Put Your Tree Online
Building your family tree on a genealogical records website has many benefits and needn’t cost a penny. Chris Paton puts four of the biggest sites to the test
Chris Paton explains how to use free tree builders to share your research and find more records and relations
There are many family history programs within which you can record information to allow you to build family trees and generate ancestral reports from your home computer. These can be incredibly versatile, allowing you creative options to record key facts, media files and source information about your individual finds.
However, as the family history scene continues to evolve, the reasons you should also consider hosting your tree research online are increasing. In storing your finds in an online tree-building program, you can continue to document where you are at any one point on your research journey, but in the data-rich world in which we now live, the information you already have gathered can be made to work harder. By placing your trees
The information you have gathered can be made to work much harder
online, and making them easy to find, you can potentially attract prospective cousins to your common ancestral cause, and you can also proactively look for trees that have been compiled by distant relatives.
A brick wall that you may have been struggling with for some time might well have been overcome already by a cousin, and a problem shared can certainly be a problem halved.
You may also find from a cousin’s tree that you’ve missed something, or that you have been unaware of an episode in an ancestor’s life, for example a second marriage.
There is, however, also a danger with online hosted trees, in that they can actually be wrong sometimes – and in some cases very wrong. As such, you always need to perform the correct diligence and check that any information included is accurate. There may also be occasions when people might harvest your research and add your findings to their own trees, over which you may have little control beyond the sending of a polite email. By placing your research online, you may be relinquishing some say over its potential use by others, but the benefits of doing so far outweigh the potential problems.
In deciding whether to host your tree online, solely on your computer, or using both methods, there are many factors to consider. If hosting on a computer alone, it’s vital to ensure that your files are regularly backed up, should there be a catastrophic failure of the hardware at some point. Placing your tree online can thus act as a basic form of back-up in case the worst should happen.
An online hosted version can also allow you to access your research while on the move through a variety of devices, in some cases via a web browser, but also using dedicated apps that might simplify the experience of updating your research
considerably. There are some great hybrids available in the form of programs that allow you to work on your family tree on your computer at home and then to synchronise the results with an online platform while on the move – such as Family Tree Maker ( mackiev.com) and TreeView ( tree view.co.uk) – and vice versa.
There are many ‘standalone’ platforms available online that can allow you to adequately host your research, such as Tribal Pages ( tribalpages.com), using
It’s vital to ensure that files are regularly backed up
which you can build a tree from scratch, or to which you can upload a GEDCOM file (. ged), the universally recognised file format for family tree programs. There are also many projects out there that allow you to build a tree collaboratively with others, but it’s worth considering that while many hands can make light work, there may be questions of control and conflict moderation with data input from different individuals that might need to be weighed up.
([WUD %HQHÀWV
If you place your tree on platforms supplied by the large subscription websites, you can make your findings work harder for you as these sites will flag up potential records hits within their databases. Ancestry ( ancestry.
co.uk), Findmypast ( findmypast.
co.uk), MyHeritage ( myheritage.
com) and TheGenealogist ( the
genealogist.co.uk) all offer online tree-building programs through free basic accounts, which permit a tree, or many different trees, to be built from scratch or to be imported from another program. Placing your tree on such platforms can, on the one hand, be incredibly useful in that the websites will flag up potential
record matches that relate to your tree. The downside is that you’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription if you wish to access any records flagged up.
Surprise Discoveries
In some cases, there may be some real surprises. Adding my tree to Findmypast alerted me to the fact that after the First World War my great uncle John Paton joined the Royal Tank Corps, for which the site held the relevant records.
In addition, MyHeritage’s ability to interrogate my data flagged up the correct location of my great grandparents’ grave and headstone in Glasgow. This was a particular shock, because the city’s council had informed me some 20 years ago that they had been buried in a different cemetery, and without a headstone.
However, you should bear in mind that if you host your trees online through one of these platforms, any records that you import into your tree can only be accessed so long as you have an active paid subscription. If you unsubscribe at any stage, your trees will still be available, but not the images of records you may have integrated. You should always save copies of these records to your home computer, where possible, so you’ll always have access to them.
On Ancestry and MyHeritage, your online trees can also work in conjunction with DNA test results as a powerful tool to proactively look for cousins. A couple of years ago, the addition of my tree and DNA to Ancestry generated a hit with somebody who turned out to be a second cousin, his grandfather being an uncle of my father. His mother had been born as the result of an affair, and he had never known who his grandfather was.
Meanwhile, a client who I advised a few years back to take a test to try to resolve a brick wall in
19th-century Ireland was stunned to discover the existence of a halfbrother in the USA.
Protecting Your Data
There are other issues to be aware of when hosting trees online. For example, people who are alive have a right to privacy and the protection of their personal data, which most providers will allow you to protect with a tick of a box when adding information. However, you should not rely on genealogical websites to do this automatically for you. It’s also important to remember that personal data can include a person’s image in a photograph.
In most cases, when you add your trees to online platforms, you are also agreeing to abide by the website’s terms and conditions to do so. You might think, for example, that placing a tree on an online platform is a good way to make sure that when you are long gone your descendants will be able to continue to work on and add to your research on the website.
Leaving A Legacy
The website’s particular terms and conditions, however, may not allow for you to bequeath your accounts to your next of kin in this way. It is for this reason of ‘digital legacy’ that you really should consider having a copy stored on a software program on your home computer. You will then own it outright, and it can be accessed by future generations without having to gain the permission of a third party to do so.