Category Archives: Technical

A little known Facebook feature (for genealogy)…

Technical, , , ,
[Note that the feature described in this article has subsequently been removed by Facebook.]

I just ran across an interesting Facebook feature that is fairly helpful for genealogy. I don’t know if this has been around a long time, or if this is something they recently introduced.

Simply, if you go to facebook.com/family you can search all Facebook profiles by surname. Not only that, but the search is created using an easy to remember web address, so you can share a search result page. For example, searching for the surname Zylberman would send you to the page:

facebook.com/family/Zylberman/1

which is the first page of search results for the surname Zylberman. Similarly, if you changed the 1 to a 3 at the end of the web address, you would be taken to the third page of results. Of course, these search result pages will change as new accounts are created, or old accounts are deleted, etc. so sending a result page might show the names you want to show someone in the short term, but may not show the same names later.

In addition to searching in English, you can search in other character sets, such as Hebrew:

facebook.com/family/זילברמן

There are actually more Zylbermans listed in Hebrew than in English, but that’s likely because there are less alternate spellings in Hebrew. For the same name in Hebrew, it could be Zylberman, Zilberman, Zylbermann, Zilbermann, Sylberman, Silberman or Silbermann in English (only the variation Sylbermann does not show up on Facebook).

You can also browse surnames which is interesting. One thing you can see is how many surnames are fake on Facebook. Besides that you can see lots of variations of surnames you may not have thought to search. Like in searching, you can also browse in other character sets. When browsing, Hebrew started on page 14893 of the ‘Other’ character set listings when I tried to find it, which you can jump to by going to this page:

facebook.com/family/directory.php?q=Other&p=14893

It may or may not be where Hebrew names start when you read this, but it’s probably not too far off if you’re reading this post not long after it was written. I could be mistaken, but it looks like Hebrew follows Armenian and is followed by maybe Farsi? When I searched, Hebrew names ended on page 17611, which means there are currently over 2700 pages of Hebrew names, or with 96 names shown per page, over a quarter of a million surnames in Hebrew on Facebook. I suppose its possible some of those names are actually in Yiddish and not Hebrew, but presumably the majority of them are Israeli users who have listed their names in Hebrew.

What if you want to search for names in Hebrew (or Yiddish) and don’t know enough Hebrew to spell the name in Hebrew, or have a Hebrew keyboard to type it out? Try using Stephen Morse’s Transliterating English to Hebrew in One Step web page, where you can type the name in English, and receive the text in Hebrew. There are slight differences in the transliteration in some cases if you choose onto the options: Sephardic, Ashkenazi or Yiddish. In the case of Zylberman, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi options return the same result (the same spelling I guessed above). Yiddish is less likely to be useful (and in this case no search results were found using the Yiddish tranliteration) for the simple reason that anyone who uses a Yiddish spelling for their name (as opposed to English or Hebrew) is not very likely to be on Facebook altogether. Once you get the text in Hebrew letters, you can copy that text and paste it into the Facebook search box.

So there you go, a super-easy way to search and browse surnames on Facebook, even using foreign alphabets.

How do you do genealogy online?

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I have three simple questions for all the readers of this blog:

1) Do you use one or more online family tree websites such was MyHeritage.com, Geni.com, Wikitree.com or Ancestry.com (their family tree features, not necessarily their databases)? If so, which one(s) do you use?

2) If you use a family tree web site, list what you like best about it – and what you like least. Also, for sites that offer subscription plans, do you pay a subscription or only use their free features? If you don’t use any family tree website, is there a reason you don’t – and is there something that would change your mind (i.e. if they only offered X I would use their site)?

3) How do you interact with other relatives when doing your genealogy research? If through a website listed above, how does that work? If you intact in a different way, such as via e-mail, explain how well that works.

I hope you will share your experiences with the various services available online, so others can learn about how different readers of this blog are using those services, successfully or less so.

If you have a twitter account, please tweet this post to your followers so we can get as many responses as possible. You can find my tweet of this post at twitter.com/bloodandfrogs and re-tweet it.

