Earlier today (Tuesday, 5 March 2013), news started spreading on the Internet that FamilySearch Family Tree is now available to the general public. I first read it on Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings. He had seen it on Larry Cragun Family and Genealogy blog.
To access Family Tree, go to http://www.familysearch.org and click on the Family Tree link just to the right of the FamilySearch logo.
Dear AI,
ReplyDeleteI thought I might put some comments here and perhaps they are germane enough to this announcement post to be addressed. I appreciate the work of FSI to finally release Family Tree.
A few quirks that still bother me:
1. The conclusion-based model works except when there are equally-viable conclusions. (e.g. two equally-viable birth dates each with equal amounts of equally-reliable sources - 3 Church records put a birth date of 03 March, 3 other records put a birth date of 13 March) Assuming all extant records have been searched and even a professional genealogist could not readily conclude one assertion over another, it would be helpful to have multiple versions of an event like birth, death, etc... Relegating one of the alternatives to a discussion thread is not easy to accept as a long-term solution. Even Ancestry provides an alternative for these events, though the UI to recognize and edit them isn't great. At least it is linked to the same event and not relegated to a comment or custom event.
2. I appreciate the efforts to standardize dates and places. When I enter a date or place, the pop-up comes up and tells me "Standard: Provo, Utah, Utah, United States". However, it does not appear possible to click the value in the Standard box and have it replace the value in the textbox. When I have a long place to expand, it would help to be able to click the full place name instead of typing it out. I'm also curious if there is documentation on whether other date standards are supported. Will Family Tree support Quaker dates or Julian dates or Chinese calendar, etc...?
3. While I'm on the topic of places... it would be nice to have either a description field like Ancestry where one could put down information such as a more specific location or details about an event. On a death event, a hospital could be listed or cause of death. Ideally, for additional place details, it would be nice to open up the place database wiki-style or at least have a way to submit places to FSI to be included in the place database. If 20 of my ancestors died in Anytown Hospital, Anytown, Anycounty, Anystate, United States I'd rather not have to write in my reason statement or in a Discussion the name of the hospital. I'd rather submit the name of Anytown Hospital to be added as a child node of the standard Anytown, Anycounty, Anystate, United States so I could include the hospital in the place name. Even submitting aliases would be nice for when Anytown Hospital becomes Anytown Regional Hospital or Anytown Medical Center or when Anytown Hospital used to be Anytown Community Hospital.
Thanks for your time and keeping us appraised of developments!
KG
I wish you could provide complete data info even on mobile version ...thanks a lot.
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