*UPDATE*: The voting still continues, and although the book is no longer available, please continue voting for us if you think we deserve to win!
The German magazine Internet World Business is looking for the best Internet Idea 2008 and our German "mothership" site verwandt.de is among the nominees! Now it’s upon you, the users, to click >>>here<<< to vote for us.
To make the data backup and editing of your family tree more comfortable, we developed a free software – the itsourtree.com HOME EDITION!
You simply install the program on your PC and start opening and editing your GEDCOM-data*. So just export your family tree and open it with your HOME EDITION. Or you create your family tree with the use of HOME EDITION and import it to itsourtree.com. For information on how to import or export a family tree click here.
The itsourtree.com HOME EDITION features:
(*) GEDCOM (acronym: GEnealogical Data COMmunication) is a frequent file format in genealogy (file ending: .ged) to save the persons’ data of a family tree and their family relationships. By means of GEDCOM interfaces, data can be exchanged between genealogy software applications. A GEDCOM file consists of simple text lines where the genealogical information is stored. The latest version is GEDCOM format 6.0 that has been introduced on Dec. 6th, 2002 and since then has been in use without any further changes. To backup your genealogical data and to edit your family tree on your PC, we recommend using our software itsourtree.com Home Edition.
You’d like to modify the birth order on the site? Unfortunately there have always been problems with the order of birth and therefore we’ve optimized this feature. To sort the brothers/sisters in the correct order, just select the profile of the person in position where she was born. When children are added for the first time, they will be sorted according to the order of integration, namely the child that was added for the first time is the number one and so on. 
You’ve probably noticed our new navigation (any comments? Let the world know in the forum!). The new structure is topic-oriented ("Family", "Genealogy") instead of focusing on the functions ("Messages", "Photos").
The new menu items in detail:
HOMEPAGE
Here, everyone can personalize whether he wants to start with the Overview or the Family tree.
MY PROFILE
This is all about you: the Personal profile, the Calendar, your Messages, your Friends and the Invitations.
MY FAMILY
Features that concern all people in your family tree such as the Family list, the Map, the Name index and the Photos.
GENEALOGY
Here, you find features that can help you with your genealogical research: the Infocentre, the Forum and the Search function.
In most some cases, the first marriage partner is not the one you’re growing old with. To be able to distinguish between different relationships in the family tree, we’re showing the connecting lines in different colours. The first marriage is represented by a black line, the second by a green one and so on.
(Click image to enlarge)
Please note that this depends on the perspective. For the husband, it may be the second marriage, while it is the first marriage for the wife. In these cases, we show the appropriate colour for every partner. From the husband’s profile, the line is green as it is his second marriage and from the wife’s it’s black as it is her first marriage.
(Click image to enlarge)
With our new invitation tool (“My profile” –> “Invite“) you can organize sent or received invitations and send several invitations (relatives and friends) at a time.
Under “Received” you find all the invitations you received. Every invitation can be accepted or declined separately. Under “Sent” we’ve stored all family and friends invitations you’ve sent. With the invitation tool, you now have a perfect overview of all invitations, you can resend invitations and – soon – delete invitations.
(Click to enlarge image…)
Since today it is possible on itsourtree.com to invite relatives with custom texts from the tree or your profile. Imagine a relative of yours is very suspicious of any unknown mail sender. That is why you should add a custom text to the invitation so that he knows that it was you who invited him. Just go to the profile of the person you want to invite, insert the e-mail, check the “Your text” checkbox and write the text you want.
If you do not have the patience or time to write a personal invitation, you can still use the standard invitation, of course. To do so, simply leave the “Your text” checkbox unchecked and we’ll send the standard invitation for you. As always, you can select the language you want to send the invitation.
When you’re researching in your family’s past, you might come across some fragmentary information like persons whose gender is not named. An example is an obituary notice with information like “He is survived by his brother John and his 4 children.” For these cases, we’ve added an “Unknown” option for every person’s gender.
Profiles marked as “Unknown” appear in grey in the family tree:
Today, we’ve started a new section of itsourtree.com: The Infocentre. From now on, we will regularly add genealogical information to several categories of different genealogy issues. And you can help us, too! If you would like to contribute to the Infocentre, if you’ve got any remarks, suggestions or even articles you would like us to publish here, please email us to info@itsourtree.com.
As this site is for you, the users, we decided to ask you for your participation in the development of itsourtree.com on a regular basis. That is why the polls that you found here from time to time have been moved and enhanced. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, it won’t take long and it won’t be complicated.
From now on, you will be asked for your opinion in a fresh poll every week. Where? In your “Home” page, below the calendar. Whenever you’ve got a second, please participate, this is your chance to improve the site the way you want it to be! For starters, we reopened last week’s poll about the source of your appetite for genealogy.
