Sunday, December 13, 2009

Family Trees on Mundia.com

I posted A First Look at Mundia.com yesterday, which was from the perspective of any researcher that stumbled across the site - a seeker, rather than someone with a family tree on Ancestry.com.

Mundia.com accesses the Member Trees on Ancestry.com, but shows a "face" different from the typical Ancestry.com home page. On Mundia.com, the user with an Ancestry Member Tree can access their Member Tree(s) after they register (you can use your Ancestry member name and password). You do not have to be an Ancestry subscriber - only a registered member of Ancestry.com. If you are not registered with Ancestry.com, then you can use your Facebook accvount to sign in to Mundia.com, or register yourself separately.

Here's the sign-in screen:





Once a person signs in, then the site requests that you identify which person you are in the Ancestry Member Tree. You would think that it should know that, but apparently it doesn't! There is also a blue Facebook "Connect" button so that Mundia can link to a person's Facebook account and vice-versa.

A person can access their Ancestry Account, add or change a picture of themselves, etc. Here is my "Member" screen:




You can see that it "knows" all about me... my name, my alerts, upcoming birthdays and anniversaries are listed, and the opportunity to invite other family members to the site are all provided in the left-hand column. My picture is there in the upper right-hand corner of the page (apparently from Facebook). The center of the page has any news updates I've posted, plus the opportunity to post more.

There are five buttons on the top menu - for Home Page, Family Tree, Gallery, Messages, and Find People. I was on the "Home Page" above, so I clicked on the "Family Tree" button and saw (after about 30 seconds to load my 38,000 person Ancestry Member Tree):




That's me with a red outline in the bottom center of the screen, with the rest of my family - both ancestors, descendants and collateral family (aunts, uncles, cousins, spouses of relatives). If I had thumbnail pictures attached to myself and my family in my Ancestry Member Tree, then they would have shown up in the Family Tree above.

The user can move around the family tree by holding down the left mouse button and roaming. The user can zoom in or out using the slide scale in the upper left-hand corner of the Family Tree area. I clicked on my great-grandfather, Frank Walton Seaver and saw (again after about 30 seconds):




Limited birth and death information for the person is listed under his name, the Facts for the person are listed in the "Life Story" section of the page, and the "Family Members" section lists parents, spouses, siblings and children. There are links on this page to Edit Profile, see the picture Gallery for the person, see the Map view, or navigate back to the Family Tree, Add the person to my Family Tree, Share the Profile, Print the Page, or Show Sources.

Pictures or documents attached to persons in the Ancestry Member Tree show up in the Gallery of the person on Mundia.com.

I clicked on the "Gallery" tab in the top menu, and saw:




Hmmm, the Gallery is empty, even though I have a number of pictures in my Ancestry Member Tree. My guess is that this Gallery is for images attached through Mundia.com, not through Ancestry.com. I haven't tried to upload a picture to Mundia.com yet. It will be interesting to see if the picture uploaded to Mundia will show up in my Ancestry Member Tree.

The "Messages" tab on the top menu shows my Messages on Ancestry.com - essentially the Ancestry Member connect feature where the user can email other people.

The "Find People" tab on the top menu provides a Search field that can be used to search all of the persons in Ancestry Member Trees - not just my own:





That's a very brief look at roaming around Mundia.com in my Ancestry Public Member Tree. Since I was signed in, I could have roamed around my own Private Member Tree (if I had one there - I don't).

In the next post, we'll look at the Facebook side of Mundia.com and then we'll ask and answer some questions after that.

I think it's interesting that, since there has been no "official" announcement of Mundia.com, other than the social media release that few people saw before yesterday, very few genealogy bloggers have even mentioned Mundia.com in a blog post.

Tamura Jones has posted his first look at Mundia.com on his Modern Software Experience website at http://www.tamurajones.net/MundiaFirstLook.xhtml. It includes some screen shots of the Facebook side of things also.

4 comments:

Sheri Fenley said...

Hey Seaver - Merry Almost Christmas

I did the Mundia thing a couple of days ago. I am not impressed. There are far too many social networking family tree sites as it is and Mundia did not give me a genea-gasim. But what do I know!

Tamura Jones said...

Randy,

Yes, it is puzzling that Ancestry did not announce the Mundia Beta themselves.
Ancestry.com management let the existence of Mundia slip months ago already, but until it went Beta, there was little to tell.
BTW, there still is a special domain for Alpha testers and translators (https://ww.mundiatranslate.com/).
I was surprised to note a few days ago that Ancestry.com PR had failed to announce that Mundia had gone Beta, but happy to write up and publish another genea-scoop ;-)
Even after the attention we have given it, there still is nothing on Ancestry.com's own blog, twitter or the usual press release channels.

- Tamura

Anastasia Tyler said...

Hi Randy,

Mundia.com is a new international website, currently in Beta, dedicated to helping people around the world participate in family history. The Mundia website includes a simplified version of Ancestry.com family trees designed primarily for an international audience and expands the Ancestry.com network of 12 million family trees into many of the languages spoken in Eastern and Central Europe, Latin America and Asia. The Mundia website is designed primarily for individuals who do not live in countries with existing Ancestry.com or localized sister sites (Ancestry.co.uk, Ancestry.ca, etc.).

Since Mundia and Ancestry.com share the same trees database, all family trees created on Mundia by Mundia members will also be available on Ancestry.com to Ancestry.com members. That means Ancestry.com members can get access to family trees from around the globe, resulting in even more connections with living relatives and hints to shared ancestors. Mundia and Ancestry.com share the same privacy settings, so if you set your tree to private on Ancestry.com it will be private on Mundia as well.

The Mundia FAQ page provides many additional details, including a specific section for existing Ancestry.com members as well as privacy settings – http://us.mundia.com/FAQ

Thanks!
Anastasia Tyler, PR Manager, Ancestry.com

Nicholas McPhee said...

Nothing exciting about this. Looks like Ancestry has created a watered-down social network and just trying to get more users. Yawn.

The problem is there are already a lot of players out there doing this much better than what Mundia offers.