Online family tree sites are terrific tools for organizing your family history, collaborating with other relatives and sharing your findings. Most let you build a tree from scratch or upload a GED-COM file generated from another program or website. And you can search most online family tree collections that others have uploaded, and get automatic matches in historical records and other family trees by uploading your data.
The massive trees at sites like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch and MyHeritage offer the mostrobust set of features, which we’ve compared at <www.familytreemagazine.com/websites/genealogy-website-comparison>. But develop ers have planted a whole forest of other online tools that are worthy of your consideration.
Here are the top online family trees and their unique features, plus what you should consider when trying to find the best fit for your research. We’ve sorted the trees into three categories: those managed by individual users, collaborative trees managed by communities, and those designed for specific areas of genealogical interest.
INDIVIDUALLY MANAGED FAMILY TREES
Individually managed family trees give you complete control. You decide who has access to your tree and (generally) whether it’s public or private.
American AncesTREES
<www.americanancestors.org/tools/american-ancestrees>
The basic version of this tool from American Ancestors is free. But you can upgrade to>, but not yet on the American Ancestors website itself.
