2015-12-31 GeneAwards 2015

Best of 2015

2015

Genealogy 2015 provide an overview of the year's technologies, events, companies, products & services, and highlights a few trends. This year, Best New Genealogy Product is actually Best New Genealogy Service. There are quite a few honourable and dishonourable mentions. Worst New Genealogy Organisation has not been awarded this year.
Here, without further ado, are the GeneAwards 2015.

Best Genealogy Product of 2015: RootsMagic 7

I hate to say that RootsMagic is still the overall best genealogy application. I hate to say that, because I'd like to see some other vendors close the gap and give them some serious competition.

RootsMagic users may feel somewhat disappointed by 2015; there were some updates this year, to both the desktop application and the mobile apps, but no major upgrades, and the long-promised native RootsMagic for Mac remains in development.
This is a Good Thing; software should be released when its done, and no sooner.

Ancestry.com's announcement of the discontinuation of New Family Tree Maker sparked many special offers. RootsMagic was not only one of the first companies to make such an offer, but has already released two RootsMagic updates focused on improving its ability to import New Family Tree Maker GEDCOM files. The improvements are partly in response to Keith Riggle's discussion of FTM GEDCOM import issues in his Replacing Family Tree Maker series.
This timely focus on FTM GEDCOM import issues is the right focus; RootsMagic is doing exactly what a genealogy software vendor should be doing right now.

Heredis is now available on both Windows and Mac OS X, with apps for both Apple iOS and Google Android.

honourable mention: Heredis 2015

BSD Concept introduced Heredis 2015, a major upgrade to Heredis 2014; improvements include shared events, searching the web from within the application, with contextual search that fills in data you already have. and integrated photo editing tools, that let you associate tree profiles with people in photos.
Late in December, BSD Concept silently released the first Beta of Heredis for Android. I can't tell much about that Hereids app other than that I understand why they released it silently; Google play tells me This app is incompatible with all of your devices, which is odd; this is indeed a Beta product.
However, with that Beta release, Heredis is now available on both Windows and Mac OS X, with apps for both Apple iOS and Google Android.

Heredis is not just pretty looking program with a modern interface. It is a multi-platform program complete with sync between these platforms that does not require you to upload your data to a third party.
Heredis is not without quirks and shortcomings, but continues to improve. It may become a serious challenger to RootsMagic if BSD Concept listens to feedback from international customers and groks that really going beyond French borders involves more than a quick translation into English.

honourable mention: Progeny Charting Companion

Progeny Charting Companion is a desktop application for creating genealogy charts. The application itself feels somewhat dated, but Progeny manages to keep expanding its feature set.
In 2011, they added the ability to export a chart to the Dynamic STitching Format (DST), a de-facto industry standard for embroidering machines.
This year, Progeny introduced export to Rich Text Format (RTF), two new chart types (Fractal Tree and Dandelion Chart), and export to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).
Progeny Charting Companion is not the first genealogy application to allow export to SVG, the free open-source genealogy application GenealogyJ has supported SVG output for years. Progeny Charting Companion does seem to be the first charting application to support it.
The SVG format is not only ideal for publishing your chart on the web, but also allows you to import it into a vector graphics program such as InkScape, Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw for editing.

Best New Genealogy Service of 2015: Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness

Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness is web site where volunteers provide free services. The new Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness (RAOGK) site started early this year is actually a reboot. Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness was originally started back 1in 1999 by Bridgett & Doc Schneider. In October 2011, the list of volunteers was lost in a computer crash, and it was announced that the site would be temporarily offline, but then Bridgett Schneider passed away on 2011 Nov 12. Since the demise of RAOGK, genealogists continued to help each other A facebook group a wiki. Alternative volunteer sites Gen Gathering and Generous Genealogists were formed. After the domain expired, it was initially held hostage by a cybersquatter, but after three years Brian Nichols of Genealogy Inc acquired it, and created the new RAOGK.

