Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Twile Converts Family Tree Data into Visual Timelines - Post 1: GEDCOM Upload

Twile was released several months ago - see Announcing a New Genealogy Website: Twile (posted 2 June 2015) and Twile Converts Family Trees Into Visual Timelines (posted 12 August 2015) on Dick Eastman's blog.

When Twile was first announced, I registered and added four profiles to see how it worked, but it took a relatively long time so I didn't even blog about it.  My hope was that Twile would add a GEDCOM import feature to make adding family tree information easy for researchers with family tree software.

Twile sent an email today with the press release from 11 August 2015 announcing that Twile now supports GEDCOM import to automatically create a timeline of a family's history."

So I revisited the site, created a GEDCOM of my family (I chose 8 generations of ancestors and 4 generations of my descendants), and took screenshots of the results.

1)  Here is the home page - the Register or Login buttons are in the top right corner:


2)  I logged in, and saw my previous effort with four persons included:


In the upper right-hand corner of the screen is a link to "Import GEDCOM."  I clicked on that.

3)  A popup screen appeared and I had to choose between discarding the existing people and milestones on Twile, or to Merge my existing tree and milestones (but rely on Twile folks to merge the profiles):


I chose the first option, then clicked the green "Choose a GEDCOM File" button and the GEDCOM file uploaded.  It took about 10 minutes for a file of 2,000 persons.  When it was uploaded, another popup screen appeared asking me to select who I was in the file.  I scrolled down and found me:


Once I picked myself in the GEDCOM file, the program sorted out the relationships between me and the other persons in the tree:


That took about ten minutes also.

4)  After the relationships were built, the family tree showed on the screen.  Males have a blue background for the first name (no last names are shown) and females have a pink first name background:


The photograph placeholder area for each person has the persons initials.  Below the person's first name is the number of milestones in the database for that person.

5)  On the screen above, I ran my mouse over my grandmother's photograph area, which listed her full name, her relationship to me, and had the option to see her profile, her timeline, or to add a relative.  I chose to see her Profile:


The Profile is a list of dates of events in chronological order.  There are icons on the screen above for different events (some events have a green icon, marriages have a red icon, deaths and burials have black icons).

6)  The screen above has a link to "View Emily's Timeline" so I clicked on that and saw:


The Timeline provides all of the events in the family tree file for my grandmother, with event title, relationships, event place and event date.

That's as far as I've gotten in Twile so far, but it took less than an hour to add over 2,000 profiles to the program and click around to see how it works.

I need to add the thumbnail photos for the persons in my tree, and will show how I did that in the next post on Twile.

7)  The GEDCOM upload process was quick and easy to use.  The tree is easy to see and navigate, and the Profile and Timeline are easy to understand.  I would prefer that the Profile be a full web page so it could be captured as a PDF although I could use the Windows Snipping Tool to save it as an image.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/08/twile-converts-family-tree-data-into.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.



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