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One-World Tree Sites

These sites support a single, common, world-wide genealogical tree. Each being a different representation depending on who contributes or works on it. This is as opposed to traditional genealogical help sites that allow each user to upload and maintain their own personal tree. Thus two personal trees may have an entry for the same person and overlap. In a one-world tree, there will only every be a single entry for a given, defined person in history.

A genealogical tree is simply a database of connected individuals via families they belong to. Often further annotated with facts and events which then bring in dates and geographical places. Some term genealogical trees as genealogical databases as they tend to have the same content a traditional, desktop genealogical programs would contain. And often utilize a database underneath. The tree is just one display or projection of that underlying data.

Table of contents:

Ancestry used to have a One-World Tree named product that was simply the collection of all the individual trees uploaded and curated by users. They have since switched to simply offering search across all the individual family trees as part of their records search. And offer hints and genetic ThruLines to indicate merge points of individual trees. In 2019, after suffering an attack, they tried to transform their acquired rootsweb site of individual trees into a merged tree. But it was a miserable failure and they have worked to unwind and make it a collection of individual work again.

Geni was bought by MyHeritage in 2018; thus making MyHeritage have a One-World Tree in addition to individual, member trees. MyHeritage has been on a buying spree of many sites over the past few years to help gain against Ancestrys dominant lead. Geni is working to incorporate DNA record facts similar to WikiTree and others.

FamilySearch is still purely a genealogical study, records and resource site with no support for genetic genealogy (yet). Most other one-world tree sites support genetic genealogy in the sense they propagate tagged, tested individuals to indicate who another individual may likely match.

WikiTree has grown at a phenomenal rate. They provide best-in-class support for tagging and propagating DNA records. They have cross links with GEDMatch and mitoYdna to help support those efforts.

It becomes difficult to remove your submitted content on such a shared site. And even more difficult to get incorrect content corrected due to rogue users that always seem to exist and insist they know better.