Best Genealogy Organisation of 2015: MyHeritage

While Ancestry.com went out of its way to upset its users, MyHeritage tried to make its users happy. In January, they introduced Family Tree Maker Mac Extension, which allows running Family Tree Builder (for Windows) on Mac OS X, and officially revealed that they are developing Family Tree Builder for Mac.
They worked with the Danish National Archives to bring the entire Denmark 1930 National Census online, and published Swedish parish registers.
They rolled out Instant Discoveries, a feature aimed at attracting first-time users, and Global Name Translation for improved matching between trees, and Search Connect for connecting with other researchers searching for the same things.

That Ancestry.com actively ruined and ultimately destroyed their own multi-million dollar brand is such a colossal screw-up, that the demise of Family Tree Maker may well become a cautionary case study at Harvard Business School.

honourable mention: Ancestry.com

This year, Ancestry.com finally decided to discontinue the monstrosity known as New Family Tree Maker. That Ancestry.com actively ruined and ultimately destroyed their own multi-million dollar brand is such a colossal screw-up, that the demise of Family Tree Maker may well become a cautionary case study at Harvard Business School.
Still, the decision to discontinue a bad product was the right decision; in fact, their own beta testers told them from them from the start that it's actually a product so awful that it should not ever have been released. After years of disappointing upgrades and updates, and a continual stream of big and small users complaints, including completely messed up databases, Ancestry.com management finally did the right thing.
That upon making this decision, they still did not stop to think about their users deserves another kind of award.

honourable mention: Dutch Government

The Dutch Government passed the Wet Hergebruik Overheidsinformatie (Law Reuse Government Information). This law encourages the reuse of existing data, and promotes providing it in electronic form, complete with metadata. One section of the law discusses tariffs, and states that archives may only charge the marginal cost of duplication, provision and distribution.
For genealogist, the immediate practical upshot of this law for genealogist is free scans, but there is an obligatory sour note: archives were using income from scans to finance other scan projects, and will no longer have that income.

honourable mention: Society of Genealogists

The Society of Genealogists (SoG) has long campaigned for cheaper BMD certificates, and in February they announced that the government accepted a amendment to a deregulation bill going before the House of Lords.

honourable mention: SeekingMichigan

SeekingMichigan is the online site for the Archives of Michigan, introduced in 2009. For their sixth birthday, SeekingMichigan announced that image scans for Michigan death certificates from 1921 to 1939 are available to search for free, that the index for records from 1940-1952 would follow soon, and that additional certificate image would be released as privacy restrictions allow.
SeekingMichigan now offers more than 2,6 million 20th century death records for free.

GeneAward Best New Genealogy Organisation 2015

Best New Genealogy Organisation of 2015: Reclaim the Records

Reclaim the Records is a not-for-profit group founded by Brooke Schreier Ganz. Reclaim the Records is an open data activism group consisting of genealogists, historians, researchers, and open government advocates. Their slogan is Public data for public use, their goal is to gain access to and then publish American genealogical records, and they do this by taking advantage of Freedom of Information Laws (FOIL) across the country.
Brooke Schreier Ganz initially started Reclaim the Records to obtain access to the New York 1908-1929 marriage licenses and affidavits, complete with index - and succeeded; the index and records are public now. These records will initially posted at the Internet Archive, but have no copyright or usage restrictions, so other sites, including commercial ones, may choose to host them as well.
Reclaim the Records is readying new Freedom of Information Law request to win public access to yet more records.

honourable mention: The new Canadian Government

After elections this year, the new Liberal government reinstated the mandatory long-form census that was scrapped by the Conservative government five years ago. They replaced it with a voluntary National Household Survey (NHS), that had significant shortcomings.
Like many other governments, the Canadian government collects census data to support data-based decision-making, but keeps census data around for researchers.

Special Recognition 2015

Most Original New Feature 2015: Famberry estate matching

Famberry is a online genealogy site created by Steve Bardouille. In December, Famberry released an rewritten Family Tree Builder, which includes an interesting new feature; estate matching. each day Famberry will check your tree against the UK unclaimed estates list, and will notify the relevant family member if there are indications that they may be entitled to an inheritance.

