FamilySearch Looking at User-Owned Family Trees

This is potentially huge news. FamilySearch is “enhancing its tree building features” and of special interest to a lot of us who use standalone genealogy software is the ability to create personal or “user-owned” trees – quoting FS:

Now FamilySearch is enhancing our systems so that users can upload, build, and modify these trees.

These elements are of particular interest to us:

  • All users can see deceased persons, but only the owner and invited researchers can edit the tree data.
  • Trees can be created directly from, and sync to, leading 3rd party genealogy products or by uploading a GEDCOM file.

There’s not a lot of details, but you can read what FS is saying about it here:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/labs/docs/CETsLearnMore

This is not changing the existing collaborative FamilySearch Family Tree, but the nice thing is with these “personal trees” you don’t have to worry about people adding a lot of wrong information/individuals to your personal tree (and you can still publicly collaborate on the main Family Tree) . You will also still get hints from FamilySearch on your tree.

Is this competing with Ancestry.com? Not financially – in fact it’s costing FS/LDS time and money to implement these new changes, which they can’t make up with a monthly or yearly subscription like Ancestry.com does, but it will definitely become a major hub of activity. Right now, a lot of people refer others to their Ancestry.com trees or other locations online, but this will provide another outlet for genealogists to share their trees, only without the fear of inaccurate information being added.

Why?

If I had to guess, enough people over the years have complained about seeing bad information on the main Family Tree from “drive-by genealogists” or “name collectors” who see a hint and automatically accept it or worse start adding branches from families that may share the same surnames and/or locations, but aren not actually related.

Many genealogists have gotten tired of trying to correct the main Family Tree.

I’ll be curious to see which programs can create and synchronize with these new FamilySearch trees – I’m guessing that RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker, MacFamilyTree, maybe Legacy Family Tree, maybe Gramps, and probably a few others – FS could certainly setup the API to allow for it. At the very least, no matter your software, you can create a GEDCOM to upload for these personal trees.

This is all under the FamilySearch Labs, so there’s no guarantee how far this will go.

You can apply to participate in this “experiment” here:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/labs/CETEarlyAdoption

2 thoughts on “FamilySearch Looking at User-Owned Family Trees”

  1. This is very interesting. Thanks for posting about it. FamilySearch has had synching of their Family Tree with a MyHeritage account for a few years, but I don’t know how that works because you have to be a member of the LDS Church to use it.

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