Saturday, July 07, 2007

Family Tree Builder software Web App

Findmypast.com | Family Tree, Family History, Find Your Past, UK

you and your family have to log in to try it out and I am suspicious of any subscription site which binds their customers in this way

The online application allows customers easily to create a tree from scratch or upload a GEDCOM file exported from any existing family tree programme.

Elaine Collins, Commercial Director of Findmypast.com, commented: ‘Web applications that encourage you to store details of your family history have been around for a while, mainly for the purposes of matching other trees, but none has come close to meeting the needs of the serious family historian and replacing traditional software.’

The Family Tree Builder software was developed for the site by leading US genealogy firm PedigreeSoft, which was acquired by findmypast.com in May 2007. The original version was described by Dick Eastman, of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter, as ‘…an excellent online genealogy application…and a snap to use.’ Founder and lead developer Matt Garner has rewritten the acclaimed product as a more fully-featured Web 2.0 and Flash-based application.

He commented: ‘Customers now demand easy-to-use web design that allows them to get started immediately. But we’ve designed this to adapt to the needs of the professional genealogist but also to be intuitive the beginner.’

‘If you’re going to put in the effort to enter in your ancestors’ details, it needs to be a service that you can use regularly to store all your source details and notes, photos and memorabilia in one place while providing full reporting, tree-building capability and collaboration tools that will become especially useful as your tree grows larger.’

The current launch is a beta version available free at findmypast.com. Paul Yates, Head of Product Development, stated that the intention is to provide a permanently free service, although enhanced paid options, with extra storage and family trees, will be introduced later in the year and made available to findmypast’s Explorer subscribers.

Further enhancements and features will be added over the summer, as well as full integration with Findmypast’s extensive collection of historical documents. ‘It will soon be a seamless process to feed an original record of your ancestor into your family tree,’ Yates commented.

not recommended

after reading the comment below
I will add I advise never to use any online applications of this type or the so called WEB 2.0 social networking sites for this purpose

Private data about living people should never be put on the net - passwords get lost or shared or hacked - usually by "human engineering" or phishing, especaily if more than one user has access.

What you should do is share your data about dead people as widely as possible in a way that people can find you throough Google or RootsWeb or Gensereunited

Keep your data on one machine and use a standard family tree program and back up off site. Privatize your tree before making it public.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Hello Hugh,

We’re a little baffled by your comment on the family tree builder software at http://www.findmypast.com. You have warned your readers against it but the only reason you seem to cite is that you have to log in to access your family tree. From the customer’s perspective it is essential that trees are password protected to allow you to control the privacy settings and who has access to your tree.

We take our commitments to our customers extremely seriously and welcome feedback on all aspects of our products and terms and conditions. Our intentions are explicit in the press release you quoted: to have a free, high specification service permanently available, with some paid options for added functionality. If you have specific concerns we’d therefore like the opportunity to understand what they are, so that we can respond. Apologies if I’ve missed some comments elsewhere on your blog that are more specific.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Yates

Head of Product Development

12:11 pm  

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