A Free, New Family Tree Tool for Map Lovers

There's another new website that can do amazing things with your family tree. It's called TreeAlive, and it features a handful of unique genealogy visualization tools.

TreeAlive can tell the story of your ancestor's journey, from birth to death, showing it on a map. It can take you to a place in your ancestor's life and let you overlay historic maps from different time periods. It can animate your immigrant ancestor's journey and put it into historical context. It can show you the locations of all your ancestors at once.

Journey through time visiting the locations in your family tree.

The website is 100% free and you do not need an account. All you do is add your GEDCOM file. (You're not uploading it anywhere—you're bringing it into your web browser on your computer.) Then click through all the visualizations you want to see.

There is a GEDCOM file size limitation of 30 MB, so you may need to exclude images and notes from your file. My family tree of 87,000+ people is too large. So I exported a GEDCOM from Family Tree Maker of all my ancestors and all their spouses—that's 439 people. It's a tiny file. I could filter in more people if I wanted to.

One feature that sets TreeAlive apart is that it works with FamilySearch. FamilySearch doesn't let you export a GEDCOM*. To work around that, use TreeAlive's option of connecting to your FamilySearch tree.

*A page on FamilySearch.org says you can export up to eight generations of your tree in the GEDCOM 7 format. The problem is, not everything is compatible with GEDCOM 7. I don't use FamilySearch, so I can't verify that.

These websites analyze your GEDCOM in your web browser for free, too:

• TreeLab
• GEDminer
• Family Tree Analyzer

Create a Video to Share with Family

The Video feature of TreeAlive puts your ancestor's journeys on the map through the years. It highlights important moments, such as The America Revolution and World Wars. You can click Share With Family to create a treealive.com link to share. Or you can join the Beta list and download your film.

Detail an Ancestor's Journey

The Journey feature lets you choose one ancestor at a time to visualize the facts you've captured. It uses the most appropriate historical map for each place and time in their journey. I've noticed one quirk with these journeys. They seem to show the immigration fact before the emigration fact. So it looks as if my 2nd great grandmother is born in Italy, comes to New York in 1898, then leaves Italy in 1898. It's as if she crossed the ocean twice.

See Who Else Was There

The Crossings feature points out famous people who were in the same place and time as your ancestors. They may have crossed paths. You can click any item in the list to learn more. I clicked the link for my great grandfather Giovanni and Geronimo. Giovanni lived in New York City in the 1905 New York State Census. It turns out Geronimo, the famous Apache, was there, too. He "sold autographs at expositions and rode in Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 inaugural parade". You can also follow links to learn more about the historical event.

Immerse yourself in historical maps for the places in your family tree.

Plot Everything

The Location Quality Explorer feature shows dots for each location in your GEDCOM. By zooming in and clicking different dots, I can confirm it includes locations for:

• baptism
• birth
• burial
• death
• immigration
• marriage
• naturalization
• occupation
• residence

Sometimes clicking a single location dot opens a starburst of facts for many people. (It's such a cool visual.) My tree has an insane number of dots for the Bronx, New York.

Look for orange dots (approximate locations) or red circles (estimated locations). You can choose to report any location you feel is incorrect and provide guidance. I found a few people who were born in the town of Baselice, but their dots were in the city of Benevento. I clicked to report these estimated location and provided the correct map coordinates. The next day, I found them corrected! I now have no approximate or estimated locations on my map. (Note: I updated my GEDCOM, so it is possible my older GEDCOM was to blame for the errors.)

Put Each Generation on the Map

The Generations feature lets you scroll through the generations of your family tree. As you scroll, it highlights general places of birth for each generation. For me, the first generation highlights the place of my birth, New York State. Generation two shows my parents' two states, New York and Ohio. Generation three adds Italy, for my two grandfathers. Before that, I have nothing but Italy. Your map may have a lot more going on than my very homogeneous family tree.

