Thanks to my friend, Claire LaBeaux, for the following news release from OneGreatFamily.com – just in time for Father’s Day!
OneGreatFamily.com Enables Serious Research and Collaboration with Other Genealogists, Plus Gives Tools for Finding Fun Information in Your Tree
June 17, 2009, Springville, UT – Here’s a fun idea for Father’s Day – figure out what famous personalities might be hiding in your family tree. While we realize that finding “famous” connections isn’t the ultimate purpose of true genealogy research, finding those family ties is interesting, and Father’s Day is a perfect time to do it.
Explore the Details of Your Family Tree: Find Famous Relatives and More
OneGreatFamily.com doesn’t just offer powerful search tools; the “Family Dashboard” at the site also gives users the ability to explore the information in their tree in new and fun ways. Just a few of these include:Relationship Calculator: with a simple click, outline relationships in your own tree, or find out how you’re related to various people in the OneGreatFamily database. For Father’s Day, you may want to explore these connections:
- Do you have a “Presidential” background with a link to Barack Obama or possibly George Washington or Abraham Lincoln?
- Is showbiz “in your blood” through ties to celebrities like Bill Cosby (the true “Fatherhood” expert), Tom Cruise, or even Elvis Presley?
- Do you have a passion for inventing that came through your connections to Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin?
- Do you love exploring – could be you’re related to Christopher Columbus or astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin!
- The Migration Map shows your family’s movement through the world over time.
- Identify common first names and surnames in your tree and in the US.
Connect Branches of Your Family Tree While Verifying Conflicts in Others
At www.OneGreatFamily.com, users can publish and edit their trees online, either starting from scratch or uploading a GEDCOM file. The system immediately and continuously checks the “handprint” of data (considers not just names, but also dates and the web of relationships) against all other trees that have been contributed. When it finds a match, the two trees are merged. If it finds a conflict or a possible match, it flags that individual and allows each user to do further research to verify their facts. OneGreatFamily maintains all views, or versions, of differing data unless a user chooses to change or merge another person’s facts with their own.Their goal in merging trees is to eliminate the frustration of online research, where for example a user does a search on an ancestor’s name and turns up hundreds of leads for the same person – they all turn out to be the same tree downloaded and re-posted – but it takes hours and hours of manually going through the results to determine that. We automate the search, fine-tune it by considering the “handprint” of data, continuously search on all data entered, and maintain differing views of data until the conflicts are resolved by the users themselves.
About OneGreatFamily.com
OneGreatFamily.com, LLC, was founded in 1999 by Alan Eaton with a vision to match and merge all of the separate family trees created by genealogists into one single unified worldwide family tree. This single family tree would remove all duplication while maintaining all differences in conclusions genealogists would draw from the research evidence. Today more than 196,000,000 individuals have been submitted to OneGreatFamily.com in family trees. OneGreatFamily also publishes Relatively Me, an application for Facebook, as well as the new GenealogyCloud. The company is privately held, based in Springville, Utah and has approximately 25 employees.
