2017-01-01 GeneAwards 2016

Best and Worst of 2016

2016

The GeneAwards started ten years ago with the Best and Worst of Genealogy 2006. The name GeneAwards was introduced in 2007, and the design for the awards in 2008.
Some major new releases users looked forward to did not happen, but there still is an abundance of genealogy industry developments worthy of an award. This year, there are quite a few honourable mentions following the Best Genealogy Product of the year, and no dishonourable mentions following the Worst Genealogy Product of the year, and Worst New Genealogy Organisation was not awarded.

Genealogy 2016; news & trends provides an overview of the year in genealogy technology.
Here, without further ado, are the eleventh GeneAwards.

Best Genealogy Product of 2016: RootsMagic 7.1

RootsMagic continues to disappoint users waiting for the Mac OS X release; renaming MacBridge for RootsMagic to RootsMagic for Mac isn't fooling anyone, it just creates confusion. However, it's is a Good Thing that they're delaying release until its done, instead of rushing it out.
In February, Ancestry.com and RootsMagic announced that RootsMagic would sync with Ancestry Member Trees by the end of the year. This was RootsMagic pre-announcing a new feature and delivery date, and early December, Bruce Buzbee, posted a mea culpa on the RootsMagic blog. The bad news is that the feature is delayed, the good news is that they're still refusing to rush out a half-baked product just to meet a deadline.

RootsMagic pre-announced three new features in February, to wit syncing with Ancestry Member Trees, searching Ancestry.com collections and direct import from New Family Tree Maker. The search of Ancestry.com collections is delayed too, but RootsMagic did add support for findmypast to WebHints, RootsMagic WebHints already supported matching against MyHeritage and FamilySearch databases, and RootsMagic 7.2 added support for findmypast record collections.

RootsMagic now supports direct import from any version of Family Tree Maker, while even Family Tree Maker itself does not.

RootsMagic delivered the promised direct import from Family Tree Maker. RootsMagic already supported direct import from Family Tree Maker Classic, RootsMagic 7.1 added direct import from New Family Tree Maker, but only Ancestry.com New Family Tree maker, and RootsMagic 7.1.0.5 added direct import from Software MacKiev Family Tree Maker 2014. RootsMagic now supports direct import from any version of Family Tree Maker, while even Family Tree Maker itself does not.
RootsMagic did right in 2016, and remains the genealogy application to beat.

honourable mention: Ancestral Quest 15

Incline Software released Ancestral Quest 15. Its main new feature is TreeTips, which finds matching records on MyHeritage, findmypast and FamilySearch. There are enhancements to the Family View Child List, Merge Tool and more. While the user interface continues to look dated, the program's pedigree view now allows viewing up to seven generations, in support of large monitors.

While the design of previous versions was fundamentally flawed, Family Tree Builder 8 is a solid foundation for future versions.

honourable mention: Family Tree Builder 8

MyHeritage introduced Family Tree Builder 8. Family Tree Builder 8 looks the same as Family Tree Builder 7, but it is a full rewrite that finally uses a database engine for its file format. While the design of previous versions was fundamentally flawed, Family Tree Builder 8 is a solid foundation for future versions.
Users enjoy slight faster GEDCOM import and dramatically improved project load times. Family Tree Builder 8 is also faster and more memory-efficient than Family Tree Builder 7, but the difference isn't as big as it could be.

Family Tree Builder 8 uses SQLite, the same database engine that RootsMagic uses, yet still demands way more memory than RootsMagic does, and does not come close to RootsMagic's capacity to handle large databases. Family Tree Builder 8 should offer considerably better capacity than Family Tree Builder 7, yet still has the same fan value as Family Tree Builder 7, most likely because while MyHeritage did change to using a database engine, they hardly adapted the rest of Family Tree Builder to this important change yet. I expect Family Tree Builder 9 to realise more of the potential improvements, and perform considerably better than FTB 8 and 7.

honourable mention: MacFamilyTree 8

Synium released MacFamilyTree 8 for Mac OS X, together with MobileFamilyTree 8. MacFamilyTree 8 features a completely overhauled user interface, including Smart Filters, a change log, and a Navigation Timeline. MacFamilyTree 8 also features improved Plausibility Testing (introduced in MacFamilyTree 7), better performance, better memory usage and improved GEDCOM support. The GEDCOM support still ain't perfect, there are some known problems, including use of illegal GEDCOM tags (no underscore) for vendor-defined extensions.

