When’s the last time you explored the world’s biggest family tree? Have you checked to see what others know about your relatives? Reconnected old photos of your grandparents’ neighbors with their descendants? Shared family recipes for others to find in the future?
These are just some of the creative ways people are harnessing the power of the global Family Tree at the free genealogy website Family Search <www.familysearch.org>. With a community-tree model, all users contribute to the same public, common profiles for shared ancestors, rather than building individual trees as you do at sites such as Ancestry.com <www.ancestry.com> and MyHeritage <www.myheritage.com>.
FamilySearch isn’t the only site to offer a unified tree. You can also find this model at Geni <www.geni.com>, WikiTree <www.wikitree.com> and WeRelate <www.werelate.org>. But with 1.5 billion ancestor profiles, the FamilySearch Tree is a giant sequoia compared to these others (which have 175 million, 34 million, and 3 million ancestral profiles, respectively).
Accuracy is always a concern in collaborative family trees. Are others connecting rogue relatives to your great-grandparents, or mismatching people who have the same name? It happens. But sources are being added four times as quickly as new names (44 million new sources and 12 million names each month). So while some branches may grow the wrong direction—and you should verify everything you find there (see the sidebar on page 31)—the Tree is, overall, becoming more accurate.
All that data (and the collective wisdom of millions of users) makes the FamilySearch Tree a useful resource in its own
