2010-12-18 Ancestory
multimedia family tree builder
beta
Ancestory is yet another website for building your family tree online. It is still in
Beta and the home page counter shows that it has had about a thousand visits so
far. However, that Bet status did not deter Fore-Word Press from issueing a press release
that bills Ancestory as
the worlds's first fully interactive multi-media family tree builder:
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.
Well, if the site is good enough for such grandiose marketing claims, then it is certainly good a enough for a quick review…
serious
Fore-word Press (Malik Al Nasir) claims that Ancestory was designed for the serious genealogist
.
When you claim to have a new product for serious genealogist but make yet
another traditional genealogy application instead of a scientific genealogy
application, you no longer strike me as entirely convincing.
The above quote is merely the one paragraph of the epic Ancestory press release.
The second paragraph explains that genealogy need not be restricted to facts at all:
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.
When you go on about people who just want to have fun telling fictional stories using social networking sites
I have to wonder whether you grasp that even traditional genealogists,
desipte their confused notion of what constitutes proof, search for facts, not fiction.
Still, the idea that your genealogy application is fully integrated with social networks is mildly intruiging.
limitations
The press release for Ancestory explains that you need Ancestory because of the limitations of other genealogy applications:
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.
GEDCOM
Fore-word Press seems convinced that Ancestory is the first and only genealogy application to support multi-media in family trees, and is therefore in a class of its own. They support GEDCOM output, but leave out the multimedia, because other products don't support it anyway:
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.
signing up
To use it, you need to register. Ancestory is a subscription service, but it while it is still in Beta, access is free.
Registration proceed smoothly. I quickly received a email that asked me to activate my new account. Activation worked fine, and I was able to log in. When I logged in, I immediately noticed that they took integration with social media serious: it immediately showed my avatar and location, presumably taken from gravatar.com.
trees
There are public and private trees. I started by exploring the public trees. Perhaps unsurprising for a Beta site, many of the public trees have names such as testing
, Test Tree
and my other test tree
.
I clicked on a random tree, and it seemed to appear almost instantly, a strong hint that Ancestory does not use Adobe Flash. I had a quick look at the page source and noticed that Ancestory is not using SVG or HTML5 Canvas either; Ancestory uses nothing but
HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The Ancestory tree code has a severe case of divitus, which isn't likely to do the memory demands of this web app any good. It is possible to collapse the tree, to focus on the Google Map below it, but there is no zoom option. You are apparently expected to scroll left and right as well up and down, no matter how large your tree, and there is no mini-tree that shows which segment of your tree you are viewing right now. The positions of the box are hardcoded in the HTML output. It all makes me wonder whether this web app was ever tested with anything but tiny trees. I doubt it will be able to handle a small tree of a few thousands individuals, let alone a medium sized tree of say 25 thousand individuals.
GEDCOM
You are allowed to export the public trees. The text on the GEDCOM export
page makes me fear the worse; The Gedcom file is written in version 5.5 and can
be exported as an XML or ASCII file format.
. It is hard enough to take a
vendor who doesn't capitalise GEDCOM seriously, but there is no such thing as
XML GEDCOM
and ASCII is GEDCOM's worst possible character set.
0 HEAD
1 SOUR ANCESTORY
2 VERS V0.9
2 CORP Fore Word Press Ltd
1 DEST USER
1 DATE 18 DEC 2010
1 FILE Production Database
1 GEDC
2 VERS 5.01
1 CHAR ASCII
ASCII GEDCOM
| out | encoding |
|---|---|
| Y | ASCII |
| N | ANSEL |
| N | UTF-8 |
| N | UTF-16 |
I tried both the ASCII GEDCOM
and XML GEDCOM
export options.
The ASCII GEDCOM output seemed to appear immediately, but that says little about
performance of the web app; with a tree so tiny it
should appear immediately.
The inset shows the GEDCOM header. There are several things wrong with
this header, but let's focus on one big issue: it identifies the GEDCOM version
as 5.01. A GEDCOM 5.1 draft exists, but there is no GEDCOM 5.01 specification,
so other applications may and should reject Ancestory files as illegal.
Notice that the header claims the file is in ASCII format, and upon superficial
examination, it seems to be, but that is only because the tree contains nothing
but ASCII characters. So I created a tree with some non-ASCII characters. When I
exported that tree, the GEDCOM file was effectively empty; it contained nothing
but a header. Because Ancestory failed to exportthe individual at all, the claim
in the header that all records are in ASCII isn't false.
XML GEDCOM
<gedcom><HEAD><SOUR>ANCESTORY <VERS>V0.9 </VERS><CORP>Fore Word Press Ltd
</CORP></SOUR><DEST>USER </DEST><DATE>18 DEC 2010 </DATE><FILE>Production
Database </FILE><GEDC><VERS>5.01 </VERS></GEDC><CHAR>ASCII
</CHAR></HEAD><TRLR/></gedcom>
I wondered whether XML GEDCOM
was really FamilySearch GEDCOM XML. Well,
it isn't. It seems to be Michael Kay's GedML; GEDCOM in XML syntax. Well,
illegal GedML to be precise. GedML uses the same tags as GEDCOM does, but
encloses it all in a <GED> open tag and </GED> close tag.
Ancestory's XML GEDCOM
uses <gedcom> and </gedcom> instead.
GedML uses the UTF-8 character encoding. Ancestory's XML GEDCOM
uses ASCII - and once again, the individual whose
name contains non-ASCII characters is missing from the output.
editing
To test the character set support, I had to create a tiny tree - and I was very
surprised to see a refusal to save the individual I had created because There
were problems with the following fields: Birth year Can't be blank
. When
I saw that message I did not feel like exploring any further. That message made
it painfully obvious that this webapp is neither designed for, nor designed
by serious genealogists, or in fact by any kind of genealogist at all. The
Ancestory press release claims are fiction.
links
- Ancestory
- Ancestory: news
- gravatar.com
- A Hurried Introduction to Scientific Genealogy
- Medium Size Genealogy
- GEDCOM Alternatives
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.