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Onegreatfamily.com Review: Genealogy Sites |
| Sign up for Onegreatfamily.com | |
Rating: |
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| Inexpensive, can yield far-reaching results but limited archives means you need a good bit of family history to start | |
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OneGreatFamily.com's goal is to build one, giant family tree for all of humanity. It's an ambitious aim for a website. Most genealogy sites just want to help you create a family tree for your family.
The differences between OneGreatFamily.com and Ancestry.com are vast, and it's clear why there's such a big price differential. While Ancestry.com leverages a gigantic database of public records from all over the world as well as the genealogical connections put together by its members, OneGreatFamily primarily uses the latter, and it requires much more work. Those who already have fairly complete genealogical data for at least 17 other family members will benefit the most. If your family tree is a bit of a mystery already (say, more of a gnarled old oak tree than a straight, tall pine), you'll be lost. There just aren't enough tools. The main interface consists of a family tree, with male and female members represented by Michaelangelo's David and Venus De Milo, outfitted in modest bathing suits. If you're not into mating the Roman goddess of love with the Judeo-Christian giant slayer, you can upload your own photos to represent family members. As with all genealogy sites you can upload a GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunication) created by another service (in our case, from Ancestry.com). The first time we tried it, it got stuck. A subsequent try worked, however, and suddenly we saw the benefits of OneGreatFamily. We found ourselves linked back to Egyptian Pharaohs. We saw births and deaths in six different countries. It's actually pretty staggering, if not completely useful for the purposes of building a family tree. In fact, it felt like information overload. While interesting from a long-term historical view, it didn't answer many questions about more immediate family relationships, say those from the last two centuries. It also only really followed the line of one of our ancestors. And since we didn't build the relationships ourselves, we felt like we just had to take the site's word for it. We're not experts in genetic statistics but, while it seems cool to find out you're related to Egyptian royalty, it's probably true for most of the population. And it's not as if you'll inherit a pyramid for it either. These are some of the novel features located in the Dashboard. There's other fun stuff too, including some interesting statistical analysis of ages and names in your family. There's a famous person relationship calculator too. However, you have to select each famous person individually for the site to calculate the lineage. It requires a bit of number crunching from their databases, so we quickly gave up on trying to find out if we were related to Ronald Reagan. There's a downloadable application for managing your family tree too, but it looks like it came from 1998 (and it doesn't work on Macs). Unfortunately, it's necessary to use it for many functions, particularly for resolving conflicts (of the data variety, not the family variety). The integration with the website is rather poor and the performance is altogether slow and unintuitive. There are a number of small buttons and odd icons one needs to figure out. Onegreatfamily.com is certainly cheaper than many of its competitors, but it's a bit disappointing after working with Ancestry.com. If you're lucky, and someone else's family intersects with yours, you'll get something out of it. But it's just not as fun nor as informative as its better-known competitors. Sign up for Onegreatfamily.com | Compare to Other Genealogy Services |
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| Price: | Free 7-day trial; $14.95/mo; $29.95/ 3 mos; $79.95/yr |
| Features: | Family tree builder; limited public records; integration with other users' family trees; statistics; famous relative analysis |
| Resources: | Social Security death index; other users' family trees |
| Customer Support: | Phone; email |
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