It's Our Tree is a genealogy service that lets people create very simple family trees using Adobe Flash. Like Geni (review) and Kindo (review), the idea is to get your entire family involved by inviting them to join and add family members they remember. It doesn't offer some advanced services like DNA sleuthing using cheek cells, but it's incredibly simple to get started, and the finished product can double as a Rolodex, birthday reminder, and private e-mail system for you and your family.
Like Geni and others, to get started you simply add family members using the directional arrows found on each person's block. There's support for divorces, first, second, and third marriages, half siblings, and any other oddly conceived (literally) member of your extended family. It also supports nine different languages, meaning if you're trying to share your tree with your Italian grandmother she'll be able to see it in her language, including the invite to participate. It's a nice touch if your family is spread out.
Each family member you (or others) create gets his or her own profile in case you feel like turning the service into an updatable family phone tree. My one irk with this is that they don't take advantage of a pre-existing contact-management service like Plaxo, Gmail's contact list, or LinkedIn to save you some time of having to dig all that up. What does make these profiles interesting is that you can add all sorts of geo-data to your family members including the place of birth, death, burial, and present location. This information can be toggled on a large Google map, which can lead to some really great exploration if you're willing to spend the time researching and inputting it all. Ancestry.com's DNA service will do something similar, although it actually shows you where your family is from based on cultural migration.
I'm giving this service a thumbs up, although if you're already tied to one of these services, its feature set is nearly identical to Geni and Kindo, so give it a look before trying to get your whole family to convert. Grandma will say grazie.
Make your family tree quickly and easily with It's Our Tree. It's got support for half siblings, deaths, and geo-location for where people were born. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Kindo is a new genealogy site for users who want to create an online family tree. Like Geni and Amiglia, Kindo runs on Flash, and makes it dead simple to start building up your family tree with very little programming expertise whatsoever. You start with a mother, father, and child, and you can continue to work up and out, adding more people as you go along. To help aid in family tree creation, you can invite your family members to claim their profile, which will give them privileges to add and remove members from the tree.
Besides the very basic and simple implementation of the tree creation, there's also an integrated social network for families who want to dig a little deeper. Each family member gets their own profile, which shows off any included personal information, along with a list of updates they or others have made on the service. There's also a status update option a la Facebook and Twitter that lets you announce what you're doing to your family members. More helpful, however, is the birthday and anniversary reminder tool, which will automatically let you know when there's a family birthday coming up. While both these things can be had elsewhere, it's a nice touch.
One of the past criticisms we've had with sites like this is how they handle the non-nuclear families--single parents, adoptions, half siblings, and the like. The good news is that Kindo has planned ahead, and easily lets you add a half sibling, or a single parent to any part of the family lineage. There's still not a simple way to deal with adoptions, but you can add notes to someone's profile when you make it to denote that the mother and father they're tied to aren't the birth parents. You can even note if they're deceased.
Make a family tree quick and easy with Kindo, a new genealogy service.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I give this site the thumbs up for its simplicity. It took me less than 10 minutes to piece together my immediate family, and that of my uncle's. As long as you've got their pictures handy you can even give them thumbnail icons too. What would really take it to the next level is integration with Plaxo, so you could pick and choose from your e-mail contacts to populate the graph. The only thing I'm worried about is how they intend to make money, as there's no advertising or premium service. The only thing they've got going that I can foresee helping them make any cash are links to parnered sites like Moo, Amazon, Photobox, and Skype.
Also worth checking out is Ancestry.com, which will do the hunting and data entry for you, as long as you're willing to part with a couple hundred bucks and some cheek cells.
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