Not much going on here, life has settled back into a normal routine. Weather’s been moderately awful — cold and snowy, which is entirely unusual for Vancouver. Gwen started teaching some of the toddler and care-giver music and movement classes (check out Flutterby Music) but I’ll leave it to her to tell you about it.

Geni ScreenshotOne of the blogs I read pointed me to Geni which is essentially a genealogical site, done up all “Web 2.0”. Which is to say it’s slick. It’s easy to use and I proceeded to add most of the near family to it. It’s one of these viral, social sort of sites too, so you “invite” your relatives to it, and they are supposed to add to it if they so choose. The privacy controls are pretty good … the only people who can see your details are people who are connected to you in your tree. Of course, as more people join and are added to your tree, this can become very large.

In addition to just adding people, you can put in photos, details of where they are, schools they went to, important dates, etc. Unfortunately the site’s in its infancy right now, so it doesn’t do much other than just show you your tree. However, they have indicated that near-future features include:

  • Importing family data
  • Adding unmarried partners
  • A better way to add same sex partners
  • Better support for adopted children
  • Merging duplicate family trees created independently by relatives in the same family
  • Better deletion features for the tree and list view
  • Support for people who show up in the tree more than once (multiple marriages between two families)
  • Printing family trees
  • International keyboard support

You can get some more nifty information by viewing the site as a “List” rather than as a “Tree” (change this by clicking the links in the middle of the screen just above the tree”).

I’ve spammed invited a few family members who I thought would be interested in such a thing, but if I didn’t send you an invite and you want one, let me know and I’ll happily fire one your way.

By the way, I’ve been haphazardly adding photos to the site. If you don’t like the photo I’ve uploaded for you — tough! Upload a different one! :)