MacFamilyTree & MobileFamilyTree 8.1 introduced CloudTree Sync & Share; fast syncing of changes to your tree via Apple iCloud. You can even sync & with other iCloud users, but that is restricted to 5000 entries per record type.

Family Historian 6 already used Unicode internally. By adding support for UTF-8 GEDCOM files, Family Historian has finally become a true Unicode genealogy application.

honourable mention: Family Historian 6

Calico Pie released Family Historian 6.1, a free upgrade for Family Historian 6 users, and their biggest free upgrade yet. There are improvement to sourcing, witness support,a tool for moving pictures between directories, better direct import from The Master Genealogist and Genbox databases, and snapshot support; each snapshot is a full backup copy of all your data that you can revert to if you so desire.
The addition of the option to store Family Historian data in UTF-8 encoding is a fundamental improvement. Family Historian 6 already used Unicode internally. By adding support for UTF-8 GEDCOM files, Family Historian has finally become a true Unicode genealogy application.
The most interesting improvement is that Family Historian 6.1 does not only feature improved import of Family Tree Maker and Ancestry Member Tree GEDCOM files, but features Smart GEDCOM Loading as well.
Family Historian 6.2 added smart matching with findmypast record collections.

The New York City (NYC) Marriage Index is just one marriage index, but is also more than just a marriage index.

Best New Genealogy Product of 2016: NYC Marriage Index

The New York City (NYC) Marriage Index is just one marriage index, but is also more than just a marriage index. The NYC Marriage Index is a citizen victory against unwilling bureaucracy. This record set is only available now because Reclaim the Records and Brooke Schreier Ganz, requested them under the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), and insisted, through legal means, when their request was met with less than enthusiasm.
The NYC Marriage Index is the first record collection that Reclaim the Records obtained and published. It, and other record collections that followed, have all been published on a dedicated section of the Internet Archive. The records are in the public domain now, free to use by anyone.

honourable mention: CSI: Crowd Sourced Indexing

CSI: Crowd Sourced Indexing is a new web app, by Banai Lynn Feldstein of Feldstein Genealogy Services. It is a crowd sourced indexing platform meant for small organisation such as local genealogy societies, to run their own indexing projects. It's a Unicode-based program, so it can be used for indexing documents in any language. The first project available for indexing (or rather, transcription) is the NYC Marriage Index published by Reclaim the Records.

Software MacKiev Family Tree Maker 2014 is the first version of Family Tree Maker to produce a valid GEDCOM header.

honourable mention: Software MacKiev Family Tree Maker 2014

Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker 2014 isn't new, it is three years old already, and it won the GeneAward for Worst Genealogy Product of 2014, Worst Genealogy Product of 2015, and guess what, Worst Genealogy Product of 2016.
Software MacKiev Family Tree Maker 2014 still suffers from many of the issues that plague Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker 2014, yet is a significant improvement on all Ancestry.com versions already, simply because Software MacKiev Family Tree Maker 2014 is the first version of Family Tree Maker to produce a valid GEDCOM header.
The Software MacKiev newsletter announced the availability of the long-awaited recommend update for all Family Tree Maker 2014 users on 2016 Dec 31.

honourable mention: gedantic

Gedantic is a free online consistency checker by Matt Harrah. Just upload your GEDCOM, and it will present a report of issues such as children before their parents, people without surnames, unparsable dates, future birth and deaths, etcetera. The site enforces an upload limit of just 8 MB, thus limiting its usage to small trees.
Gedantic is an open source project written in Java, that takes advantage of another open source java project of his, the gedcom4j GEDCOM parser. Both projects have full source available on github.

honourable mention: Google PhotoScan

PhotoScan is a new photo scanning app from Google, available for both Google Android and Apple iOS. It is a Google app, so it integrates with Google Photos. PhotoScan detects edges, rotates and straightens the image, and even removes glare.

honourable mention: Cite This For Me

Cite This For Me is a Google Chrome Extension that creates website citations in APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard style.

MyHeritage did what it should be doing; improve their products and services to deliver increased value to their users.