Most Inspiring Collaborative Genealogy 2015: The Knowles Collection

The Knowles Collection is a collection of six databases, created and managed by Todd Knowles. What began as research into his own ancestry, has evolved into a project encompassing the entire Jewish Diaspora. The six databases, each one for a geographical region, link many generations of Jewish families from all over the world together. It has become a collaborative effort, with researchers from all over the world donating their research. By bringing all this together, the Knowles Collection solves many otherwise difficult to solve genealogy puzzles, as the records for a single family can be dispersed over hundreds of places.
This year, the collection as a whole surpassed 1 million profiles.

Most Innovative Interaction Design of 2015: ZoomPast user interface

ZoomPast is a new product that derives its name from its zoomable display of your tree, based on the OneZoom tree of life explorer. ZoomPast uses a layout known as a fractal tree, and lets you click any displayed individual to change focus to that individual. The ZoomPast implementation isn't so hot, as it easily crashes for anything but small genealogy files, and I am personally not particularly enamoured by the ZoomPast interface, I find the layout too busy and their garish colour choices a pain to behold, but in a sea of substantially similar services, ZoomPast stands out as a novel way of exploring your tree.

Genealogy & Gaming done Right: The Sims

The past few years have seen several awful attempts to literally make genealogy into a game, through misguided, inauthentic application of gamification gimmicks by visionless but buzzword-eager companies. Right now, BrightSolid is still trying to peddle their ill-conceived and unplayable Family House, the Worst New Genealogy Product of 2014.
This year, Electronic Arts showed these companies the right way to combine genealogy and games; not by trying to make genealogy a game, but by adding genealogy to a popular, multi-generation game; the very popular Sims franchise now features genealogy for the families that players create.

Best Who Do You Think You Are Spoof: The Checkout

The Checkout is an Australian consumer affair program. Their Who Do You Think You Are video, a spoof on the Who Do You Think You Are format, is not just funny, but quite informative as well, giving some good advice and warnings to beginners.

Worst of 2015

Ever since the release of Family Tree Maker 2012, Ancestry.com has been releasing service packs with fixes that to failed to really fix TreeSync.

Worst Genealogy Product of 2015: New Family Tree Maker

The latest - and last - major upgrade of New Family Tree Maker is Family Tree Maker 2014, released late in 2013. Ever since its introduction late in 2007, New Family Tree Maker practically owned the Worst Genealogy Product of the Year award; Ancestry.com's product mismanagement earned them this award in 2007, 2013 and 2014,and dishonourable mentions in both 2010 and 2011. The one honourable mention they received was for their decision to not rename the product to Family Tree Maker 2013 merely to charge their usual annual upgrade subscription fee.
The fairly obvious reasons for that decision were the flood of user complaints that Family Tree Maker 2012 (with TreeSync) had generated, and the lack of significant new features or improvements that could be sold as major upgrades.
Ever since the release of Family Tree Maker 2012, Ancestry.com has been releasing service packs with fixes that to failed to really fix TreeSync. Late in 2014, Ancestry.com was expected to release Family Tree Maker 2015, but didn't, for lack of major upgrades. Maybe that was because they focussed on trying to fix TreeSync, but when, late this year, the intended pre-Holiday release date of Family Tree Maker 2016 also came and went, they still hadn't really fixed TreeSync and they still did not have any major upgrades to sell either. Frustrated, Ancestry.com management finally decided to give up on their New Family tree Maker product.

Back in 2007, their beta testers told Ancestry.com the product was defective and not ready for release. Back in 2011, their beta testers told Ancestry.com that the TreeSync feature was defective and not ready for release. Ancestry.com did not listen to their beta testers, nor to their users. For eight years, including all of this year, Ancestry.com knowingly sold a seriously defective product, until they finally gave up on it.

Famberry turned out to be a male-centric product even less suited to genealogy than FamilySearch Family Tree.

dishonourable mention: Famberry

Famberry.com Famberry was announced in mid 2013, and has slowly been adding features. In February, they announced, after several months of beta testing, that their GEDCOM support was ready for prime time. A quick evaluation of Famberry GEDCOM not only found that it was the worst not-really-GEDCOM ever, but also raised question about their understanding of genealogy.
Famberry turned out to be a male-centric product even less suited to genealogy than FamilySearch Family Tree; it not only failed to support heterosexual marriage, it even failed to support sequential monogamy and adoption.

