I live on a fixed income so I need free. 17 years ago I put my tree online at Tribal Pages. The thing I like most is it’s your tree. There is no merging duplicates. There is no co-managing with people who may or may not be related to you. If you decide to delete your tree you can do so with a click of a button. You don’t have to worry about being banned & blocked from your own tree for doing so.
But since I need free I couldn’t have made it private even if they had the option. So within no time total strangers were contacting me either wanting to join my tree or send me info & pics on their branch to add to my collection. I didn’t have a collection ’til people started sending me things I didn’t request. And what to do with all this stuff? I didn’t want it left in my email’s inbox or worse – on my computer’s hard drive taking up space. It needed to be uploaded somewhere public to do everybody some good. Unfortunately, free means limited so I couldn’t upload these things to my tree.
It would be awesome if someone would create a combination between a tree site like Ancestry, a social networking site like Facebook & a memorial site like Find A Grave all rolled up into one software that you could upload to your own server. We need a tree, profiles for the living & memorials for the deceased. We also need the profiles to have real names for the tree of course but we should be able to use usernames for the public parts of the site like blogs, forums & groups. We need the memorials to have a way where even friends can upload pics, vids & audio recordings. We need either a light a candle or leave a virtual gift feature. We need a share a memory or leave a note feature. We need the blog to share stories & recipes. We need the forums & groups to work on the tree together plus attract more family.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing like this yet. I can’t even find anything like this online. So I’ve broken things down into sections. I got my tree at Tribal Pages. You could also check out RootsFinder. If you don’t mind shared trees, you could check out FamilySearch. I’d avoid Geni.com like the plague.
The only thing I keep at Tribal Pages are stats. Then I link to Find A Grave memorials in the short individuals notes section they have for people. At Find A Grave anybody can request an edit, request a bio or obit be added, upload a pic, or post a note. As for the blog I have a WordPress site. Others could join & add to it. We also have a forum & although the forum has groups we also have Facebook groups.
