Monday, 23 August 2010.

Ancestory – Where the past meets the future

It’s finally here! The world’s first fully interactive multi-media family tree builder was launched today by publisher Fore-Word Press Ltd. Designed for the serious genealogists, who want to manage a multitude of documents and media thrown up by their family history research, in a simple traditional family tree structure.

But the story doesn’t end there. What about the people who just want to have fun telling fictional stories using social networking sites and sharing their trees with others? Well, Ancestory is equally as useful to you. With full integration with all major social networks, Facebook, Bebo, Flikr, Twitter, AIM etc. You can construct fictitious characters, tell stories, add documents, videos, audio or pictures and share to your hearts content.

We at Ancestory recognise the limitations of other family tree builders and as such, we have added as many cool features as possible, to make your experience useful, fun and truly interactive. Integration with Googlemaps allows you to select a place of birth off a world map, rather than a drop down menu, with satellite views as well as map views. You can build as many trees as you want (under the same subscription), you can make your trees private or public, factual or fictitious. If you make your tree public, others can add to it. You can also add to the public trees of others as well.

For compatibility with other sites, if you create a tree in Ancestory, you can export it in a GEDCOM format, which will allow you to upload your data (but not the media) into any GEDCOM compatible site or software. Since we are the first in the world to allow media to be embedded in a family tree, there is no other program on the market that could receive both data and media, so for that reason, we’ve stuck with the GEDCOM standard for optimum compatibility. However, we hope that as others catch up, a new standard will emerge that will allow us to export the media as well but until that time we remain in a class of our own.

We are beta testing Ancestory and welcome comments from subscribers. So currently subscription is free and you can build up to three generations with full interactivity. For the next version of the software we intend to allow infinite family trees. We will let you know when that time comes, so for now just sign up, log on and build away. Ancestory is truly the "where the past meets the future"

©Fore-word Press Ltd 2010.