FamilySearch Community Trees

FamilySearch Labs added something new today: FamilySearch Community Trees.

As the site says, "Ever wish you could reconstruct the families that lived in your ancestral village in the 1750s? FamilySearch works with individuals and groups with the expertise to piece together the families that lived together historically in a community. We’re experimenting with ways to make these richly-sourced lineage-linked trees more available and expand the number of people helping with this effort. Check it out and tell us what you think.

"Community Trees are lineage-linked genealogies from specific time periods and geographic localities around the world. The information also includes the supporting sources. Most of the genealogies are joint projects between FamilySearch and others who live locally or have expertise in the area or records used to create the genealogies. Each Community Tree is a searchable database with views of individuals, families, ancestors and descendants, as well as printing options.

"The scope of partner projects may be a small, grass roots village or township working together to form a family tree of all the known residents of its community for a given time period. Some are genealogical and historical societies working with FamilySearch to index several sources of data to link them to common, lineage-linked genealogies of a targeted geographic area of interest.

"The scope could also be focused on a particular record set and locality. The goal may be to identify and reconstitute all families of a particular place from a village, county, or even a country. Many of the current projects were produced by FamilySearch's Family Reconstitution team and date back to the medieval times. One even has the audio of the oral genealogies attached.

"GEDCOM downloads of the community trees may be available depending on any records access restrictions. No living information is available in this public view. Edits and corrections to these databases are usually restricted by the partners, but please contact them to offer suggestions, corrections and new information. Some partners may have additional information or enhanced versions of the genealogies on their own website. These databases will be updated if they are a work in progress."

Comment by Dick Eastman: This is a great project! However, don't forget that you are looking at test software. It is almost guaranteed to have a few bugs. The reason for opening it up now is to ask the public to help identify those bugs.

You can learn more at http://histfam.familysearch.org/ and also at http://histfam.familysearch.org/learnmore.php.

Comments

[Lee Drew]

Nice to see that the site is powered by Darrin Lythgoe's TNG (The Next Generation) software. That will make the project work well indeed.

[Adrian B]

How interesting - they're using TNG for the base software - it's more complex than the rest of FamilySearch stuff but a lot more powerful. And not Flash! Must be a feather in the cap of Darrin Lythgoe.

[Chagoi]

Incredible! First impressions are that the site is easy to navigate and the Ancestors/Descendants charts are well laid out.

I've just downloaded Gedcoms covering 20+ generations of one of my direct lines, and they include the source citations which are SO important.

Definitely a thumbs-up!

[Roger Moffat]

Yes it's using TNG - a great product, although I do wonder how well it will scale as the record count gets seriously high - right now it's 1,177,487 individuals, and things that affect the whole database, like listing surnames, places take a wee while at the moment.

Kudos to Darrin Lythgoe!!

[Bebe Brovk]

Sounds interesting, If you went up and down my village main street in the mid 1800's almost every one was related.
Bebe B.

[lautsprecherkabel]

I like the concept of community tree.It is good to find missing informations about our ancestors.By the way,thanks for this article.

[Dae Powell]

Wow!

Happy Dae·

[RickK]

I've been working with some people to record a cemetery in my home town. As we have progressed I've noticed how "connected" the families are and have though about building a TNG site for the cemetery. This is good news.

[LarryN the LibraryN]

I have been trying to get this going here, since back when I had hair! Great to see that this is underway.

[Leah Hammer]

Would be nice if the common folk in the European villages were included or other parts of the US.

[Taneya]

Such great news for Darrin! TNG is an incredible product. I've been a user for more than 3 years now.

[Alice McCabe]

What does TNG stand for?

[Roger Moffat]

TNG = "The Next Generation" of Genealogy Site Building. See http://lythgoes.net/genealogy/software.php It is a set of PHP scripts that create great looking, very customisable webpages from data stored in a set of MySQL tables.

Here's a page on my TNG site - my great great grandfather http://roger.lisaandroger.com/getperson.php?personID=I16&tree=Roger

[usb kabel]

Its a good initiative. I think this will bring revolution to the conventional strategy.

[B.G. Wiehle]

The concept is not a "...revolution to the conventional strategy." (although the interface is impressive).
European genealogy is almost dependent on looking at the whole community [one-place studies] because of similar names and multiple relationships between individuals that developed when people stayed in the same place for generations. There are many published books and websites out there looking at the records from all the families in a single village. The best such site for German genealogy is Online Ortsfamilienbücher at http://www.ortsfamilienbuecher.de/index.html .
Several ethnically-based societies are also working on creating super-databases for their particular interest group. It will be interesting to see how much cooperation develops between these groups and the LDS effort.

[Davine]

Can any of the info at this German genealogy site be translated into English on line at this site? I do wish I could read and speak German.

[Ethel (Ledgerwood) Davis]

I would like to check the Parrish records of the Killinchie Church, Newtowonards, co. downs as my greatgrand parents attended this church.James Alexander Ledgerwood and Elizabeth Wallace I now nothing about his family, parents or siblings. He was born in 1818, married in 1839.
Does anyone have a copy I could read? Also willing to purchase. I understand it is listed as MIC 1P/404 and Kilmood church as MIC 1P/406. They buried two children there in a plot owned by Wm. Ledgerwood, cannot connect him to the family.
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Ethel V. (Ledgerwood) Davis
ETVio@hevanet.com