Good Idea? Bad Idea? Online Trees! Part 2

 

Many of us have been blessed to sit beneath the 150-year-old banyan tree in downtown Lahaina, Maui. (Which is said to be showing signs of life after the devastating August fire. Yahoo.) Looking at the city-park-wide spread of this tree, one can imagine an equally large series of roots reaching back into time and bringing the beloved tree back to life.

The Maui Banyan is the metaphor I choose to share with you today. All that we see, from the ground up, is our growing family (pretend you're the tiny white person/spot). But what we cannot see is the equal number of roots/ancestors that brought us to this point. 

It's those people/ancestors whom we genealogists seek. The question on the table to day is how to organize and keep that information in a safe and a usable way?

Let's take a peek at the different safe-storage-for-long-term methods:

• Individually Managed Family Trees.. meaning YOU are in charge, period:
• American Ancestors TREES
• Ancestry -- private member trees
• MyHeritage -- private member trees
• Findmypast --- private member trees
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• Keeping your tree online on these websites means nobody/no how can add/substract/multiply/divide or mess with your information.... but you can give permission for folks to see your tree. 
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• Collaborative Family Trees.... meaning folks do work together to add/edit/mange profiles. BUT know that others can and might make changes to "your" profile. Not supposed to without giving documentation. 😉
• FamilySearch Family Trees..... nearing 2-billion online trees
• WikiTree..... 36 million trees
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• Programs on your own computer...... meaning you are solely in charge; both have a free and paid version.
• LegacyFamilyTree ---- can sync with FamilySearch
• RootsMagic ----- can sync with Ancestry

Certainly there are other online programs and other at-home computer programs. I'm just giving the bare minimum here to kick-start your decision making process as to what are YOU going to do with all your family history information????? Remember, your "Maui banyan" might burn to the ground next time.