Best Genealogy Organisation of 2016: MyHeritage

MyHeritage introduced Family Tree Builder 8, which finally uses a real database engine, making it a solid foundation for future versions.
MyHeritage improved their so-called Record Detective, calling it Record Detective II. MyHeritage added voice recording to their mobile app.
They introduced Book Matching, which matches trees on MyHeritage against a collection of roughly half a million digitised books. MyHeritage introduced the MyHeritage community, a Questions & Answers forum. MyHeritage introduced a PedigreeMap, which plots ancestors on a world map, and SuperSearch Alerts, alerts for new result from saved searches.
MyHeritage added DNA support to their products and in November they introduced MyHeritage DNA, their own testing service. When their Terms of Service for their DNA service were criticised, they listened and changed the terms.
In short, MyHeritage did what it should be doing; improve their products and services to deliver increased value to their users.

honourable mention: Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com raked in record number of negative awards this year, but one positive development deserves to be highlighted as well. Ever since they introduced TreeSync in Family Tree Maker 2012, Ancestry.com kept the TreeSync API secret. This year, Ancestry.com announced that they will replace TreeSync with something new, and are sharing the API with both Software MacKiev, the new owner of Family Tree Maker and RootsMagic.

GeneAward Best New Genealogy Organisation 2016

Best New Genealogy Organisation of 2016: Software MacKiev

Software MacKiev used to be the contractor for Ancestry.com that received the New Family Tree Maker code and then turned that into Family Tree Maker for Mac for them. They already had intimate knowledge of the Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker code, they already knew how bad it is, yet decided to take on ownership of the product anyway, and clearly stated that they'd be focussing on stability and performance. The first release of Software MacKiev Family Tree Maker creates correct GEDCOM headers, and subsequent betas do show performance and stability improvements. They took the entire year to create a free update they recommend to all Family Tree Maker 2014, but finally started to provide it on New Year's Eve. They (and RootsMagic) started working with Ancestry.com to provide a replacement for TreeSync by the end of the year, and while Ancestry.com didn't announce that the New Sync would be delayed till somewhere next year, they did.

There are many more vendors that claim to listen than vendors that actually do. Atavus never claimed to listen, but does.

honourable mention: Atavus

This year Atavus introduced themselves by introducing rootsTrust 1.0. I discommend rootsTrust 1.0, as it is way too rough around edges, and it is painfully clear that Atavus hardly ever bothered to test anything, but I do want to highlight Atavus for taking criticism seriously, fixing reported issues, improving defaults, providing defaults, and even taking misfeatures out. There are many more vendors that claim to listen than vendors that actually do. Atavus never claimed to listen, but does.
Send them plenty of feedback, and their product might yet become great.

Special Recognition 2016

Best New GEDCOM Technology: Family Historian Smart GEDCOM Loading

Many programs use undocumented GEDCOM extension. When Family Historian encounters a GEDCOM extension it does not recognise, it does not throw the data away, but keeps it around in what Calico Pie calls an Uncategorised Data Field (UDF) within the Family Historian GEDCOM (Family Historian uses GEDCOM as its database format). That data may be practically unusable, because Family Historian does not know what is or what to do with it, but it is not lost.
Family Historian 6.1 improved recognition of Family Tree Maker and Ancestry Member Tree GEDCOM files; Family Historian 6.1 now recognises Ancestry.com GEDCOM extensions and errors that earlier versions did not. The Smart GEDCOM Loading is this; Family Historian looks through the UDF records in your database, and if it spots a record type a previous versions did not recognise but it recognises now, it recovers that data, the same way as it would import that data today. The bottom line is that if you imported some Ancestry.com GEDCOM file into Family Historian 6 or earlier, you do not have re-import the original GEDCOM into version 6.1 to benefit from these improvements, you just have to chose Recover Unrecognised Data from the Tools menu.

Best New Matching Technology: MyHeritage Book Matching

MyHeritage Book Matching matches your MyHeritage tree against a collection of nearly half a million books - but it not just about adding the books and simply matching single names against the text. MyHeritage is the first major genealogy company to market what several companies been developing the past few years; automated analysis of texts to extract genealogical information. Text analysis identifies names, events and relationships, essentially creating tree fragments, and that is what your tree is matched against, for much better results than plain text matching.
The initial release of MyHeritage Book Matching is limited to English books.

