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Family Echo – Free online family tree maker
- bradleyjg 3y agoI haven’t found a good program to create a good looking printable tree with pictures where available. I ended up using Visio and laying out everything by hand but it was a big pain in the neck.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoYeah. I have this issue. I have a stupid amount of names and I'd like to print select generations into binders for family. I don't like any of the options though. It's all non-intuitive and/or irrelevant info and/or lots of wasted space on a page.
- SilasHaslam 3y agoI've used Chronoplex MyFamilyTree with good results. https://chronoplexsoftware.com/myfamilytree/ https://chronoplexsoftware.com/myfamilytree/
- qingcharles 3y agoUgh, I used Visio about 20 years ago to do the same. It seems like a smart idea for about an hour, then it isn't :(
- Isthatablackgsd 3y agoIf you are still looking, I recommend yEd Graph Editor. They have a family tree layout you can use. I used it in the past and it works great for my needs.
- tekla 3y agoOf course with all Family tree software, I gotta test the thing. I don't think you can make incest babies on this software.
- gerdesj 3y agoMy uncle has been doing genealogical research for over 20 years now and has 130k individuals in the db. He uses The Master Genealogist (TMG) running under Wine (Windows gave up a long time ago). TMG ceased development some time ago but it was written by someone who really knew their genealogy but not so hot on the programming/db front. It is FoxPro based and a bit odd. However, I can get at all the data via Libre Office so at least the data is safe for the future - even as just a set of tables. If you ever get into genealogy you will discover GEDCOM as the lingua franca. It is/was a file format developed by the Mormons. It is a bit idiosyncratic but at least it is a standard and still developed. The CofJC&LDS (Mormons) have their own reasons for getting into genealogy and they are probably not your reasons. However it is a standard and it works pretty well. You can always overload notes fields for your purposes. We are currently settled on Geneweb as the presentation medium for the data in TMG. Geneweb is written in OCAML and I am learning OCAML as a sideline. GW is very, very fast at some calcs and reports and a bit weird in general. It will be a while before I can request a git pull. I've slapped Privacy Idea on the front to secure it. My personal favourite self hosted app is webtrees. It's a LAMP jobbie and well supported. Go for that, if you are starting out. Now, one of the biggest issues you face in genealogy is what to record and even how to get that data. Be very careful how you approach the living. Human relationships are frankly rather messy and memories can be rather malleable, documentation can be wrong or illegible and so on. So your recording system has to be rather flexible. Ideally you assign a confidence score to each fact, event, anecdote or whatever. Me and my Uncle have decided on a policy of "as close to actually happened, as possible or redact and note as such, unless the object has a hissie fit". So if your fictional aunt does not want her second boyfriend of 10 years noted, then an entry is made without a name, if she gets really unhappy about it then remove the record altogether - the living get to decide what you record about them. That brings me around to another issue: Significant relationships - what to record and why: What are they? Marriages only? Nope. Also note that the notion of sexuality and sex are rather more nuanced these days than they were. Genealogy needs to keep apace with real life. What genealogy really, really needs is not another website. It needs some clever kids who understand the subject matter and can come up with a decent data schema - perhaps by modifying GEDCOM. This is data that needs to be textual and ideally self describing. It needs to work in 500 years time. Help!!!
- anadem 3y agoI prefer Zoompast, also free (as yet), developed as a student project a Imperial College, London: https://zoompast.com/about https://zoompast.com/about
- ghostpepper 3y ago"Family Echo is provided by Familiality Ltd., a private company founded by Gideon Greenspan and based in Tel Aviv. Other sites include: Web Sudoku, Magic Baby Names and TrainMyAI." Sorry but if I don't understand how you make money from my data then I'm not putting my data into it
- LVB 3y agoThe last item of the FAQ says, "Family Echo is a free service, supported by advertising."
- freitasm 3y agoI think the "TrainMyAI" tells a lot about how the data might be used. Their Data Policy (1) says nothing about how they use data you enter. Only says you can enter as much or as little and who can see th data you share. Big nope. (1) https://www.familyecho.com/?page=policies https://www.familyecho.com/?page=policies
- vkdelta 3y agoIs there any open source version of such software ? I always to map our community and families from specific country.
- ellrob88 3y ago'Gramps' has been recommended to me in the past.
- secabeen 3y agoGramps is good, as is the spinoff web version: https://www.grampsweb.org/ https://www.grampsweb.org/ Gramps Web is distributed as a collection of containers, with a provided compose file. It works really well, if you're an HN reader with a place to host some containers and an nginx proxy for SSL.
