Reviews

Bottom Line Up Front

FamilySearch Family Tree (FSFT) is the largest free shared family tree website with 1.2 billion profiles (not all unique). This compares to 20 million profiles at WikiTree and 3 million at WeRelate. Geni.com, a “freemium” website, contains 131 million profiles. So FSFT has the potential to be a great option for those who want to work on a collaborative family tree. It contains all the tools necessary for good family tree building: access to a plethora of free historical records and indexes and the ability to attach them as sources; automatic record searching and duplicate profile detection; the ability to add notes and discussions and various media files; an extensive help center with information on how to use FSFT, search for records, and do genealogy research. Unfortunately, FSFT contains key flaws that prevent me from recommending that people contribute to it: a lack of moderation of disputes, difficulty attaching source citations, and lack of safeguards when merging profiles of people.