Worst of 2016

Worst Genealogy Product of 2016: Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker 2014

For many years, Ancestry.com rushed ostensible major versions of New Family Tree Maker out to market to meet marketing-imposed Holiday Shopping deadlines, even if the new features weren't all that major, blatantly disregarding even their own Beta Testers feedback in the process.
Ancestry.com made such a mess of New Family Tree Maker, that late 2015, they finally gave up trying to make the product work right, and abruptly discontinued it, without providing any migration path or guidance for the many users they so suddenly abandoned. Major competing vendors quickly responded with special upgrade offers, and early this year, Software MacKiev bought all the right to all versions of Family Tree Maker. Software MacKiev was quick to get the product back to market as Software MacKiev Family Tree Maker 2014. Software MacKiev promised to publish a free update recommended for all Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker 2014 users, that would address FTM's many performance and stability issues, but Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker 2014 users are still waiting for that recommended update. Late 2016, Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker 2014 remains in widespread use, because Ancestry.com botched up New Family Tree Maker so hard that Software MacKiev needed the entire year to clean up their mess.

Ancestry.com botched up New Family Tree Maker so hard that Software MacKiev needed the entire year to clean up their mess.

A major feature of Family Tree Maker 2014, rushed to market as part of Family Tree Maker 2012, is TreeSync. Every Service Pack since the release of Family Tree Maker 2012 included TreeSync fixes, without ever really fixing it.
TreeSync is not just buggy, but so unsatisfactory overall that Ancestry.com decided that it must be replaced by something better. Ancestry.com is in the process of replacing TreeSync with this New Sync, and promised to have this done by the end of this year, but it got delayed, so all Family Tree Maker 2014 users remain stuck with the old TreeSync for now.

Worst New Genealogy Product of 2016: We're Related

You may remember We're Related as a FaceBook app from the now defunct FamilyLink. It tried to use your FaceBook connections, both to build your tree and to spread virally.
When MyHeritage bought most of the remains of FamilyLink in 2011, the We're Related app was not included in the sale. Nothing much was heard from We're Related since, and a quick look in the WayBack Machine suggests the website ceased to exist late in 2013. Anyway, Ancestry.com acquired the wererelated.com domain name and is using it now.

Ancestry.com's We're Related isn't a FaceBook app, but a mobile app available for both Google Android and Apple iOS. Well, the Android app it is available in some countries. While many apps are understandably restricted by Android version, this app is restricted by country. That is odd, as genealogy is global, but then this isn't really really isn't a genealogy app. In fact, Ancestry.com themselves have categorised the app as an Entertainment app.
I'd categorise this particular app as in the excrement of a male bovine category. The We're Related app should come with a disclaimer that the results it shows are about as reliable as Ancestry.com's irresponsible claim that Robert Pattinson is a descendant of Dracula.

The We're Related app should come with a disclaimer that the results it shows are about as reliable as Ancestry.com's irresponsible claim that Robert Pattinson is a descendant of Dracula.

The app is not very original, but a me-too app, that seems based on KiN2.me, and its KiNection Finder. Both apps are about finding your connection to famous people.
At the basis of such apps is a large genealogy geneathology database, with celebrities marked as such. The KiN2 website uses the GenealogyCloud API to access the OneGreatFamily database. According to the Ancestry.com blurb, We’re Related taps into 70 million family trees, 8 billion connections, and 6 million profiles to expertly connect you to possible notable or nearby relations., and that sounds a lot like OneWorldTree, Ancestry.com's own notoriously unreliable world tree database they stitched together from member trees.

The superficial problem with this app isn't that is a superficial app, but the suggestion and promise of instant genealogy for the instant gratification generation, while Ancestry.com continues to have millions of members because even a full Ancestry.com membership does not provide anything close to instant gratification genealogy.
The core problem with this app is that it is plain irresponsible. The geneathology database at the core of the app is, to put it mildly, unreliable, so whatever connections it presents as your famous cousins are unreliable too. Ancestry.com knows that, but pushes the app out anyway, thus deliberately misinforming the app's users. This app would be entertainment if it continually displayed a disclaimer that the purported connections may be incorrect. Without that disclaimer, this app is irresponsible nonsense.

dishonourable mention: rootsTrust

This year, Atavus took rootsTrust out of Beta by introducing version 1.0. Improvements show that Atavus listens to feedback, but trying to use it shows that they hardly ever bother to test anything. Attempting to explore the application, I was greeted by run-time error messages every time I tried anything non-trivial. RootsTrust 1.0 is a one-dot-zero product in the derogatory sense of that expression. It's wise to wait for version 2.0.