Please post your answers in the comments to this post on the blog.

Using DNA for Genealogy: Y-DNA and mtDNA

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This is the first in a series of articles on using DNA for genealogy. I’m going to start by taking a look at two types of DNA that are used in genetic genealogy, Y-DNA and mtDNA, and explain how they can be used by family researchers to help in finding relatives and in confirming relationships. A later post will look at autosomal DNA, and how this newer test can be both very useful, but less accurate as a genealogy tool. Keep in mind that nothing I will be discussing in these articles will relate to the issue of DNA testing for health reasons. While there are companies that do both genealogy and health related DNA tests, I will only be focusing on the genealogy side.

DNA Basics

Let’s start by explaining some of the basic terms and concepts of DNA, and DNA testing. As some may recall from high-school biology, humans each have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Twenty-two pairs of chromosomes are what we call autosomal chromosomes, and are inherited in equal part from both of a persons parents. In general, it is these 22 pairs of autosomal chromosomes that contain all the information that make up who you are physically – what color your hair is, what color your eyes are, how tall you are, what diseases you are pre-disposed to, etc. While interesting, most of this information is not particularly useful for genealogy purposes. The last pair of chromosomes are the sex chromosomes – two X chromosomes in a woman and an X and a Y chromosome in a man.

For the most part, the X chromosome is not very interesting from a genealogical point-of-view, or at least not any more interesting than autosomal chromosomes, since in women they are combined from each parent like autosomal chromosomes, and in men they get combined when passed on to daughters and are not passed on at all when the man has a son. Technically a man does receive the complete X chromosome from their mother, but this has limited genealogical value. From a genealogy point of view it’s best to ignore the X chromosome, or at least group it with autosomal chromosomes (which will be discussed in a future article).

Y-DNA Basics

The Y chromosome, unlike autosomal chromosomes, is only passed on from father to son, and is not modified at all. Thus if you are a man you have the exact same Y chromosome as your father, as your father’s father, etc. This is true going back many more generations, except that over time small mutations are introduced to the Y chromosome so eventually you will find a father who has essentially one character out of thousands that is different in the Y chromosome he has compared to his son. These mutations over time are what allow us to use the Y chromosome (or Y-DNA) for genealogical purposes.

If you find someone who has the exact same Y-DNA as you, then they are descended from a common male ancestor. Figuring out how far back that common ancestor is is where the mutations come in to play. If you find someone who has the same Y-DNA as you, except for one mutation, then you can assume the connection is further back than someone with no differences in their Y-DNA. If the person has two mutations, than the common male ancestor is even further back in time. By looking at the exact mutations, one can even figure out which people are in which branch of a family. For example, if you find three people with two mutations difference from your Y-DNA, and two of them share the one of the mutations, then you know it is likely that those two people descend from a common branch.

mtDNA Basics

You may have noticed that Y-DNA is only found in men. So how does one track their maternal line (mother to daughter)? The answer is not found in the 23 chromosome pairs of one’s DNA, but in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is the DNA in the mitochondria of cells (essentially the engine of cells). Mitochondria, found in all cells, converts food in energy to power the operation of the individual cell. The mtDNA is the DNA of the mitochondria and is passed down from a mother to her children (both daughters and sons).

There are probably a few reasons that mtDNA is only passed from mother to child, and not from the father. The first reason is that the mtDNA of sperm is found in the tail section, and the tail breaks off during the fertilization process, and only the front section of the sperm makes it into the egg to fertilize (and contribute DNA). There have been some rare occasions where it has been shown that the entire sperm has made it into the egg, but in this case there are orders of magnitude more mtDNA molecules in the woman’s egg than there are in the sperm, so through dilution alone, the male’s mtDNA has little chance to have an effect.

Like Y-DNA, mtDNA mutates over time, and thus can be used for genealogical purposes. However, mtDNA mutates at a slower rate than Y-DNA, and thus a single mutation would push a common maternal ancestor back much further than a single Y-DNA mutation would push back a common paternal ancestor. This slower mutation rate makes mtDNA less useful for practical genealogy.