Legacy is build on pre-Unicode technologies that are way past their sell-by date.

dishonourable mention: Legacy Family Tree

Millennia's Legacy Family Tree continued to unimpress. That Legacy is the best-known desktop genealogy application without its own Apple iOS or Google Android app isn't a real issue, because there is a third-party app. Then again, while the respective vendors of RootsMagic, Family Tree Builder and Ancestral Quest provided a way to run their Windows application on MacOS, Millennia did no such thing for Legacy Family Tree.

When Millennia introduced Legacy Charting, a sleek, modern, fast charting application, it won the GeneAward for Best New Genealogy Product of 2008. The introduction of Legacy Charting created high hopes for the future of Legacy, but three quarters of a decade later, there still is no hint of a Legacy rewrite.
Like TMG, which was discontinued last year, Legacy is build on pre-Unicode technologies that are way past their sell-by date. Like TMG users, Legacy users are increasingly reporting minor and not-so minor problems running Legacy on the newest version of Windows.
Legacy Family Tree is a relic from the past, a code-page application that, more than two whole decades (!) after GEDCOM 5.5 included Unicode (1995 Dec 11), still doesn't support it. Although the latest version of PAF is more than a dozen years old, Legacy still cannot guarantee correct import of a PAF GEDCOM file, and cannot in good conscience be recommended as a New Family Tree Maker replacement either.
The current product should have been retired and replaced in the previous millennium already.

RootsOfMine isn't genealogy or even genealogy done wrong. RootsOfMine is geneathology done wrong.

Worst New Genealogy Product of 2015: RootsOfMine

RootsOfMine is a new site that promises to produce an Instant Family Tree! after you enter some basic data. The site typically fails to produce anything, and when it does produce something, it's wrong. When it produces a result, there is no way to tell whether its wrong, right or even slightly believable, (unless you already know what it should look like, and then you don't need RootsOfMine), as RootsOfMine fails to show its sources.
RootsOfMine produces nothing but completely unsourced claims. RootsOfMine isn't genealogy or even genealogy done wrong. RootsOfMine is geneathology done wrong.

dishonourable mention: 1939 Register

FindMyPast started drumming up excitement for the 1939 Register last year already. Its release this year was a disappointment, first of all because many entries for possibly living persons are redacted. That these are redacted is a good thing, privacy takes precedence over genealogy. Findmypast did mention redaction of entries more than once, yet still failed to manage expectations, by leaving that important fact out of the availability announcement. It is possible to get 1939 Register entries un-redacted by providing proof of death - but only by providing proof of death through other (expensive) records, that will tell you more than the redacted entry does...
The search engine isn't bad, but not excellent either. Findmypast isn't shy about milking their limited-time exclusive contract for what it's worth; the prices for the (redacted and therefore incomplete) household record are rather steep. Findmypast also antagonised its users by going out their way to remove TNA references that allowed savvy users to do an advanced search that will present a more complete preview of a page.

dishonourable mention: Global Family Reunion

The so-called Global Family Reunion wasn't global, wasn't about family, and wasn't a reunion - and that's already more commentary than it deserves.

Ancestry.com introduced New Ancestor Discoveries for AncestryDNA with claims many experts consider more than a little misleading.

Worst Genealogy Organisation of 2015: Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com introduced New Ancestor Discoveries for AncestryDNA with claims many experts consider more than a little misleading. Ancestry.com also sold DNA data to Calico Labs, and introduced AncestryHealth, and that seems, well, unhealthy.
Last year, Ancestry.com destroyed MyFamily.com and when it retired its Y-DNA and mtDNA tests, also destroyed the irreplaceable data and samples for these tests. This year, in what seemed a knee-jerk PR-driven reaction, Ancestry.com removed the Sorensen database from their site after it was used for police investigations.
Last year, Ancestry.com blindly copied FamilySearch databases, without doing any sanity checks; this year, they left these unfixed, knowingly continued to misinform their users. This year, Ancestry.com changed their website again, and that managed to upset many users. Although such change seems inevitable, the fact that this change sparked a petition that it calls it the worst change Ancestry.com ever made to its website, and that petition got thousands of signatures is worrisome.