This isn't an objective Family History Guide at all, but an incredibly biased FamilySearch Family Tree for Dummies website.

dishonourable mention: The Family History Guide

This website was in Beta during 2015 already, but was only officially introduced this year. It presents itself as a learning resource, even claims to be the a best-in-class learning environment for family history, and aimed for beginners and advanced genealogy researchers alike, but actually is a thinly disguised FamilySearch Family Tree (FSFT) propaganda site. This isn't an objective Family History Guide at all, but an incredibly biased FamilySearch Family Tree for Dummies website.
The ostensible guide not only pretends there are no other one world trees, it even is structured and written as if there is nothing else but FSFT, as if there is no such thing as genealogy software...
The very first project immediately pushes the unwary beginner towards FamilySearch Family Tree, with dishonest statements like Navigating in FamilySearch Family Tree is essential so you can find ancestors. Truth is that there are many good reasons why serious genealogists avoid shared trees in general, and FamilySearch Family Tree in particular, but the ostensible guide never discusses these issues, never even mentions the concept of shared trees, it just keep pushing FamilySearch Family Tree on the unsuspecting reader. The guide never even mentions Geni.com or WikiTree, and only gives the briefest attention to real genealogy software, only in one of the last very last projects titled technology, and even that brief section ends with the instruction to upload your data...
The entire site is aimed at fooling beginners into using FamilySearch Family Tree, instead of real genealogy software. Strongly discommended.

Worst Genealogy Organisation of 2016: Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com disdiscontinued Family Tree Maker by selling it Software MacKiev, and they opened up syncing with Ancestry Member Trees to not only Software MacKiev, but to RootsMagic as well.
Then again, New Family Tree Maker users continue to suffer problems caused from a decade of poor programming practices and product mismanagement, and Ancestry.com decided to add insult to injury with the release of the We're Related app.

Ancestry.com did not even bother with adequate regular backups, and that is plain unprofessional.

Ancestry.com makes such poor software that they won both Worst Genealogy Product and Worst New Genealogy Product, and they did not deliver the TreeSync replacement as promised. All that is disappointing for sure, but what truly makes Ancestry.com the worst genealogy company of the year is the prolonged RootsWeb outage and significant user data loss.
In February, a RootsWeb outage started that lasted more than a month. RootsWeb is owned by Ancestry.com, and you may recall that the Ancestry.com site itself went down in 2014. Back then, Ancestry.com claimed that was because of a DDoS attack. You would expect the company to have put measures in place to prevent repetition and this massive failure makes it seem they did not those measures. In fact, Ancestry.com did not even bother with adequate regular backups, and that is plain unprofessional.
This time, Ancestry.com did not even communicate about this major outage on their blog, and when they finally sent an email to registered RootsWeb users, it was to tell that they had lost data, specifically content from FreePages added after the summer of 2015 - that is practically an entire year of data.

dishonourable mention: findmypast

Findmypast wasted money on Twile, a hopelessly unimaginative me-too timeline webapp, best known for their continual annoying you have 5 questions to answer spam. After a few somewhat disappointing years, which included several bad investment decisions, most notably grossly overpaying for Mocavo, the company let CEO Annelies van de Belt go, only to appoint as interim CEO Jay Verkler, the very guy who, as the same official message tells us, had been giving her advice these past few years...

dishonourable mention: Geni.com

This year, Geni.com passed 100 million profiles. According to a celebratory blog post by a Geni.com marketroid, Geni.com's World Family Tree has quickly become the largest, highest-quality family tree of the world.. Verily, according to Geni.com, Geni.com is the definitive family tree for the entire world. Those preposterous claims are in direct conflict with reality.

dishonourable mention: ScanMyPhotos

ScanMyPhotos's twitter feed was a constant stream of political messages relating to the American presidential election. If you want to vent political opinions, do it from your are stuff for your personal account, not your corporate account. A constant stream of political messages has nothing to do with getting your photos scanned.

2017-01-01 GeneAwards 2016

Best and Worst of 2016

2016