The Path of Y-DNA and mtDNA

Thus, Y-DNA allows one to trace back direct paternal lineage (for men) and mtDNA allows one to track back direct maternal lineage (for both men and women). The following chart illustrates the path of Y-DNA and mtDNA inheritance (click to enlarge).

The path of Y-DNA and mtDNA inheritance

Note that out of thirty-one ancestors on each side of your family going back five generations (parent + 4 grandparents + 8 great-grandparents + 16 gg-grandparents) only five people on each side share the relevant DNA (i.e. mtDNA on your mother’s side, and Y-DNA on your father’s side) with you. Another way to look at this is that out of the 62 ancestors you have in the past five generations, only 5 match your Y-DNA and only 5 match your mtDNA.

That, of course, is only true when looking in one direction of your family tree (from you up). For example, you share the same mtDNA with all your siblings, as well as your mother’s siblings, your mother’s mother’s siblings, etc. and the children of all the women included among those people. Thus if your mother had a sister, then her children, your first cousins, would also share the same mtDNA that you have. If you find someone whose mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s sister was your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, you would also share the same mtDNA, even though you are fourth cousins. Of course, as mtDNA mutates slowly, you may share mtDNA with people much farther away as well, so sometimes this information is not so useful (and can be frustrating). The same is true of Y-DNA, except it is only in men, so if you are male you will match with your father’s brother’s son, but not with your father’s brother’s daughter since she has no Y-DNA to match, and not with your father’s sister’s son, since he inherited his Y-DNA from his father, not from his mother (which is your blood relative).

How Y-DNA is used for Genealogy

I’m going to start on the genealogy side by looking at Y-DNA because it has some significant advantages over mtDNA for using as a genealogical tool. First, as traditionally surnames were passed down from the father to his children, Y-DNA should in most cases match with people’s surnames. For example, just like your father’s father’s brother’s son’s Y-DNA should be the same as yours, so should his surname. This makes doing genealogy research using Y-DNA significantly easier.

Keep in mind that only men can take Y-DNA tests. If you are a woman and want to test your paternal line, you will need to have a male relative in the same paternal line take the test instead. For example, your father or brother could take the test, or your father’s brother, or your father’s brother’s son, or any number of other male relatives that are descendent father-to-son from a common paternal ancestor.

Another important point is that some people’s families only started using surnames in the past two hundred years (such as much of the Ashkenazi Jewish population) and you will find many different surnames that may match your Y-DNA since the matches (depending how close of a match) may have happened before two hundred years ago when your ancestor started using a surname. In fact, sometimes brothers in the same town were assigned different surnames (if they lived in different houses at the time surnames were assigned) and thus even if you find a close match that shares a common ancestor close to the time your family started using surnames, you might find a person with a different surname, and not realize how they are related.

This brings up an important point in using DNA for genealogy – DNA by itself will not build your family tree for you. Using DNA for genetic genealogy is just a supplement to traditional genealogy, and without pre-existing research of your family back to when there was a common ancestor, it won’t help very much.

So how does Y-DNA testing work? First, you take a DNA test from a company like FamilyTree DNA (FTDNA). I mention FTDNA in particular as they have the largest Y-DNA database. When doing any DNA test for genealogy, the results you get will depend on the number of people who have also tested and have their information in the company’s database. In other words, doing a DNA test for genealogy cannot tell you very much about yourself, but it can tell you about yourself in comparison to others.

FTDNA offers several levels of Y-DNA tests. They differentiate these tests by the number of ‘markers’ that are tested. Essentially, markers are locations on a person’s Y-DNA that are prone to mutation. By comparing these markers and seeing how many are different, you can figure out how closely someone is related to you. Y-DNA tests that FTDNA offers, or has offered, include 12, 25, 37, 67 and 111 marker tests. Each test with more markers allows more accuracy in predicting relationships between people. At the 12-marker level, for example, even an exact match on all 12 markers will only indicate a common ancestors thousands of years ago. This is beyond the ‘genealogical time frame’ – i.e. it is beyond the point that anyone would be able to trace back their family trees and is thus essentially useless for genealogy purposes. Of course, your father and your father’s father will all match you on all 12 markers, so while a 12 marker test cannot be used to show any kind of useful family connection, it can be use to disprove a family connection. For example, if you are a man and you find another man who you think is related to you on your paternal line, if your 12 marker test shows different results than the other man, then you are not likely related on your paternal line. Thus even a 12 marker test has some usefulness, but it is limited to disproving theories, not proving anything.

