Top 3 Websites for Building an Awesome Family Tree Online

Building a Family Tree Online Has Never Been Easier

Where to start? One of the first things to do is to decide if you are going to build your tree online, or offline, or on paper. For many people, building a family tree online is best. This gives them a chance to access it wherever they are and utilize all the resources that come from each site. Some sites give you an option to share your family tree with others. Genealogy websites today just make it easier to work on your family tree online and from the comfort of your home. 

Back in the day, family historians had to travel to government offices, libraries, churches, etc to look for historical records by hand. Not anymore. Many records are available online now, making family history research much faster and easier. They would spend hours on the phone tracking down the right office or trying to find where the records were before going there in person. And all the handwritten notes! I don’t know if that has gotten better for all of us, (colorful post-it note lover here), but the websites I am going to tell you about sure make it easier to keep our notes in one place. 

Building a family tree online allows anyone to piece together their family histories, connect with extended family members they may or may not have known about and find a sense of belonging in the big, broad family tree they are building. I feel like it is important for you to know why you are building a family tree online. Is it to organize your research? To share with family members? To leave your research for others? Knowing the answer to these questions will help you to decide where your home base for your family tree online is.

So, here are my top 3 websites I use to do my family tree online and the reasons I use each of them. 

Ancestry is one of the most well known sites out there to build your family tree. Ancestry offers records searches, DNA resources and let’s you build a family tree online that you can attach to your DNA, allowing you to go even further in your research. It’s the first one I used and I use it everyday. They have been rolling out some amazing upgrades lately that are really going to add to the user experience. No one piece of software is ever perfect so I take what I want and leave the rest. I am just grateful there is something like this to do my genealogical research with access to billion of records from over 80 countries, from home!

Here’s a list of pro’s and con’s as I see it. This is just my opinion, you’ll have to find what works best for you as you create your family tree online.

• PRO- extensive collection of: birth, death records, marriage, census, naturalization records, obituaries, military records, passenger list, social security indexes as well as the user provided stories, photos and public trees to refer to. City directories and local records like county histories are becoming a ‘must find’ for me. 
• PRO- DNA Testing with ethnicity results and DNA matches to explore. In program messaging to connect with new relatives.
• PRO- There is a free version that allows you to build your family tree online for free. An Ancestry membership will come in handy when you reach the end of your personal knowledge and need to start searching records and other members family trees to find the clues to move you further down the road. 
• PRO: Most public libraries have Ancestry Library Edition available for FREE! This gives you all the access of a paying member but for free by using your library card. You sign in with your credentials and sign out when you leave. It is your account, not the library’s, you are just borrowing their access letting you work on your family tree online. Ask your local library staff about this. 
  
• CON: Some consider it expensive. I consider it necessary, but I am also as frugal as they come. So I wait for Black Friday to come around and have my husband <wink, wink> buy me a annual subscription for 50% off. I originally got started by using my 30% discount from my AARP membership. Where there is a will, there is a way. I will try and share all the specials as they come along. 
• CON: Everyone has privacy concerns about DNA and public family trees. You have to decide for yourself what feels comfortable. Read the privacy policy and understand how your DNA will be handled. 
• CON: It is overwhelming at first. It is so much information, so fast and when the constant hints are being thrown at you it is easy to make a great big mess and by time you realize it, you’re too overwhelmed to go back and fix it. My suggestion is go slow, remember a hint is just a hint, not a fact so do your due diligence before adding it to your family tree online, remember other people may see it and if it is incorrect it just gets passed on.

FamilySearch is a totally free website to use. It is run by the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Since 1884 the church has dedicated time  and resources to collecting, preserving and sharing original records of genealogical importance. Their reason is simple, they believe that families can be together eternally after this life so they learn everything they can in order to strengthen their relationships with family that is still living as well as those that have passed. If not for them, I cannot imagine the amount of records that would have been lost forever. They had the insight to preserve records from companies, organizations, churches, schools, government offices… and they have done a damn good job of it.

Again, I am appreciative of this incredible resource and time and effort they have put into this. Most recently they finished digitizing their entire collection. Every single record they have! Just because it is digitized doesn’t mean it is indexed, or even available online yet, but it is their intention to do so. Lucky us! Building a family tree online can be an exercise of frustration if you don’t understand the idea behind it.

It is important to understand this website or you will be frustrated. The records are amazing. The interactive activities are amazing. The instruction they offer is amazing. The one stop FamilySearch Wiki is OUT of this world! This is a world tree, in hope of connecting everyone together as one big family. Everybody adds to it. Other than that, FamilySearch is an amazing repository of records, books and knowledge. You do not build your own family tree. You add to a world family tree. The tree is everyone’s. By working on your branch of this world tree, you could eventually link to someone already in the tree and all their people. I consider it a hint, and use those leads before adding the information to my master tree.

