The Challenge of Multiple Online Family Trees: Part One Introduction

When I point out either to classes or individuals the advantages of having record hints from all of the major online genealogy database websites, the one most common response is to object to having multiple copies of their family tree information. This concern is often coupled with a complaint about how the information in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is "changing" all the time. Interestingly, the two issues are obviously related. The addition of historical sources to unsourced family trees inevitably leads to changes in the unsourced data. So the real issue is whether or not the advantage of having the automated record hints outweighs any concerns about either changes or the difficulty in "maintaining" multiple family trees on multiple websites. For this particular post, I am going to limit my comments to only four online family tree websites: FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, and Findmypast.com. All four of these websites have record hint technology coupled with a family tree. Two of those websites, Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com, provide a pathway for members of The Church Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to synchronize all or part of the data generated by those record hints with the FamilySearch.org Family Tree.

I intend to go into the details of the synchronization process for both Ancestry and MyHeritage in later posts in this series, but for now, I will simply say that the ability to synchronize the information between family trees is fundamentally the answer to the issue of maintaining and benefiting from multiple family trees. But even absent an efficient way to synchronize data, the record hints are worth the extra work involved in maintaining more than one family tree.

At this point, it is important to point out that many of the same people who question the need for multiple family trees know little or nothing about the resources provided by the four online programs and how those resources in the form of vast collections of records differ from website to website. The collections maintained and added to by each of the four websites are substantially different and each of the websites has its own unique records not available on the other websites. For example, MyHeritage.com has an integrated, extensive, entirely indexed, and searchable collection of newspapers that is rapidly growing. MyHeritage Record Match discoveries in newspapers are included in the record hints automatically supplied to LDS users of the program. MyHeritage is the only website of the four that presently includes newspaper matches as part of its LDS Account offerings. Both Ancestry.com and Findmypast.com have separately charged subscription newspaper websites. Likewise, both Ancestry.com and Findmypast.com have collections that are not available on MyHeritage.com. Granted, that these advantages are only available to members of the Church and those without an LDS Account will have to pay for all of the subscription services.

One of the core issues with multiple family tree websites is the added burden of remembering logins and passwords. This is a universal background burden on all online activities. Of course, you can pay a subscription service to maintain a database of all your passwords, but then you still have to remember the service's login and password and when you change a password you still have to tell the service about the new password. If you are worried about your passwords being hacked, it might occur to you that it would be harder to hack multiple passwords than hack the server for the system that is helping you remember all your passwords.

I believe that the main objections to multiple family tree websites arise out of a lack of basic computer skills. Many people are not comfortable with the multiplicity of the online experience. For example, I taught a class about online ebook sources today that included a number of extremely popular and well-known websites. Very few of the websites were familiar to those attending the class and most were "overwhelmed" at the number of places to look for genealogically significant ebooks online even when the number of websites was really quite a vanishingly small representative of all the possible online sources.

As you can tell from what I have already written, maintaining multiple online family trees can be a challenge, but the benefits are substantial and when taken in the perspective of working with dozens or even hundreds of different programs and websites, not as significant an issue as it might initially appear to be.

Stay tuned for additional posts on this subject.