Family.me -- FamilySearch Partner Program

Part of the recent website partnership announcements made by FamilySearch.org that gave free access to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints included free access to the Family.me website. Registration for this website is essentially the same as that for all of the other free partnership websites. For a quick review of the process and the reasons for using these additional websites see my video, "A Closer Look at FamilySearch Partner Sites."

Family.me falls into a new category of online family tree programs. The emphasis of the family tree in these newer programs is to establish a network of family members. The interface and the relative simplicity of the program will initially not be very attractive to established family historians, but the idea here is to engage those who are not technically involved in family research. The program provides a pleasant and engaging interface to the information in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. The names and some details of my own ancestors came right into the program from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree but very little else. There were links for Memories and Records but none of the existing Memories or Record (Sources) seemed to come across from the Family Tree. The Family.me program seemed to import lines back to my Great-grandparents in some cases, but not in others where it stopped with my grandparents.

Using the Records link to search for records about my family was also not obviously helpful. The search results included only a surname and minimal information about the individual. Here is a screenshot of the search results for "Tanner."

There did not seem to be any way to add additional family members from the Family Tree, making this program a completely isolated copy of what was already available. I guess the program will be attractive to those who simply wish to talk about their family and add memories, but it is not yet a tool for doing any further research.