• PRO: FREE! This is a totally FREE website! They have an extensive book collection online as well as every kind of record you can imagine: census, birth, death, church, marriage records, military and so much more. Vital records are a standard on the big sites. 
• PRO: The Family Wiki is what sealed it for me. The Family Wiki is often where I start my research. I can look up just about anything and learn about it. It’s important to understand the area where an ancestor was: what records were available, what businesses were in the area, what newspapers were published, where the country seat was, etc… you don’t know what to look for if, you don’t know what to look for. 
• PRO: An online website, apps, a massive FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City( great place, I’ve been there) and over 4000 FamilySearch centers around the world to go and do in person research at. 
• PRO: Educational opportunities like their annual RootsTech convention. AMAZING training for FREE! And fun activities like “Famous relatives” and “Where Am I From’. 
• PRO: There is a lot of information already in this world tree. Always pay attention to prompts that may suggest there is someone similar to the person you are trying to enter. Check them out, and if it is your person, take advantage of all the research that may have already been done. Just remember, everything should be vetted before taking it as fact.
• PRO: They offer a great service. If you have photo albums, books, papers or family documents of genealogical value, they will digitize it for free and provide you a digital copy of everything as well as give you your originals back. And for their trouble they have even more genealogical information to preserve and share for future generations. 
  
• CON: The biggest frustration with this website is that the family tree you build is not your own. It is a world tree meaning we are all related somehow. Everyone contributes and as you start building your family tree online in FamilySearch, your ancestors will connect to other ancestors that someone else entered. You never know if the other researchers are correct, or as meticulous as we are. Another frustration is people don’t check before they enter someone so sometimes there will be 6 records for one name that need to be merged. We can all add to it, edit it, delete, etc… I like to see what someone else has found and then go confirm it myself. 
• CON: Steep learning curve. The family tree is not as user friendly as I like. If I need to edit a record or add a record, I usually have to go watch a video on it so I do it right. 
• CON: I find it harder to collaborate with newfound relatives. I do most of my collaboration during their annual convention when they release a feature called Relatives at Rootstech. If you have a FamilySearch account, check out this amazing resource of learning and education.

MyHeritage has earned a special place in my heart. At first, I was not a fan! But as I played in it more and l got more comfortable it grew on me. MyHeritage is a great resource if you are looking to your European heritage. They have a more international focus so records from European, Middle Eastern and Jewish family history are pretty amazing.

I have family in Germany that I hadn’t been able to locate much information on prior to their immigrations. MyHeritage had records I hadn’t seen and never would have looked for. Like my great grandfather had 6 grown children he left behind when he came to America with his new, young wife. Those children were never spoken about. I am so grateful for this resource.

• PRO: The Photos! They have some great tools for editing photos. You can upload a photo and clean up the scratches or bends but my favorite? You can upload a black and white photo and colorize it! This really makes photos pop out and you are able to see so many more details. You can also animate photos, but I am not a fan. People love it though. Remember my thought from before, take what you love and leave the rest. I leave the animation where it sits!
• PRO: I really like the Printing Charts option. Their family tree charts are a little ‘classier’ than the other 2 I have suggested. Building a family tree online is awesome, but printing it out and seeing it is doubly awesome.
• PRO: DNA features! DNA features! DNA features! MyHeritage allows you to upload your AncestryDNA test results to their platform. They have 2 great features! The Chromosome Browser and Auto Clusters. They are too much to go into right now, but if you know, you know. I’ll do a separate post about them. 
• PRO: Cheaper than Ancestry but not as cheap as FamilySearch. 
  
• CON: Their database of records isn’t as big, but it is different and that’s good!
• CON: I admit, I do have trouble accepting people hints and records hints. For me it is easier if I just add them to my personal family tree manually. This isn’t a bad thing since it lets me have control and proof everything before saving.
• CON: Their search features aren’t as intuitive as I’d like. But they get me where I need to be. 

So there you have it folks. My top 3 websites to build family tree online. Just to put it in perspective so you don’t think you have to go to each website and enter in your entire tree, you don’t. My main tree with 6,000 people is in Ancestry. I downloaded a Gedcom file from Ancestry and uploaded it to MyHeritage. Now that I have done that, I do have to be mindful that if I add something in MyHeritage I have to manually add it to my Ancestry tree. That’s ok for me since I really use MyHeritage for special cases like European record searches. 

There are many other online services offering you an opportunity to build your family tree online. Ultimately you have to find an interface you are comfortable with. You are the one that will be working in it and sharing it with family so take your time, try out the free trials as they come along and make a decision that works for the kind of family researcher you are. I can promise you new discoveries are just a few searches away. 

Happy tree building y’all! 
~MaryK