Family Group Trees?
There is a class being offered at Roots Tech 2024 entitled, "Introducing Family Group Trees to FamilySearch.org"; apparently, "...living family can share a tree, photos, and stories with each other on FamilySearch".
Just wondering if this is going to be released soon as a beta option, or will it go "live" soon without any testing/input from users? I've heard the idea discussed sometime ago, but just would like to know if there is already a thread on Community where this is being discussed since I cannot locate it.... Thanks for your help!
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@Ottley BQ The Family Group Trees feature is for sharing living persons. Suppose that I have living parents, and my children, my siblings and their children all want to share references to that set of living people. Within a Family Group Tree, we would all see the same profile for my father, my mother, myself, my wife, my brother, my sister, etc. Because we are looking at the same profile for these living persons, we can all see the same vital details, memories, and relationships for all these persons.
As with the existing family group capabilities, there are features to facilitate communicating within the group, and part of that communication could be around research on shared ancestors. But those shared deceased ancestors are still part of the huge common Family Tree, and so every FamilySearch user has access to those same deceased persons, even if they are not part of the Family Group. There are no particular features in Family Group Trees that would control edits to deceased persons.
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There is a Community group for the pilot, but it's private/invitation-only. There have been a minimum of two test/pilot phases, but I declined the invitation to the second one (I just don't do living family online), so I may be out of the loop now. But if they're doing a class on it at RootsTech, I'm sure there will be a wider test phase soon.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi is it a "living descendancy tree"? From the description, it sounds like it is an "ancestor tree", where one can (an administrator) can invite living family members to collaborate and help build a branch of the tree that the family agrees(?) upon....
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One of the problems during the initial test that I participated in was telling the family group tree apart from the "real" FamilySearch Family Tree. I don't know what exactly they've done about that, but it illustrates that the intent is for it to be a full family tree, just like the one with all the shared profiles for deceased people, except including shared profiles for living people, too. The sharing would be significantly limited compared to the public tree, of course, but as far as I can tell, the intent is for anyone to be able to initiate a group amongst which to share.
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@Alan E. Brown thanks for the note! Also, do you know if it's going to be released soon as a beta option, or will it go "live" prior to Roots Tech 2024 without any testing/input from users?
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@Ottley BQ , it has already been released for several months in a limited beta test. So there has been a lot of feedback from users. I imagine that there is a desire to go live by RootsTech 2024, but with software releases there are no guarantees.
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@Alan E. Brown are you involved in the "limited beta test" process? If so, is the group still looking for input, and how can one access the site?
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@Ottley BQ No, I'm not involved. I've just heard about it. So I don't know those details.
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So exciting! I cannot wait!! (unfortunately the session seems to be In Person, and I won't be)
But I would love to hear more, and if it is not going live soon, I'd love to be involved in a beta
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You can try out family group trees by going to FamilySearch Labs and choosing Family Group Trees.
Other resources--
Family Group Tree Feedback community group
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