Anyone recommend a genealogy site?

[andrewducker]

I currently have a wodge of data up on geni.com, tracing back my family for a few generations.

Sadly, I've gone over 100 people in my family tree, and Geni now want users to pay for their service. Not unreasonable, but I'm not willing to pay $5.00 per month for something I don't actually use that much. I'd happily pay $10/year though.

Any recommendations? I don't want much out of it - just a place to store a family tree with simple editing tools for adding more info and bringing it up to date when necessary.

Comments

[peoppenheimer]

Storage you can do anywhere; Dropbox, for example.

As for simple editing tools, can you say a bit more about the sorts of edits you want to be able to do?

[makyo.livejournal.com]

Not sure if this is the sort of thing you're looking for, but I use gramps to manage the data, sources etc, and get it to generate a website which I host on my own webserver. It'll also output in GEDCOM format too, which some sites (genesreunited.co.uk and probably ancestry.{com,co.uk}) will happily import.

[andrewducker]

Cheers. Nice piece of software. If it produced a pretty tree picture with everyone in it then I'd go for it in a shot!

[makyo.livejournal.com]

The ability to generate a pretty family tree diagram would be really useful, and it's about the only thing I really want gramps to do that it doesn't already do. It can generate ancestor and descendant charts and a few other things like that, but not a full family tree diagram as far as I've been able to tell.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

er Andy, remind me again what you do for a living? :-)

[andrewducker]

Something that sucks up large amounts of my time, and leaves very little free for me to write software for fun things?

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I used to use geneanet, but no idea if there's a limit on people.

[andrewducker]

Doesn't look that way.

The interface isn't so nice, but it seems to work reasonably well. Thanks!

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if it's worth contacting Geni to say: 'This is too much for me to justify paying; do you have another payment package for my type of usage, such as, say, $10/year?'

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Feorag's busy right now (Pride in Glasgow) but you could do worse than email her about her experiences of Ancestry.com, which she's using extensively.

[andrewducker]

Cheers! As it happens I'm just taking a look at Ancestry.co.uk (which seems to be the same people) and it looks pretty good. They do the family tree for free, and then charge for the searches, which seems very reasonable.

Could you drop her email address to andrew@ducker.org.uk? Thanks!

[makyo.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I have a subscription to ancestry.co.uk and I find it very useful - they have all the England and Wales census returns from 1841-1911, plus all of the UK BMD indices from 1837-2005 and a bunch of other useful record sets. Now that I think about it, they also have a family tree database thing where you can either upload a GEDCOM file or input everything by hand, but I've not really made very much use of that.

It's a little bit pricey, but worth the money considering the record sets you get access to.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - and I figure I can always subscribe for a month or two to check out the data.

Only 1841?

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

My family left England a wee bit earlier...

Re: Only 1841?

[makyo.livejournal.com]

There were UK censuses in 1801, 1811, 1821 and 1831 as well, but they were essentially just head-counts of the population, and didn't record any information about individual people. The 1841 census was the first one to actually include names, ages and addresses of individual people.

It gets a bit more difficult (but not impossible) to go much further back than the early 19th century - civil registration began in 1837 and the useful censuses began in 1841. You have to rely on things like parish registers, not all of which have survived or been transcribed. If your ancestors were wealthy they might turn up in property or probate records, depending on when they emigrated.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

I don't have any recommendations, I just wanted to say that I initially *totally* misread the title of the post.

That is all.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

You are DEFINITELY middleaged if you are already into the whole family tree thing. :-)

[andrewducker]

Oh, I got this set up _ages_ ago, because my uncle was doing it, and I took it all and stuck it online for him.

It didn't take very long, and was kinda fun. Now that I have a Julie, my geek/collector instinct insists that I add her, and at least her parents/grandparents into it.