Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Checking out WebTree.com - Post 1

I was reading my blogs this afternoon, and saw the WorldVitalRecords blog post by Whitney Ransom concerning http://www.webtree.com/. When WebTree was announced two months ago, I thought "I'll check it out when it comes out of beta testing."

Well, it's out of beta now and available to use. So what is WebTree? The site says:

"WebTree.com is a community for publishing your family history.
* Publish and share your family tree files
* Create great looking charts and reports
* Embed your tree on any website or blog "


I can't resist trying out new things and telling my readers about them (have you noticed?). I went to http://www.webtree.com/ and signed up. The first screen looks like this:



The screen notes that they have had over 700 family trees uploaded in the first 48 days, which is fairly impressive.

There's an ice big "Upload Your Tree" button at the top of the screen. Will it upload my large family tree (over 20,700 individuals)? I tried...


And succeeded, in about one minute time. It took several minutes for my database to be processed (less than 20 minutes) so I went exploring. I clicked on the Browse tab and the screen showed me the latest uploaded databases.


I clicked on the Search tab, and filled in the surname with "Seaver," being the curious sort to see how many are already in the database. The search box looks like this:


Well, there were 84 entries for Seaver in the uploaded databases. Here are the first screen of matches.


Rather than go into someone else's database and explore, I'll wait and write another post about what my uploaded database looks like in WebTree.

By far the most interesting thing that Whitney's post said was:

"An index of the GEDCOMs stored on WebTree.com will be available as part of free search results on WorldVitalRecords.com."

That's great, I think!

4 comments:

Abba-Dad said...

Hmmmm... I went to check out the site, but even for me it seemed extremely basic. I couldn't see any source information for the data, so it doesn't seem like it will be more than another reference.

Looking forward to seeing what you found.

familytwigs said...

Are they going to do away with FamilyLink? I had never heard of them before. "Embed your tree on any website or blog". How does that work? Sounds interesting.
I like to try them out too, but now I live vicariously through you. I got into a mess once trying one out. :o) So. . . . , keep up the good work, Randy!
Can't wait for more!

Whitney said...

No, we're not going to do away with FamilyLink. WebTree will continue to be integrated into our site. Thanks for your interest in WebTree.com. Whitney Ransom

Ginger Smith said...

Hi Randy, Thanks for the insight on this new online family tree website. I was also wondering how the embedding your tree into a blog or website worked?