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.

No more worries about missed anniversaries in your family! If you want, we’ll remind you some days in advance of the anniversary, no matter if it’s a birthday, a wedding anniversary or an obit! You can either set the reminder for a certain degree of relationship or individually in every profile.

Individual reminder:

You can set individual reminders for each profile. To do so, check or uncheck the little box under the birthday, obit or wedding anniversary fields and set the number of days you’d like to be reminded in advance. In the picture below, you see our short profile:

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You will find the same settings in the detailed profile. A person’s data (birthday, date of wedding and, if necessary, obit) can be found directly under the name and next to it a link “Edit”. Here, you can (de)activate the reminder and the number of days in advance you’d like to be reminded, just as in the short profile.

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In the “Settings” under “Reminder” you can set general reminders for all persons that have a degree of relationship that you determine. The green slider lets you set the degree of relationship:

1. (Mother, brother, son…)

2. (Grandma, uncle, grandson…)

3. (Great grandmother, grandnephew, cousin…)

4. (Great great aunt, second-degree niece…).

(Click image to enlarge…)

 Within the next few weeks, we’re going to add another option to the existing reminders: a reminder for unmarried couples’ anniversaries.

Yes, you’re right. It’s been there already, but some usability tests have shown that it has been too hard to find: The Navigator.

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From now on, you will find this extremely helpful tool directly below your tree. You can enter first, last, second or maiden names, possible results will show up as you type. Click on the result you are looking for to move the tree automatically to the profile.

The “Navigator” icon still leads to the little map of your family tree for quick movement within your tree. As usual, a click on the little “x” will make it disappear.

In your account’s “Settings”, you can set what information can be found with the search function. Now, we’ve revised this option and added the photo options:

You can now set in your privacy settings who may see your photo albums, your favourites and the photos you’re tagged in.

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As you already know, on itsourtree.com you can search the entire worldwide data base for names and, if they allow it, contact the people you found. This way, you might find out about relatives you didn’t know about, come to know ancestors or branches of your family tree you suspected to exist but did not know where and when.

If you’re looking for relatives to expand your family tree, you will probably not want to search our database for everyone with your surname but only for living people. Our constantly growing data base may turn up with too many results, so we added a feature that lets you choose between “All persons” and “Living persons”.

We’ve added two more tooltips to the site to help new and unexperienced users. The tooltips are shown when you touch the question mark with your mouse cursor:

The first tooltip explains the birth order of siblings. You can either set the birth order for every profile or enter the date of birth. Then, the birth order will be determined automatically.

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The second tooltip helps with cycle relationships and gives examples of the phenomenon.

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To some ears, Chinese names might still sound a little strange. But for most of us, the original way of writing them probably is a much greater problem, at least on internet sites where system fonts are not supported… If you’ ve got relatives from China and want to add their names correctly, you can now use the new setting “use system fonts” in the tree’s preferences under “Name format”.

Enabling this action will change the display of your relatives’ names slightly, but you will be able to insert for example Chinese letters as well. Of course, you can also print your tree with the system fonts, too.

Most of you already know the partnership icon that is displayed on the connecting lines between the profiles. You can (de)activate them in the tree’s settings under “Node style”.

 The three existing icons “married couple”, “ex married couple” and partners…

 have been complemented by another: Ex-partners (non-married couples) are marked by the following icon:

From now on, itsourtree.com supports Adobe Flash Player 9 only. The latest version allows us to print the tree, use the navigator feature and to add cycle relationships to the family tree. Most of you already use it anyway, but for those who cannot enter their tree: Here’s the solution. You need to update your Flash Player to the latest version and don’t worry, it’s easy. Simply click on the image below:

 Some users (especially those who still use Internet Explorer 6) may encounter difficulties with the installation. In this case, it will probably help to deinstall the existing Adobe Flash Player before installing the new one. To do so, choose “Adobe Flash Player X” in the Windows control panel under “Software“. Afterwards, you install the latest version.

To check the Flash Player version on your system, please click here.

We recommend the latest version of Mozilla Firefox  or Microsoft Internet Explorer for a perfect view on your family tree.

For all the poor guys who had lived without itsourtree.com until recently but want to know more about it (the “nOObs“), we offer some first-aid-basic-tips. All those who log in for the first time see the balloontips automatically. When logging in again, you will have to click on the following icon to see the balloontips again.

 You will get information on the photo upload and the message system, help with changing a person’s parents as well as links to this blog and the forum and much more.