Janet's Genealogy Blog

Geni: Posting Genealogy data and photos free

I read an enjoyable article in the New York Times on Saturday: Latest Genealogy Tools Create a Need to Know. This article talks about the latest genealogy powertool: DNA testing and also covered a number of genealogy websites.

It talked about leading sites like Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, MyFamily.com and Onegreatfamily.com.

I'm not using any of these, but got more interested in another site they mentioned, geni.com, that looks to be the most innovative of the bunch. It's a combo family-tree-making and social networking site devoted to sharing genealogy data amongst members of the same tree (heads up: the family trees cannot be made available to the general public except by taking screenshots and posting them).

Geni doesn't allow importing GED files as yet. It can export them but that doesn't help you get a tree going in their software. So, I typed in about 80 entries and had a good time putting in only names first so I could get a visual family tree up in a hurry. Each person in the tree has, by default, visible arrows pointing up, down and sideways with choices for adding parents, children, siblings and spouses. These make it superquick to get up and running.

Each person box has room for a photo. You can click the empty photo box and be prompted to upload a photo for that person. What I liked about it is that I could fool around and get over 20 photos of key family members up populating my tree with great dispatch and no hassle.

I already have a more extensive tree online produced with the aid of my MacFamilyTree software. It has photos. But, Geni has photo albums too and is live. Where MyFamilyTree needs to create a new family tree set of web pages each time, Geni allows data entry using Ajax technology so it is easy and fairly quick data entry.

If all Geni had was the data entry and free photos and whatnot, it would be a decent site to consider. But, what makes it more interesting to me is that it is designed to allow multiple members of your extended family to share information and details about various members of the family tree. You can enter email addresses for yourself and others. And other members of your tree can enter their own details. Messages and photos can be exchanged.

Right now, this is a solo venture. No one else is yet involved. Maybe it will be one more promising social-network web project that doesn't go anywhere. But, genealogy seems like such a great fit with social networking, so it is worth a try.

Please comment here if you've tried your own Geni or other online genealogy site. I would love to hear what you've experienced and learned.

MacFamilyTree 4.06 Charts now interactive

I just downloaded MacFamilyTree 4.06 and the new version's charts have navigation icons on each person to get to their summary, edit their record or go to parents or children. When you click the icons, they zoom out to a larger size. Very slick!

You can choose between color schemes.

This proves to me that:

OnlyMac is serious about making MacFamilyTree a great product

The good looks we are seeing now are just the beginning of an on-going effort to make genealogy beautiful!

MacFamilyTree 4 Charts Dazzle

These are my grandparents on my Mom's side and their parents. I was happily using Reunion 8 to track my family tree until I got a look at the beautiful charts that MacFamilyTree 4 produces. Wow!

Besides this kind of charting, you get instant web pages. If you have web space somewhere including .Mac, you can get your data up on the web fast! Here's my first attempt. Each person's name can be clicked to zoom into their information in detail like this 50% screen shot:

MacFamilyTree 4 feels like a young program. In fact it is. It's been built from scratch for the Mac OS X platform. It uses all the built-in capabilities of X like image resizing. There's a little slider that lets you view charts at any size with instantaneous and smooth expansion and contraction as you move the slider.

Being young, it has its moments but also has rough spots here and there. I'm guessing that you can learn your way around the rough spots and do great with it - and it's only $45. I recommend that you pop open the help right away because they give you a few getting started tips that will help you avoid a couple of the rough spots.

Right now this is the *fun* genealogy program and Reunion 8 is the *serious* genealogy program for Mac. I'll be using both for a while because fun is a priority for me. MacFamilyTree uses the GED 5.5 format rather than a proprietary data format. There may be some limitations to that, but it's also nice to know that everything you do in the program can be exported to GED format. Reunion 8 can export to GED as well but since that format isn't it's native format, you can't be sure everything will be exported.

I've entered about 40 records into MacFamilyTree and I must say that it's faster to enter into Reunion 8. But then, part of that is that I'm used to Reunion. And part is that Reunion has a few more data entry aids. It might make sense for me to enter data into Reunion and then export it periodically into MacFamilyTree when I want to print charts or post an updated family tree to my website.