For genealogy, if you are planning to do a Y-DNA test, you really need to start with at least (at FTDNA) their 37 marker test. FTDNA estimates that when you find someone with the same surname as you and who has a full 37 marker match on the 37 marker test, that there is a 95% chance of a common male ancestor within 8 generations and a 50% chance of there being a common ancestor within 5 generations. Of course, these odds may not sound too good to you. Even if you have tracked your family back 8 generations, the other person who matches you on your test may not have done enough research to make a connection. With a common surname and an exact match on all 67 markers of a 67 marker test, FTDNA estimates a 90% chance of a common ancestor within 5 generation and a 50% chance of a common ancestor within 3 generations. That said, these percentages assume that all the markers match. For example, if only 66 out of 67 markers match on a 67 marker test, then the common ancestor is pushed back further in time.

Of course, each level of test with more markers is more expensive than one with less markers.  One good thing about FTDNA is that they bank your DNA samples so if you, for example, buy a 37 marker Y-DNA test and later decide to upgrade to a 67 marker test, you can just order the upgrade online and they will retrieve your existing DNA sample and run the new test. You can thus spend less at the beginning, and if you find that you get a lot of 37-marker matches and want to get the 67 marker test (or even the 111 marker test) to help you refine your results, you can always do that later.

Once you have the test done, you get a few things from the company.

First, you get a list of the marker values. If you got a 37 marker test, then you’ll receive a list of 37 marker values. These numbers are what get matched to others.

FTDNA will also estimate your haplogroup. Your haplogroup is a very broad designation of your ancestral origins. Essentially it means you match a common ancestor tens of thousands of years ago. This is not particularly useful from a genealogy point of view, but it can tell you something about where your very distant ancestors lived. You may have noticed I said FTDNA will estimate your haplogroup.The reason it is an estimate is that a Y-DNA test tests STR mutations and you need to test SNP mutations to really confirm one’s specific haplogroup. I’m not going to go into the differences between STR and SNP mutations in this article, but FTDNA can predict your haplogroup based on how other people in its database have matched, and if they can’t they will run SNP tests to confirm their result. If you want even more specificity in your haplogroup results (and sub-group results) you can also pay for what they call a Deep Clade test, which will confirm your haplogroup using SNP tests. None of this is particularly useful for practical genealogy.

In addition to your marker results and your haplogroup, FTDNA gives you what they call ‘ancestral origins’. This is a list of where other people who closely match you have indicated their family originated. This is largely dependent on the information people provide on their family, and how far back people have researched their families. This can give you some areas to research, but again it is based on what other people know about their own families, which is not always accurate.

Your Y-DNA Matches

Lastly, and most importantly, you receive a list of matches. FTDNA will compare your Y-DNA markers to all the results in their database and give you a list of matches. They start by showing you a list of all the 12 marker matches. If you have an Ashkenazi Jewish background, expect hundreds or thousands of matches at this level. As mentioned, at this level your matches have little meaning from a genealogical point of view since the match could be thousands of years in the past. FTDNA then proceeds to show 25 marker matches (I believe 25 marker tests were offered in the past and later replaced by the 37 marker test), 37 marker matches, 67 marker matches, etc. Obviously you will only see results up to the level you have had tested.

Keep in mind that if you receive a match at 25 markers and you don’t see the same person listed in your 37 marker results there are two possible reasons for this:

The first reason is that the person matched at 25 markers but mismatched on many of the 12 additional markers in the 37 marker test and therefore no longer shows up as a match.

