Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Using GeneaNet.org - Post 1

I am still looking for my "ideal" family tree and social networking site - I spelled out what I would like to have in Family Trees and social Networks out the wazoo (?). In Comments to that post, Jean-Yves Baxter said "Genea-Net offers all of those features and much more."

I had registered for free and uploaded a GEDCOM to GeneaNet some time ago, thinking that I would test it out. So - in this series I'm going to see if Jean-Yves' claim is correct, and if this site satisfies my research needs.

Here is the welcome screen for http://www.geneanet.org/ for a registered user:



On the left-hand side, there is My Account options, Archives and Services. We'll explore some of those later. The Search box for surnames and localities is front and center. There are icons for different languages in the upper right-hand corner - the options are English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Dutch.

GeneaNet has many free research opportunities, and some paid ("Club Privilege") research opportunities. The cost is 40 Euros for a one year and 75 Euros for a two year subscription. The menu of Club Privilege benefits is below:


I'm going to stick to the free side for now, even though I can't search by first name, by spouses, by alternate spelling, or use filters, see maps, or print reports and charts, among other features.

I'm most interested in the Search features. The Search box claims that there are over 233 million names in their databases. I plugged "Seaver" into the Search box on the home page, and received 725 matches, listed 20 to a screen, as shown below:


The list has the user/contributor name on the left, the surname, some years, a locality (place, county, region, country), and a symbol (the green family tree, there may be others).

I scrolled down and clicked on the link for one of my entries (I'm user rjseaver). The screen below appeared, and shows a link to my family tree. There is also a "most popular surnames" cloud on this page.


In the next post, I'll look at search results in my own database.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The surname cloud is fairly new feature.
One of the best features of geneanet are its free weekly notifications of new or updated trees containing names of interest.
I have subscriptions for several spelling variations of names that interest me.
If anyone uploads a tree with one of your names it in, you'll know, and you can compare with your data.
BTW, Geneanet can sometimes appear to be down suddenly, but is usually back as soon as you hit F5.

Jean-Yves said...

Many thanks for the post Randy!

Jean-Yves said...

Randy,

When you create a new GeneaNet account, you can build your online family tree using our Basic Family Tree Builder. It's friendly but for beginners and small family trees.

Then, you can switch for Free to GeneWeb, a real full-featured online genealogy program and take advantage of much more features and options.

Best regards,
Jean-Yves