HelPeR - BYU Idaho Special Collections and Family History

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Net Famil History
To facilitate the communication between relatives
all around the world, Dynastree offers family friendly
communication features. Just like any other common
web email service, every user gets its own inbox and
family mail features. The recipients are quickly selected
from a list of all active members and friends
of the family. As a special service, Dynastree offers
automatic reminder e-mails for all kinds of events in
the family such as birthdays, wedding anniversaries,
or obits. That way, one cannot forget any important
dates concerning the family.
To make sure that such personal and partly private
information like biographies cannot be read by
complete strangers (very distant relatives can easily
be completely unknown to others in very large
family trees) Dynastree offers a detailed but easyto-use
rights management. This allows every user
to determine who of the family tree can see which
detail of information in his profile (e.g. depending on
how close the familial relationship is). In addition to
a multilingual communication platform for family
members, Dynastree offers a forum for genealogists,
a blog, and an information center containing valuable
information on ancestry research.
Dynastree was founded in 2007 and is supported
by SAP founder Hasso Plattner. Dynastree offers its
software in eight languages besides English: German,
Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese,
French, Spanish, and Dutch. The global concept of
the network is a crucial factor to successful online genealogy.
As migration led to the distribution of families
all over the world, the nine languages Dynastree
supports help finding relatives abroad. For the future,
Dynastree plans further expansion to other countries
such as Russia and Turkey.
The success all around the globe has been overwhelming:
So far, 60 million profiles have been added
to six million family trees. Every week more than
100,000 new family trees are created. The entire database
is searchable available for free so that genealogists
can search for distant relatives and ancestors with a
mouse click. The found persons can be contacted directly,
if they accept it in their rights management.
The complete tree data can be downloaded in GED-
COM format and one can load the family tree in the
also completely cost-free professional desktop software
that has recently been released. The “Dynastree
Home Edition” offers all the easy genealogical editing
on the home PC or even on a portable USB drive. That
way, the family tree can be taken anywhere, shown
in family reunions, or shared via email.
Dynastree co-founder Daniel Groezinger explains:
“Like Google’s strategy of turning the expensive
Keyhole software into the free Google Earth, we decided
to offer software that is usually pricy—for free.
This applies to the web as well as the desktop version
of our software.”
While Dynastree´s web and desktop software are
free, the company will add premium services soon.
From the first quarter of 2009 on, poster printouts of
family trees can be ordered. Layout elements such as
background images, colors, and profiles frames will
be completely customizable. As every family tree has
its specific sizes depending on the number of generations
and number of relatives entered, not every
poster size can be suitable for the tree, so Dynastree
offers various formats.
The family trees that are created on the network
can of course contain duplicate information. Once the
tree has been built and relatives or ancestors are found
through the search option, the next logical stage is to
merge the two structures to create one common family
tree. The developers are currently working hard on
what is, according to the founders’ vision, an important
step towards the world’s largest family tree, one
single tree including hundreds of millions of profiles
and eventually showing the familial relationship to
virtually everyone.
116 © Ev e r t o n’s Ge n e a l o g i c a l He l p e r Ja n ua ry/Fe b r u a r y 2009