Allen County Public Library and WeRelate.org Announce Partnership

I wrote about WeRelate.org last year. It is a great online service that has the potential to provide a lot of genealogy information at no charge. You can read my article here . Now WeRelate.org has announced a partnership with the second-largest genealogy library in the country. Here is the announcement:

The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne, Indiana) and the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc., announce a partnership in operating WeRelate.org, a new social networking website for genealogy. WeRelate.org is totally FREE and makes it easy to upload family trees and images, find and connect with other family members, share research easily, and extend lines. WeRelate.org is now the largest English language genealogical wiki in the world. In the past few weeks, WeRelate.org has uploaded over 73,000 ancestor wiki pages. WeRelate.org also has more than 430,000 wiki pages for current and historical inhabited places, 115,000 given and surname wiki pages, and 1.3 million wiki source pages. WeRelate is now the largest English language genealogical application. Please watch our new video at http://www.werelate.org/videos/WeRelateTour.html.

WeRelate.org offers:

• Family Tree Explorer. WeRelate.org recently released the online Family Tree Explorer, which makes creating and navigating family trees easier than ever before. The Family Tree Explorer displays pedigree, descendancy, or combined pedigree/descendancy views (showing as many generations as desired) on the left side of a split screen with detailed ancestor or family information on the right.
• GEDCOM upload. People can create pages for their ancestors one at a time or by uploading GEDCOM files. Nicely formatted life stories including biographies, annotated photos, scanned source documents, and 44 different life events can be created without the need to know HTML.
• Annotated images. Researchers can upload all their documentation and family photos, so they can completely document their work online. They can also attach notes to their images, labeling each person in a group photograph, or pointing out information in a hard-to-read original document, for example. See, http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Image:Daniel_Lincoln_Phillips_and_Ella_Boone_Grey_and_family%2C_1909.JPG
• Work on the same page. Since cousins all work on the same web page, they won't need to endure merging their GEDCOMs or endless rounds of photocopying and mailing. Each participant can share research successes and dead ends, instantly and online. Research can be efficiently coordinated, planned, and organized.
• Pedigree maps. Automatically generated pedigree maps show where the people in a five-generation pedigree chart migrated across time and place. See, http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Special:ShowPedigree?pagetitle=Person:Ella_Grey_(1)
• Automated collaboration. Email notifications are sent to interested persons whenever a fellow genealogist adds something new to a “watched” page. Messages can also be sent inside the system, so researchers can work together without exchanging email addresses or other personal information.

The Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc. will continue developing the software and hosting the web site, and the Allen County Public Library will provide administrative and support services. WeRelate is a FREE public service supported by tax-deductible donations. The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library houses over an acre of genealogy materials under one roof and is the second largest genealogy library in the world. The Foundation for On-Line Genealogy is a non-profit organization dedicated to making family history research easier, faster, and more rewarding.

Comments

[Loran Braught]

This is really exciting news (surprised that I was not previously aware of it as I just last week attended a conference where Curt Witcher, Manager of ACPL Genealogy Division, presented sessions without mentioning this). However, I know that if Mr. Witcher is associated with this new partnership it will be both quality and free as he is a true leader of such values for genealogy. The FGS 2007 Conference being held at Ft. Wayne, IN in August will also allow participants to witness the amazing new ACPL facilities that feature many front-line library services and great support to patrons, according to a few early visitors there who have reported it to me (I will go there in a few weeks to verify that praise). I am so amazed at the awesome repository of ACPL, so this partnership is virtually certain to also be amazing. Thanks for the heads-up on it (now I need to get to WeRelate.org with expectation of being a routine user).

[Paul Drake JD]

GREAT !! No other word for it :-)