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Last Week at OneGreatFamilySite Activity
Summary
262,766 new individual merges!
85,761 new individual hints!
87,653 new family merges!
46,130 new family hints!
Activity Per Group
142 average individual merges
35 average individual hints
40 average family merges
8
average family hints
If you didn't receive a GenMail
telling you about new merges in your family tree, your tree wasn't
affected by this activity. You may want to add new individuals or
information to your family tree to improve the likelihood of matches
and merges taking place.
Having Success?OneGreatFamily wants to hear
from you. Please send us your success stories and your
recommendations for new features.
Submit your story
Send us your wish
list
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Happy New Year from the employees at
OneGreatFamily!Now is the time to make your plans and set your
goals for 2005. Remember to include learning more about your own
family history as one of your New Year's resolutions. We at
OneGreatFamily are optimistic that, in light of the growing body of
information being made available on the Internet, 2005 will be the
best year yet for uncovering more knowledge about your family
tree.
We are also making our plans and setting our goals for
2005. The survey results have been invaluable in helping us
understand your perspective on what we do well and where we can
improve. Again, thank you for taking the time to fill out the
survey, especially during the busy holiday season. We are now
developing enhancements to our service as well as some new product
offerings to better meet your needs. 2005 will be a very exciting
year for OneGreatFamily, and we believe you will be pleasantly
surprised as we roll out new features.
One last word...we
hope that you will include in your plans for 2005 a generous
contribution of aid to the hundreds of thousands of victims of the
earthquake and tsunami in Southeast Asia. Much help is truly needed
on the other side of the world right now and this is the time to let
them know that we really are one great global family.
Thank
you, and Happy New Year!
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What is the handprint concept and how does it benefit
me?Most run-of-the-mill genealogy websites are built around the
principal called "search and sift"-first you search on the name of
an ancestor, then you sift through the thousands or tens of
thousands of results you get back. "Search and sift" is great if you
just like busy work and it may even let you feel like you are in
control, but it won't make you very productive.
Consider one
example. One popular genealogy website touts that it offers over
2,000,000,000 names. If you begin a search for an ancestor with a
common name, like John Smith, you will get back roughly 6,727,860
pieces of data. Even if you could review 5 of those a second, that
would still take you more than a MONTH just to scan through them.
Experienced genealogists have learned that this is not a
manageable way to work, so they have had to become more
sophisticated in their searching. Perhaps on the first search they
don't include a birth date, but if the results are too numerous they
might include a birth year on the second search. If still too
numerous, they might then use the month and day on the third search.
The same game can also be played with death dates, middle initials,
and so on. They search and search, until they whittle the list down
to a manageable number of records to sift through.
But what
if your John Smith's birth date (or any other piece of information)
was inaccurately recorded? The whittling down process might cut out
the very record you are so desperately seeking on that ancestor.
OneGreatFamily takes a very different approach to genealogy
than the worn out "search and sift". Instead of searching primarily
on names, dates and places to identify ancestors, OneGreatFamily
focuses on family relationships to better identify an ancestor as a
unique individual.
To follow-through on our example, perhaps
John Smith is married to Mary Williams, another name that by itself
will produce millions of search results. Still, when you search for
the husband and wife combination, the results narrow significantly.
And if they had a son named John Smith, that family unit becomes
significantly more unique. Add in a father to John Smith named Peter
Smith and a mother named Susan Anderson (both also common names on
their own) you have now narrowed the results to a manageable number.
This principal is what we at OneGreatFamily call the
"handprint." Just like a fingerprint, the handprint is a way to
uniquely identify people.
Imagine it this way: Hold your
hand out flat. Let the palm of your hand represent you, then let
your fingers represent your father, mother, siblings, children, and
spouse. A handprint is often confused with a family group sheet, but
it is different. A family group sheet represents a single nuclear
family. The handprint reaches far beyond nuclear families, which is
where the real power of relationships helps to uniquely identify
individuals. Those relationships provide the best information or
evidence to uniquely identify you among the billions of other people
who have lived on the earth.
You are able to view handprints
through our Genealogy Browser. Selecting any individual in
OneGreatFamily gives you access to that individual's unique
handprint. You can see the relationships that identify who that
person is. The handprint view lets you also see details for the
individual you have selected or for that individual's family.
Clicking on the selected individual opens the individual
details, which lets you edit the record and view additional
information, such as biographies, photos, notes, and sources. The
handprint view also includes buttons to view family information. By
clicking on the "Family Info" button, you can elect to see the
family in which the individual is a child or the family in which the
individual is a parent (if he had offspring). The family view
provides marriage/divorce information and access to additional
information that applies to the entire family.
Another big
difference between OneGreatFamily and other genealogy websites is
this - While ordinary websites might be willing to maintain a search
for a few of your ancestors that you have specifically identified,
OneGreatFamily will search continually on your entire family tree
without you having to do anything. Just give us what you know and
we'll start searching - and we won't stop.
OneGreatFamily
uses the handprint and other available information to constantly
search for ALL of your ancestors. The handprint is useful when
finding matches in the OneGreatFamily database and showing you where
more information is available on your family tree.
While
OneGreatFamily searches for matches for everyone who has submitted
their family trees to OneGreatFamily, only subscribers gain
unlimited access to the new relationships and information that
results from the matching and merging process.
Login to OneGreatFamily
Subscribe to OneGreatFamily
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Want some FREE time?Current subscribers can
earn additional free time by referring others to OneGreatFamily.com.
OneGreatFamily needs your help in growing the largest single family
tree in the world. You can get free subscription time on
OneGreatFamily by referring others to this unique service. When
anyone you refer to OneGreatFamily subscribes to our service and
enters your username, you get an additional free month.
Learn more about this FREE
opportunity Refer a new subscriber to
OneGreatFamily today.
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