FamilyLink.com, the social network for genealogists, is testing our new family tree software with GEDCOM upload functionality. The site and the tree are still in beta, but the feedback we are getting is encouraging. FamilyLink members are now uploading their trees and sharing them with others. Just yesterday we had 39,000 ancestor names uploaded. Geni.com got 5 million profiles in 5 months. At 39,000 in one day, we are running at the same pace.
One of the benefits for submitters is that we track and report on all the surnames you are researching and all the places where your ancestors lived. This makes it very easy for you to make contact with other genealogists who are researching your surnames or who live in the locations where your ancestors lived. If you need a local record lookup, it will now be easy to find a kind soul who can do it for you.
In the next few days we will begin inviting our 250,000 monthly visitors at World Vital Records to upload their family tree to FamilyLink and the momentum will soar.
I remember back in 1998 when the Ancestry World Tree was growing only by a few hundred thousand names per month, and was around 7-8 million total names, and we decided that it had to grow 5-10 times faster in order for us to pass the Broderbund World Family Tree collection in size and importance. We came up with all kinds of ways to encourage more members to submit their trees to our free indexed collection. Over time the Ancestry World Tree grew into the hundreds of millions of names. It has been since been used by tens of millions of genealogists around the world.
Our World Vital Records / FamilyLink GEDCOM index is now slightly larger than the Ancestry World Tree was back in 1998. Now that we have GEDCOM upload, and a great way of viewing and sharing your family tree online, we will begin to promote this feature. Soon we hope to be able to help everyone find ancestors and distant relatives by offering powerful searching of user submitted trees on both World Vital Records and FamilyLink. Stay tuned for more….
Note: I left MyFamily.com back in 2002 and have no ongoing involvement with the company.
3 thoughts on “Upload Your Family Tree”
Interesting timing on this post and the one I read on techcrunch today http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/10/writing-sharing-and-protecting-your-lifes-story/#comment-1610020
Too bad I think I put 2 links in the comment I made so it’s probably been moderated.
Paul, please talk about business in utah again. You made it interesting. I used to check your blog everyday. Now I probably come every couple of weeks.
HOW DO YOU UPLOAD GENEALOGICAL DATA TO A WEB SITE
PAUL