Users were also upset by the decision to discontinue New Family Tree Maker, but that was the right decision too late. Where Ancestry.com really left their users down is their complete failure to provide any alternative. They had years to come up with some replacement for New Family Tree Maker, and they offered absolutely nothing; no new desktop application, no feasible web alternative, no recommendations of third-party applications, no migration path; absolutely nothing, not even a FAQ. Although doing so would greatly ease transitioning to another application, Ancestry.com did not even promise that they'd try and fix issues with New Family Tree Maker's ostensible GEDCOM output.

dishonourable mention: HeritageQuest

HeritageQuest may have had what seemed solid business reasons for ditching their own software, to run Ancestry.com software instead, but dumping their own more legible census images, better index, and superior search engine in favour of Ancestry.com images, index, and search engine did not serve their users.

dishonourable mention: PBS Finding Your Roots

When Ben Affleck asked Finding your Roots to not mention the fact that he has slave-owning ancestors, the show decided to give in to that request and not tell the truth, willing to self-censor because of Ben Affleck mega-star status.

…users trusting enough to follow the CBG's self-serving advice will lose data.

dishonourable mention: Central Bureau of Genealogy

In 2015, the Central Bureau of Genealogy (CBG) finally decided to kill off WieWasWie's Family Tree Builder, but immediately followed that decision with the recommendation to transfer trees to StamboomNederland.
The GEDCOM support of both products is still so poor, that users trusting enough to follow the CBG's self-serving advice will lose data.
The CBG receives taxpayer's money to manage both sites, but in all the years they managed both sites, neither one improved a bit. Not a single one of the many issues with StamboomNederland has been addressed; StamboomNederland remains as awful as it was when the CBG introduced it five years ago.
The CBG also decided to start charging for WieWasWie search, despite it still being as awkward to use as it was back in 2012; starting next year, the ability to search for two names, a basic search feature, will only be offered to paying users. If that isn't against the letter of the Wet Hergebruik Overheidsinformatie (Law Reuse Government Information), it still is against the spirit of that law.

dishonourable mention: AncestrybyDNA

Throughout the year, genealogists noticed AncestrybyDNA adverts on FaceBook and other social media. These adverts aren't new, and have been shown for several years already, but it seems the company behind it stepped up the frequency, so the adverts got noticed more.

The problem with their adverts is the name of the service. AncestrybyDNA seems a perfectly fine name, except for the fact that is very similar to AncestryDNA, Ancestry.com's DNA service.
Ancestry.com has finally woken up and on 2015 Nov 16 they filed a trademark infringement case against DNA Diagnostic Center, the company behind not just the AncestrybyDNA offers, but the ConnectMyDNA offers as well.
You might think that the name is okay, as it is AncestrybyDNA, not DNAbyAncestry, and the AncestrybyDNA brand was in use before the introduction of the AncestryDNA brand in 2012, but it isn't that simple. The AncestryDNA brand was actually in use before 2012, but more importantly, customers are being confused, and that is what trademark law is really about (IANAL).

Not-so Special Recognition 2015

Worst GEDCOM export: Famberry

When Famberry decided, after taking the time to beta test, that their GEDCOM support was ready for prime time, a quick evaluation of the Famberry GEDCOM showed otherwise...
It's not just that PAF failed to import the Famberry file or that Famberry failed the round-trip test. Famberry managed to do practically everything wrong. The GEDCOM contained empty lines, there were multiple issues with the GEDCOM header, they were using GEDCOM 5.5 instead of 5.5.1. They claimed to use the MACINTOSH character set, which is not just illegal, but one of the poorest choices possible anyway, and it was actually a lie, as they were really using ISO/IEC 8859-1 (ISO Latin 1), which is also illegal.
The submitter record did not contain details for the submitter, but for another individual from the tree. The GEDCOM export for a three-person tree contained a superfluous empty and unreferenced FAM (family) record, because their export creates FAM records for every male, regardless of whether he has a partner or not.
And to top it all of, their chosen line terminator wasn't carriage return (CR), a single line feed (LF), CR/LF or even LF/CR, an abomination GEDCOM allows while it should not, but LF/CR/LF.

Best of 2015