The second reason that someone might not show up in the 37 marker results is that they never had more than 25 markers tested. They might actually match you completely at 37 or even 67 markers, but you won’t know unless they upgrade to more markers. In this case, if you find someone at a lower marker level that you think might be a match (for example because they share your surname, or they originate from the same ancestral town) then you can try asking them to upgrade their test.

Because FTDNA is completely focused on genealogy, and does not offer health information, the assumption when you sign up is that you want to be in touch with people to research your families. In fact, when you take your initial test (by scrubbing your cheek with three swabs and mailing them in) you will also sign a release form that allows them to share your e-mail address with other matches. Other companies like 23andMe which does health testing also, have double-blind communication systems that let one communicate with someone anonymously initially, share just genealogically relevant data and then share health information later if you choose. As long as you sign the release form when you send in your DNA sample, FTDNA eliminates this extra step and just provides you with e-mail addresses of your matches. If you don’t want matches to know your real e-mail address, you can always set up a dedicated e-mail address on gmail or similar service to communicate with matches on FTDNA.

In addition to the exact matches, the list includes matches that are one or more markers off from the total. For example, if there is a 12 marker match that matches 11 exactly, and the twelfth match is one value off, then it will show up as a 12 marker match with a genetic distance of 1. If another genome matches yours on 35 out of 37 markers, and the other two markers have values that differ from yours by one each, then it will show up as a 37 marker match with a genetic distance of 2. However, if the same genome was tested at 67 markers and matches all the other 30 markers, then it would instead show up as a 67 marker match with a genetic distance of two. As you move up in the number of markers you will continue to have fewer and fewer matches, as it becomes less and less likely you will receive a match. You may have hundreds of matches at the 12 marker level, dozens of matches at the 37 marker level and only a few matches at the 67 marker level, none of which may be exact matches.

All of this may seem abstract, so let’s take a look at what matches look like (click to enlarge):

Some Y-DNA matches

In the screenshot you see a selection in the middle of my results. You see all (four) of my exact matches at 37 markers (names and e-mail addresses are blurred). You can also see that there are nine 37 marker matches that are a genetic distance of one (although only the first two are shown in the screenshot). Other things to notice are that those matches that have tested at 67 markers, show that in parenthesis next to the match’s name, so the last exact 37 marker match and the 2nd 37 marker match with a genetic distance of one, both show they have been tested with 67 markers.

You can also see that there are one or two icons on the right side of each match line. The first one which all of the matches show is what FTDNA calls the FTDNATIP. This is FTDNA’s projection of how closely the match is related to you. For a 12 marker exact match, for example, it would show you that the person has a 33.57% chance of sharing a common ancestor within 4 generations, a 55.88% chance of sharing a common ancestor within 8 generations, and a 94.80% chance of a common ancestor within 28 generations. Like mentioned before, 12 marker matches are not easy to work with for genealogy since the matches can be so distant. By the 37 marker exact matches, the chance of a common ancestor within 4 generations jumps to 83.49% and 97.28% within 8 generations. I can’t tell you what the chances of a common ancestor are for exact 67 marker matches since I don’t have any, but I can tell you that the 67 marker match at a genetic distance of one has lower probabilities than an exact 37 marker match.

Oddly, FTDNA doesn’t check to see if a match shows up in higher marker tests when showing these calculations, so it will show a higher probability for the same match when showing it as an exact 37 marker match than it does if it later shows up as a 67 marker match at a genetic distance of one.

The second icon with an FT in the middle, which only shows up in two of the matches in the image, indicates the person has uploaded a GEDCOM of their paternal family tree. A GEDCOM is a standard file that most genealogy programs support that contains information on who is in your family tree and how they are related. FTDNA allows you you upload a different GEDCOM for your paternal family tree (for Y-DNA matches) and for your maternal family tree (for your mtDNA matches) so that other people can view the relevant family tree and try to find relatives or at least family names in common. If the person has uploaded the relevant GEDCOM file then the icon will show up on the right side of their match and allow you to view it.

