As our goal is to bring families closer together, we’ve got a new feature for you: You can now send messages directly by clicking on the little green envelope button in an active person’s profile in the tree.

Additionally, this little marker on the profiles shows you which profiles are active and which not. The ability to send messages to all your relatives without having to know all the email addresses makes your tree a powerful communication tool. So, the more relatives you invite the better…

By the way: the button can also be found in the active person’s profile.

…you will probably want to use one of our avatars to fill the gap in your ancestor’s profile. As previously reported, we’re constantly adding new avatars to our collection and you can add them to your relatives’ profiles with a click on “Edit portrait” in the person’s detailed profile. For your convenience, you can now add an avatar picture as portrait image directly from the photo upload window in your family tree. Simply click on “Choose avatar” to get to the avatar collection directly.

Today’s feature description is especially helpful for users with a large family tree and thus with a lot of different surnames in the tree.

A click on “Names” in the menu “My Tree” takes you to a list of all surnames in your family tree. The list is in alphabetical order and clicking on a surname shows a family list of all members of your family tree with the surname.

To make it easier to create your family tree, you can add a lot of data right at the creation of a profile. With a click on “more”, you will see additional fields of input. When you uncheck the box “Alive”,  you can even add the date of death directly.

If your growing your family tree quickly, you will probably know the problem: you need more space on the screen for your tree!

When you click on “Full screen”, all you see is your family tree, the header and footer are not displayed. A click on “Normal view” will take you back to the usual view of itsourtree.com.

To show your relatives if you’re online or not, you can enter your account data of one (or more) of the various messengers that we support (ICQ, Skype, AIM…). The little icon (online/offline) will show your relatives your online status.

Most of these messenger services have disabled this feature by default and you have to enable it before your status becomes visible to your relatives. On Skype for example, you can change this setting like this >>.

Have you tried the alternative way to display your family tree? Apart from the classic style, you can look at your family in an ancestor circle. You find the icon to switch to this display method in the lower right corner of your tree.

In this view, the next relatives (max. 5 generations) are displayed. When you click on another person in the circle, the circle will be reloaded and then displayed from this person’s view.

Of course, the circle can be printed as well. Here, you can choose between printing empty (grey) nodes or not. With the slider to the left you set the number of pages your circle is to be printed on.

Currently, you can choose between eight different language versions for your family tree and we’re still expanding. With these languages we should be able to cater for a large part of your family.

If your relatives come from other countries or have another mother tongue, you can invite them in their language directly after entering the email address for the invitation. Whereever you enter a person’s email address, you can choose from all our language versions by using the drop down box next to the address field. With a click on “invite” an email in the appropriate language will be sent.

Start learning foreign languages now on parentistretti.it, meusparentes.com.pt (or meusparentes.com.br), verwant.nl, verwandt.de, familleunie.fr, moikrewni.pl, miparentela.com.

A vCard is an electronic business card that you can save in your email client with a mouseclick. Furthermore, you can use vCards in mobile phones or PDAs or send them by email. The data saved in a vCard can be business and private addresses, websites, telephone numbers and much more. It’s a pretty neat way to manage your contact data!

That is why we added a feature that lets you export your family’s contact data as vCard as well. In the profile, you can click on “Export as vCard” to download the person’s contact data in vCard format.

When starting a family tree, the “newbie” sees a help window for the first steps. If you would like to see it again, simply click on the info-icon in the lower right corner of your tree window.

The baloontips explain all the basic things to do when you’re new to Itsourtree.com: How to invite relatives and friends, how to export the tree to a GEDCOM file, how to move the tree and so on and so forth…

You can navigate between the entries by clicking “Back” and “Next“, to close the window click on the little “x” in the corner.
If you need more help or further details, please have a look at our Help section.