Need some help filling in the missing pieces of your family tree? There is a genealogy website that can help you to do that. It is called OneGreatFamily, and it actually works on your family tree for you, while you are doing other things. It will even let you know when it finds new information.
Genealogists, even amateur ones, spend countless hours doing research, gathering information, and putting together their family tree. There are going to be times when you have too many things going on in your life and are too busy to work on your genealogy research. Or, you might have hit a dead end in your research, and are currently unable to find information about an ancestor you are trying to find.
When this happens, it is time to delegate. Some people will hire a professional genealogist and ask him or her to do a specific genealogy related task. Or, if you belong to a genealogy group, there is potential that you could ask another group member to help you out. However, these solutions require either the finances to pay for the services of a professional genealogist, or a current connection to a genealogy group. Not everyone is going to have those options available to them.
Instead, you can try OneGreatFamily. It is a genealogy database that has over 190 million unique entries. You can enter as much information about your family tree as you care to, either by importing a GedCom file, or by filling it all in manually. It is stored on their servers, which are regularly backed up.
After you have done that, OneGreatFamily will automatically have its search engine sort through the data you entered, and the data entered by other people, in order to find new connections. It will send you an email when it finds a new connection between your family tree and the family tree of another member. If you decide that the connection is correct, it will automatically merge your family tree with whatever family tree it found the exact same person in.
This automated system could save a genealogist quite a bit of time. OneGreatFamily can search twenty-four hours a day for you. This leaves you free to attend family gatherings, cook dinner, do household chores, or even sleep! Or, you could spend that time working on a different genealogy project instead. It is up to you.
You can get a seven day free trial to check out OneGreatFamily if this sounds like something interesting to you. If you like the service, then you will have to purchase a subscription to it after your free trial runs out. They have an Annual Subscription, an Quarterly Subscription, and a Monthly Subscription. There is a sale right now that will continue until July 3, 2011. The price of subscription has been discounted for a limited time.
When I looked at the prices of their subscriptions, the top of the page pointed out that they “noticed” that I wasn’t using Windows. It seems that OneGreatFamily does run on Mac browsers, but “for the absolute best experience” it recommends that people use Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows.
Image by Martin Petitt on Flickr