Overlay Those Maps

I saved my favorite feature of TreeAlive for last. The Time Machine feature is an immersive experience because of its historical maps. While in the Time Machine, zoom in and choose a location dot to click. You'll see a particular event for a person in one location. TreeAlive overlays an historical map that dates back as close to the time of the event as possible.

Here's where you can have some fun. Other maps are available! You can select any of them from the list to get a better feel for the place. Since I'm looking at Italian maps, it interesting to see the older maps showing Latin place names. I see some place names that seem to be an error by the person who drew the map. For instance, on one map they wrote the town of Baselice as Baseuce. On some maps, my towns are not included, but I recognize the neighboring towns.

There's even a button that tilts the map. The button icon is a compass needle. When I click it while viewing a particular 1808 map, the mountains it depicts seem to look 3D. Now I can understand why it was so hard for my husband and I to drive from my one grandfather's town to the other. Mountains are in the way!

While viewing a 1714 map, I clicked the Full screen button to get a better feel for the lay of the land. My ancestors all came from neighboring towns. This view makes it easy to see their proximity to one another.

You can share much of what you see on TreeAlive with your family. Set aside a genealogy session to play with his one-of-a-kind new family tree tool. I'm sure you'll have fun with it.

Adding GPS Coordinates to Your Family Tree

Entering an address into Google Maps and Bing Maps can show you two very different locations. In most of these cases, Google can't find the place and shows the same-named street in another city.

In a past article I explained why I prefer to use Bing Maps to locate streets in my ancestors' Italian towns. The other day I was looking at one town with a very dense cluster of buildings. I knew there had to be alleys running between all the buildings. How else would someone walk around? Google Maps showed no street or alley names in the cluster. Bing Maps showed a ton.

But I love using Google Street View to see what it looks like to stand where my ancestors stood. It's rare that Bing Maps lets me click to see the view from the street. This is why I often search both map sites side by side.

Why Latitude and Longitude Coordinates Matter

Here's what made me want to add coordinates to my family tree. There are too many cases where I look at a location in the Places tab of Family Tree Maker, and it's wrong. The map isn't showing the address I entered. It's doing what Google Maps sometimes does—showing me a similar street name in another town. Which is weird because Family Tree Maker uses Bing Maps as its database.

Seek out the missing and incorrect GPS coordinates in your family tree with this free tool.

I want to return to my ancestral hometowns in Italy. There are places I still want to see—and a couple of hometowns I've never visited. When I get there, it would be fantastic to pull out my iPhone and know exactly where to go. I don't want to risk getting there and finding an error in the FTM map.

See What You Have and What You're Missing

My family tree has been growing again as I work through missing source citations and add more facts. My tree now has 86,188 people, and the vast majority are from small towns in Italy. My tree includes 10,269 places. Family Tree Analyzer shows you the places in your tree that have latitude and longitude coordinates.

To see which locations in your tree have coordinates and which ones need them:

• Open your GEDCOM file in Family Tree Analyzer.
• Click the Locations tab. This puts you on the Tree View tab in the second row of tabs.
• Click the Places tab that's on the same level as Tree View. It's the last one on the right.

You will see different icons:

• A blue question mark means you need more information. I have soldiers who died in Ethiopia and Armenia. The map in Family Tree Maker is showing the right place, but Family Tree Analyzer marks them as Not Searched. I will add GPS coordinates in Family Tree Maker so they'll be in my next GEDCOM export.
• A green check mark means the place is on the map and shouldn't need any attention. In the Locations/Countries tab, you'll see the coordinates and a Geocode Status of Google Matched.
• A white check mark inside a green circle means GPS coordinates are in place. You should see the coordinates there in the table.

You will have places showing a blue question mark that don't need anything from you. Why? Because they don't have any facts attached to them. For instance, a man in my family tree was born in Coleman, Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, Canada. I have GPS coordinates for Coleman. But Crowsnest Pass and Alberta have no facts, so they need no coordinates.