An interesting point to make here is that out of the four exact 37 marker matches, only one of them has been tested at 67 markers. This means only one match has the possibility of showing up as an exact 67 marker match in my results. In fact, that match shows up as a 67 marker match with a genetic distance of one, which means of the extra 30 markers in the 67 marker test, one of the markers is off by one value. It is possible that the other three exact 37 marker matches could be exact 67 marker matches, but without them upgrading their tests to 67 markers, there is no way to know. However, keep in mind that if you only look at the 67 marker matches, then you might miss out on these three matches which may actually be closer relatives than the one of the four which shows up in the 67 marker results. 

How mtDNA is used for Genealogy

As discussed, mtDNA tracks one’s maternal line, so it shows you matches from mother to child. Both men and women can take this test, since all children receive their mother’s mtDNA. When you take an mtDNA test, you can use the higher-resolution tests to try to find common maternal ancestors, or you can use it to disprove a theory if you think someone shares a common maternal ancestor.

Instead of marker values like Y-DNA, mtDNA gives you the differences between your results and the CRS (Cambridge Standard Reference). The CRS is the mtDNA whose sequence all other mtDNA results are compared to, and since mtDNA mutates so slowly, the changes are not usually so large. For example, at the lowest resolution (the mtDNA test of the HVR1 region) I only differ from the CRS in two locations. In the high resolution results (the mtDNA Plus test of both HVR1 and HVR2 regions) I differ in seven locations. In the full sequence (the mtFullSequence test of the entire mtDNA genetic sequence) I differ in only 13 locations from the CRS. It is these differences which are compared to others in the database when looking for matches.

FTDNA will also assign you a maternal haplogroup and show you your ancestral origins for your mtDNA.

Your mtDNA Matches

Matches to your mtDNA work similarly to your Y-DNA matches, so I won’t go into every detail, but I will explain the differences.

First, there are three levels of mtDNA matches available through FTDNA. Most other companies that provide mtDNA testing offer at least the first two. At FTDNA these testing levels are called mtDNA, mtDNA Plus and mtFullSequence. The mtDNA test tests a region of mtDNA called HVR1. The mtDNA Plus test also tests the region called HVR1 but adds a region called HVR2. This added region, like additional markers on the Y-DNA test, increases the likelihood that matches are closer related. mtDNA comprises a much smaller amount of DNA than Y-DNA or certainly all of autosomal DNA, so FTDNA offers a third option, called mtFullSequence, which tests all of the mtDNA strand.

When viewing matches, they are shown in three categories which correspond to the three testing levels: Low Resolution (HVR1), High Resolution (HVR1 + HVR2) and Full Genomic Sequence. Like in Y-DNA matches, when a match has tested at a higher level it will show when viewing the match at what level the person has tested. For example, when viewing the Low Resolution matches, if a match has taken the mtDNA Plus test, then the match will show in parenthesis next to the name HVR2. If the match has tested with the myFullSequence test, then it will show FGS next to the name. If the match also has tested in Family Finder (FTDNA’s autosomal test which I will discuss in a future article) it will also indicate this next to the name.

If the person has uploaded a GEDCOM file of their maternal line, then a icon (with the letters FT) will  indicate this, and clicking on it will show you the person’s maternal family tree (thus the FT).

Like with Y-DNA matches you are show their actual e-mail addresses and you must contact your matches directly in order to find a connection. Finding mtDNA matches is harder than Y-DNA matches since the mutation rate is slower, the connections are generally farther back, and the matches have no correlation to one’s surname. If one family had five daughters three hundred years ago and you are descendant from one of the five daughters, think how many family names each of the five daughters descendents have gone through in the intervening years. It is very difficult to track these kinds of connections.

Conclusion

Genetic testing is an interesting supplement to traditional genealogy, and can connect you to many potential relatives when doing research on your family. It is not a replacement for doing real genealogical research, but can help you confirm or disprove theories of how people are related, and can connect you to many potential relatives that may know of branches of your family that you are unaware. The same tests can also provide health information, genetic traits, ancient origins, etc. but these are not useful for genealogy. While genetic testing can be expensive, the cost is continually going down as more and more people try it out. As more people test, the databases in which one is comparing their DNA to others is also getting larger and larger, making them more and more useful. Genetic genealogy is only ten years old, so as more and more time goes on, it will become more and more useful, more and more accurate, and more people will be able to find real matches to relatives using genetics as their roadmap.

