ThinkGenealogy

Connect with friends, connect with family, connect with those that match your DNA?  The social networking site launched in beta today by the Sorenson family of companies called GeneTree promises to better help people answer the questions “Who am I?” and “Where do I come from?”.

A number of Sorenson companies (Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, Sorenson Media, Sorenson Genomics) have joined forces with a vision described in their motto and overall goal:

Motto: You Belong Here

Goal: To be able to take any two people in the world, sit them down and tell them exactly how they’re related.

The press release uses phrases such as “deep ancestral histories” and “human genetic heritage” as it describes how this social networking site is different from other family history networking sites:

GeneTree will tie into the SMGF database that currently contains information on more than 6 million ancestors through linked genetic and pedigree data from approximately 90 percent of the world’s countries.

Registering for the beta site is open to all and is completed in a few minutes.  The site allows you to manage your profile, upload media, create a family tree, connect with friends, and keep a DNA profile.

The following image shows the Flash-based Family Tree Builder:

It will be exciting to see how this site evolves and is accepted by the genealogy community.

I was reading Dick Eastman’s newsletter today and came across a post about MacFamilyTree 5 beta so  I decided to follow the link to the company site to see what the UI looked liked.  To my surprise, the main tree diagram looks a lot like Microsoft’s Family.Show sample application that I have blogged so much about. 

Compare the tree diagrams for yourself:

MacFamilyTree 5 beta

Microsoft’s Family.Show

The latest updates to genealogy software appear to have at least a graphic designer (if not a user experience designer) on the team.

What started out as a sample application to showcase the latest UI technology from Microsoft called Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) resulted in a sample to the genealogy community of innovation.

At the beginning of this year, the company I work for hired Vertigo Software to do a prototype application using WPF.  Part of the portfolio that Vertigo shared with us during the pre-hiring phase was an end-to-end reference sample that they did for Microsoft. The exciting thing about this sample is that it is a genealogy application. Family.Show version 1 was released in April in preparation for the MIX 07 conference and version 2 was released in July.

This is not a full-fledged application and it wasn’t designed by experts in the genealogy community. But don’t dismiss it too quickly. This sample shows the imagination and innovation that can come when user interaction experts, software developers, and graphics designers work together. I especially like the different visualizations used in the application and will talk about them specifically in a future post.

Here is the feature list published by Vertigo:

• Quickly build your family tree
• Add photos easily via drag-and-drop
• Create advanced family tree visualizations with pan and zoom support
• See what your family tree looked like years ago using the Time Explorer
• Tell your family members’ story using rich editing and formatting controls
• Mine your family data with statistical filtering and sorting
• Import and export family trees to GEDCOM 5.5, a standard genealogy format
• Change the look of the entire application by choosing a different skin

Some limitations of the application are:

• Supports single birth, marriage, and death events
• No other events supported
• Doesn’t support approximate dates (Abt. 1815, Bet. Jan 1707/08 - Jan 1708/09, Bef. 1931)

Links:

• For those who want to see screen shots/videos or who want to install it, go to the Vertigo Family.Show site.
• For software developers who want access to the source code, go to the CodePlex site.