At the beginning of August FamilyLink.com launched its new site WebTree.com
This site provides a free place for you to share, store and manipulate your personal family tree online and all
submissions will also be indexed on WorldVitalRecords.com and remain available at no cost.
This is the statement that I like the best.. directly from their site.
“If you’ll kindly consider contributing your data, know that
WebTree.com is committed to respecting your hard work. Here
is our commitment to you:
* An absolute truth: You own your data. WebTree.com
respects the hard work you’ve put into your family history
and we’re not about to take that away from you. You can
delete your file at any time, no questions asked. Also,
WebTree.com will never sell your data or burn it to CD.
We’re looking to build the most respectful family tree
publishing site on the Internet and it starts with
respecting our users! At any time, should you change your
mind about contributing your data, you can remove it with
just a few clicks.”
For me personally, when I first got started I was appalled when in an attempt to help others I uploaded my gedcom only to have the information I shared copied onto CD’s and SOLD.
Perhaps in my naivety I did not do my due diligence but I like that this site puts it right out there.
I also like that you can upload GEDCOM’s. There are some other public sites out there that are very pretty, but do not allow this making a family tree of 18,000 (which mine is) a bit cumbersome to enter into their sites.
The site also has the ability to embed your tree in your website or blog. Now thats REALLY nice.
The interface is a tad slow, but being a new site I know they probably werent expecting this kind of response so are probably feverishly working on this.
I would encourage you to take a look, do a free search or two and see if this is something that can move your research forward… or just be a fun diversion from all that “tedious” research we all get buried in.
I expect good things to come from this site.
I advise anyone not to post their data on this site. I did post my data and when I tried to remove it all it removed was the contributor’s name. They state you have complete control over your data and can remove it at any time. They have not delivered any of the things they promised fo the site. When I wrote to them this past week I received the following response; “We are replacing our management team and along with that our development team is not yet in place. We’re sorry that
this hasn’t been removed yet as we are getting a new development team. ”
Seems to me some sort of scam is going on and they have received a ton of Genealogical records for free that they ae going to do who knows what with. BEWARE