The success of the legendary Jackson 5 probably led to the Jackson family’s status as most famous family of musicians in the world. We would like to dedicate a family tree to the Jacksons after the passing of the King of Pop – Michael Jackson.

We now need your help for creating the family tree: expand the tree with your knowledge about the Jacksons, and enter all the information you have on Joseph, Janet, Michael, and all other Jacksons, directly into the family tree at dynastree.com. You can login to view and edit the tree with the email-address jacko@dynastree.com, and the password “michael”. So let’s get going: http://wwww.dynastree.com/login!

Please note that the tree’s language is German per default, you can of course set it to English (or to another language) using the dropdown-menu in the lower right corner.

Three different newspapers in the United States recently featured dynastree.com and our Russian version, semyaonline.ru! The newspapers, Russian Kaleidoscope (published in IL, MN, WI), Kontinent West (Mountain and Pacific States), and Russian Accent (Midwest), target Russian Americans and are published in Russian. You might have come across one of the articles that were published in the print versions of the newspapers. One article was also featured online. Give it a try if you speak Russian!

Don’t worry if your tree looks like this at the moment:

No data is lost, we are experiencing some technical problems at the moment, but your tree is still there. Note that the number of persons in your tree (displayed at the top) is still correct, you can also still access each relative by seraching for his or her name. Our developers are working on the problem, please excuse the inconvenience! We will let you know once the problems have been solved.

We are proud to point out that dynastree’s German version, verwandt.de (the first one, launched in 2007), is listed on Techcrunch’s Top 100  “of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies”! 37 points have been reached, which places us on rank 68!

See the full Top 100 here! (You might want to try different browsers, some had difficulties accessing the site.)

Today’s blog takes us to Japan, it will briefly touch the fascinating topic of Shintoism, Japan’s most important religion.

Shintoism dates back to the 6th century, and almost 120 million people believe in it. It can be translated as “The Way of the Gods” and is genuinely Japanese, it was even Japan’s official state religion, until 1945. So, what does it have to do with genealogy? Shintoism means worshipping one’s ancestors, whose spirits are believed to remain around the living after death. What might seem spooky to us is part of daily life for Shintoists, as the living have to pay their respect to the dead and honor them – to prevent the ancestors from interfering with the fate and future of the living.

Genealogy is thus very important for Shintoists, as they have to know about even distant, century-old ancestors in order to be able to honor them. This is not only important for the prosperity of the immediate family, but also for that of the community.

When speaking of ancestors, one has to bear in mind that Shintoists do not really regard them as dead, but as spirits among the living, and their contentment has to be ensured so that they will guard the homes of the living. This system of beliefs does not only concern the ancestors, but also one’s own parents. Paying respect to them, being grateful and obedient is also very important; this is called “filial piety”.

You can win a premium subscription (duration: 3 months)! Enjoy our premium features, such as: extended statistics, a premium family page, and automated search for profiles that match yours! A free PDF of your tree is of course also included.

All you have to do is answer the following question: how many profiles does the family tree with the most profiles on dynastree contain? Whoever comes closest to the actual number wins! Post your guess as a comment.

**Update**
Sorry folks, there was a lot going on yesterday! Anyway, we have a winner now! Congratulations to Dan Levold! Please contact us!

Today, we would like to introduce a feature we recently added: more details about one’s wedding. You can now not only enter the date, place, and details of your (church) wedding ceremony, but also those of your civil wedding (in the section labeled “Register Office).

In order to do so, click on the person’s profile card in your family tree, then on “Details”, and on “Edit my data” on the left:

Details of the civil wedding (click on the image to enlarge it):

Details of the wedding ceremony (click on the image to enlarge it):

Rate the new extended search function!

Our surname map is widely spread by now, many websites and blogs have adapted it. Many have not only integrated an image of their surname map, but also made use of our surname map widget. This lets visitors search for further surnames without having to leave the original website. We now updated the widget for the popular blog software “WordPress” and also equipped it with more features.

We now updated the widget for the popular blog software “WordPress” and equipped it with more features.

• Installation file for WordPress: Zip file (please refer to the readme file for instructions)

• Explaining widgets: Wikipedia article

You can choose from the different countries for which we support maps directly from your blog’s admin area after installing it.

The widget also automatically recognizes the language set in the blog, this for example lets you integrate a Spanish surname map into an English-language blog, yet all text will be displayed in English.