and searching by others. So you download the cell phone application, use it to photograph gravestones, upload the photos to the website, and then you or others can see the photos and add transcriptions which make them searchable. The link to Memorial Day is two-fold – first, that these photographs can be a form of memorial to those who served their country and died in that service, and second that people are off from work can visit cemeteries, and while there photograph gravestones and upload them to the web site.

The idea is quite good, but I foresee some problems.

I like the idea because anything that makes the process of documenting graves, transcribing them and making them searchable, is a boon to genealogists. The problem is that I don’t think AppTime has put quite enough thought into the back-end of this site. Things can be fixed over time, but it would have been better to get some of these things right at the beginning.

The biggest problem I have is the duplication this creates with other sites like FindAGrave.com, which I’ve written about before. I understand that AppTime wants to make money, and by controlling the server they can better control revenue streams, but I’m not sure there is room for a newcomer here. Far be it from me to tell anyone not to go into a market because it’s crowded. I’m a big believer in the market and if they can truly innovate here, that’s great. If they just muddle the process and split up the graves indexed on their site and the others, then they are not contributing but detracting from the process. I also wonder if  they will be able to build the large cemetery database needed to make this work. It might have made more sense in this regard to sell an App that is a front-end to FindAGrave.com.

Let’s put aside the issue of competition, however. I signed up to the site and tried it out. The interface is simple, which is great. Even without using the cell phone app, I can choose to transcribe photos. If I choose Transcribe I see the photo and a simple interface for adding the names and dates from the gravestone. This simplicity masks some omissions, however. For example, there is no place to add the maiden name of a woman. My only choices, in fact, are to add Prefix, Given Names, Family Names and birth and death dates.

Transcribe interface on BillionGraves.com

So there is no way to add the maiden name, nicknames, or other information that may be present on the grave. I can of course add a nickname into the ‘Given Names’ field and I can add the maiden name to the ‘Family Names’ field, but how? If I add the maiden name one way such as in parenthesis, and someone else does it differently, then what if I only want to look for women whose maiden names were Smith? I can’t do that, and BillionGraves.com can’t add this later without making people go back and correct the data later.

There is no way to fully transcribe a gravestone, to add information on the individual, to add a memorial to the person, etc. This can all be added later, but then how do they know which graves already transcribed have more information to be added once they offer that capability?

There is no way to add more than one photo of a grave, such as when there is writing on both the front and back. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to prevent duplicate entries of the same grave. Perhaps they’re expecting the GPS coordinates uploaded with the photos to help them figure out duplicates, but there is nothing that indicates that to me, and nothing to prevent someone from photographing a grave already photographed.

While FindAGrave.com could improve the experience quite a bit, they do support the ability to link graves of spouses, parents, etc. This is an important feature, and one that BillionGraves needs to support.

From a Jewish perspective, of course, there doesn’t seem to be support for other languages such as Hebrew – common on Jewish gravestones.

The iPhone app is free through June 1 (the next two days) and then AppTime will be charging $1.99 for the app. Presumably the web site itself will remain free. An Android app is currently being worked on and they hope to release it in the next few weeks. For more information on BillionGraves, go to their web site or their blog.

If you have an iPhone then download the App by June 1st for free and give it a try. Let me know what you think in the comments. If you use FindAGrave.com, let me know what you think of the differences.

I hope AppTime fixes some of the initial issues with the web site and wish them the best of luck in this new effort. I also hope FindAGrave.com wakes up and puts out their own cell phone apps to provide a way to upload geo-tagged photographs to their site as easily. Let’s hope competition improves both sites.

What’s your favorite online family tree site?

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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.