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.

Pruning Your Family Tree

Technical, , ,

Cruft is a term used in computer programming circles to mean the useless code in a computer program that accumulate over time. Cruft is the stuff you added at one point that might have been important then, but is now irrelevant, and worse it causes the rest of your program to slow down. You might have needed, for example, to support what is now an obsolete computer platform at one point, but the code for that shouldn’t still be in your program today.

Family trees also accumulate cruft over time, and just like in computer programs those extra people and extra information can slow you down. There are a number of reasons that bad information can enter your tree, but the most common and most problematic is when you import a GEDCOM from a relative without checking first to see if everyone in the tree is actually related to you. If you get a GEDCOM file from a relative with 2000 people in it and only 200 of them are actually related to you, you’ve just added 1800 that are irrelevant to your tree. Moreover, if you upload your family tree to a site like Ancestry.com or MyHeritage.com where they can do some form of automatic matching between your tree and other trees as well as with records on the site, you’re going to get all kinds of matches for people who are not actually related to you. Following up these false leads is a big waste of time.

I recently uploaded a family tree to one of these web sites and started getting matches to people not related to me. It illustrated to me that when I imported a tree from a relative a couple of years ago I did not properly check out the tree first. When I share a tree with someone, I usually only export those people who are related to the person I’m sending the tree to, plus spouses. This insures the person doesn’t get a lot of records that are not relevant to them. When you receive a GEDCOM from someone else, you should also check it out, create a test file where you import it, add yourself to the file, and then see if everyone in the file is related to you. I obviously forgot to do this with this particular file a few years back, and ended up with about 300 extra people in my tree that I was not related to, which was what was causing these false hits in the matching program (technically they’re not false hits, okay, but from my perspective they’re just as annoying even if they are my fault).

After receiving quite enough of these messages from the web site I decided it was time to remove the incorrect records from my family tree file. While my initial guess about that GEDCOM file was correct, and it was indeed the source of most of the incorrect records, I also discovered something else interesting – that there were other people in my family tree that were not related to me, some of them that I wanted to keep. The important thing here is that while most genealogy programs will let you select all your relatives (and their spouses), it’s not so simple to select your relatives and delete everyone else. The issue of the spouses, by the way, is a simple one. If you only had the program select your actual relatives, your sibling’s spouse would not be chosen. Your sibling’s kids would be chosen, but they would be missing a parent since strictly speaking that spouse is not your blood relative. Thus you need your genealogy program to select spouses as well.

The people I found in my tree that were not related to me fell into a few categories. Most were from GEDCOM imports, with most of those from that one GEDCOM I suspected, but also a few others here and there.

Some of the people were really cruft in that they were small sections that were someone isolated from the rest of the tree. I suspect they were descendants of someone I deleted at some point. They should probably have been deleted a long time ago, but were somehow still in my tree – probably due to a bug in the genealogy program.

Then there were the parents of spouses. I sometimes like to add information on parents of spouses that I add to the tree. This is mainly so that if I want to research the spouse at some point in time, that I know a bit more about them to help me with the research. Knowing the names of a person’s parents can be very important when doing research. The problem, of course, is that if I do a standard selection of people in my tree that are not relatives or their spouses, these parents get left out – yet I still want them in the tree. The solution here is not simple. There is not an automated way to include these people. The answer is probably (and I have not done this yet) to flag those parents in some way. Some genealogy programs let you define custom flags, and then assign them to people. If you carefully check out all the non-relatives in your tree and see which ones you want to keep, you can then flag them for future reference. Each time you add non-relative parents, you can flag them. In the future if you go to prune your tree again, you can do a standard selection of relatives and spouses, and then add the flagged people. Anyone left over can then be removed from your tree.