- LVB 3y agoI wish I could find a self-hostable version of a basic family tree like this. The various genealogy apps I've set up have been too complicated and off-putting for my extended family. They just want to easily browse a family tree and see interesting dates, locations, and photos of people. This site looks pretty much at the level I'd like, but I don't feel like shoveling my personal family data to some random company.
- hooverd 3y agoThat seems like the perfect use-case for overengineering something with a graph DB.
- spennant 3y agohttps://www.webtrees.net https://www.webtrees.net
- kmonad 3y agocan the generated tree be downloaded in some common format? I could not find any option like that.
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoI kind of wonder about a really big public version of this. Something like a Wikipedia of family tree history, so people working on their family's genealogy might meet up with others somewhere 5 or 6 generations back and discover some stories going back a couple hundred years. I imagine allowing for people to fill in little biographies and attach photos or references of ancestors. But such a thing would probably have a bunch of abuse scenarios that would be hard to solve for (it's "what's your mother's maiden name" as a service, for one), and I'm not sure if they're easily solved. But it'd be really cool.
- xahrepap 3y agohttps://www.familysearch.org/ https://www.familysearch.org/ does exactly this. Only information of people who are deceased is viewable outside the account of the person who entered the information. It's run by the LDS Church, so there's a religious tone to their marketing. But you don't have to be a member or religious to use it.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoI'd agree. Family Search will eventually be understood as the authoritative tree. One challenge with an authoritative tree is when a distant or non-relative creates a profile, marks it living and then that creator disappears. A close relative shows up but the profile is locked to the creator. The actual relative has to jump thru hoops to get access to their own family. With privacy concerns, I don't know how to handle it better. Only that folks might want to avoid creating living profiles except for close relatives.
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoI'm glad it exists, but I'm not super comfortable encouraging everybody in my extended family to give all of their information directly to the LDS Church, especially with their history of stuff like proxy baptisms of holocaust victims. But on the other hand, I was just a minute ago wishing that this sort of service existed publicly as a Wikipedia-like free resource, which is a strict superset of the LDS Church having it, so maybe that's unfair.
- kichik 3y agoCan it import GED files?
- fjfaase 3y agoFor genealogical research you need something more than just a tree builder, you need a system to record facts based on documents (like birth certificates) and a mechanism to link those records (I think person A mentioned in birth certificate C the same person as person B mentioned in marriage certificate D). The family tree is the accumulation of these the documents and the assumptions you made. It is possible that when you encounter a new document, you have to drop some of your assumptions, because, for example, it does occasionally happen that a person with a same (or similar) name is born on the same date in the same city.
- gerdesj 3y ago"For genealogical research you need something more than just a tree builder, you need a system to record facts" Facts are facts (indisputable for a given value of indisputable!) but you can and I think should also record anecdotes too. Mark the data as such. A generic term for facts might be "Events" ie events in a person's life. Assign a score or an attribution or whatever works for you. The thing about facts is that they can become distorted. Human memory is a bit ... malleable and let's face it the output from our sensors (eyes etc) are open to some interpretation. That's a bit meta! I suggest you forget about neat little trees when it comes to genealogy. Think thicket instead, really tangled thickets.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> It is possible that when you encounter a new document, you have to drop some of your assumptions, because, for example, it does occasionally happen that a person with a same (or similar) name is born on the same date in the same city. Good grief yes. Families with the same surname, with kids born in the same order and in the same years. I had a 3 pack of that in one NJ town. Man marries 3x, all named Lilly. Siblings Smith marrying Siblings Jones. Second wife adopts first wife's name as their nickname. Siblings swapping spouses (divorcing first). Parents who reuse the name of a dead child, multiple times. Aging dad who remarries daughter-in-law's mom. Women marrying men with same surname (some related, some not).
- sobkas 3y agoI might be a bit paranoid, but don't provide some random website on the internet intimate information about your family. Someone might learn about your ancestry at the worst possible moment...
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoFamily Search is free to join and it's massive. Living profiles are obfuscated tho. Frankly, the people likely to harm me with data are those in power - the same people that privacy laws don't apply to. Randos are pretty much at the bottom of the threat stack.
- chaostheory 3y agoYou’re likely right, but I would worry more about census data https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/census/feature/japanese-americans-in-world-war-ii-and-the-census# https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/census/feature/j...