There may be other blue question marks you can't resolve. In my tree, an Italian soldier died in Kosovo, and I know the name of the town. But Serbia doesn't recognize the independence of the Republic of Kosovo. So the map in Family Tree Maker doesn't know what to do with it. That's above my pay-grade, so I'll leave it alone. I have another type of problem with a soldier who died in Libya. I have a town name, but I can't locate the town or its state on the map for certain.

Work Through the Project

In Family Tree Analyzer, click the Export menu at the top of the window and select Locations to Excel. Then sort the spreadsheet by the Geocoded column. Doing this, I see:

• 1,374 locations with latitude and longitude coordinates (way more than I expected).
• 774 Google Matched locations that show coordinates in Family Tree Analyzer. I plan to check a bunch of them to make sure Family Tree Maker is showing the right place. If not, I'll add the coordinates.
• 8,198 locations with no coordinates. They say they are Not Searched. The first one I checked looks correct in Family Tree Maker, so I'm hoping most of them are fine. I'm an optimist.
• 121 locations marked as Partial Match. There are different kinds of partial matches:
  • 73 Partial Match (Google)
  • 30 Partial Match (Levels)
  • 18 Partial Match (Ord Surv)

I didn't find a definition of the three types of Partial Match, but I checked a few against Google Maps. They seem fine. In a few cases, the address no longer exists. For instance, my parents' first home is now the site of a sports arena, so the best I can do is estimate the spot. (I found a map from the right year, but it ends a short distance before the sport arena.) If I add coordinates to Family Tree Maker, I should be able to clear up all the partial matches.

Copy and Paste the Coordinates

To copy and paste the coordinates into your family tree:

• Pinpoint the location you want in Google Maps or Bing Maps.
• Right-click at that location to reveal numbers that look something like this: 30.56951350255699, 49.039306549833455.
• Click those numbers to copy them. You can paste them in the Location field found on the Places tab in Family Tree Maker. See what the best spot is for these numbers in your family tree software.

When I don't have a specific address, I do the best I can. I put my mouse in the approximate center of the town, state, or country and right-click for coordinates.

Important! GPS coordinates in the Places/Location field are not available outside of Family Tree Maker. You can't get to them from your tree on Ancestry or in the Ancestry app.

You can make your GPS coordinates accessible from your smartphone with a feature of Family Tree Analyzer. Do this after you've entered all the coordinates you want. Here's how:

• From the Maps menu, choose Export to Google MyMaps. This will save a *.kml file to your computer.
• Go to Google Maps and click the Saved tab, then the Maps tab.
• At the bottom of the window, click CREATE MAP.
• Click Create.
• Click Untitled map to give your map name and description.
• Click Import and upload your *.kml file.

With this custom Google Map, you can use your smartphone to navigate to any location in your family tree! Open the Google Maps app and tap You at the bottom of the screen. Scroll way down and tap Maps (it's next to Timeline). Your new custom map will be there, ready to use.

Fix These Genealogy Errors Before They Multiply

If you've tried the new in-browser family tree analysis programs, you know your tree has some errors to fix. I've written about GEDminer and TreeLab. Now the ever-popular Family Tree Analyzer has an in-browser version. It limits the size of the GEDCOM file you can analyze, but I recommend taking a look at it.

Every once in a while, you should check your family tree for certain errors. If you don't, you may wind up with quite a headache from trying to sort out a complicated mess. Errors can pile on top of one another, messing up a whole family.

Here are 5 of my favorite and most important family tree clean-up projects.

Don't let overlooked errors wreak havoc in your family tree. Any of these 5 genealogy clean-up projects can set things right.

1. Your Family Tree Checkup/Tune-up List

Follow these instructions to check for these types of errors in your family tree:

• dates
• places
• media
• sources
• names

If you've ever found a ton of information to add to your tree, there's a chance you made errors due to your excitement.

2. Another Way to Find Errors in Your Family Tree

Use the available error reports in your family tree software or Family Tree Analyzer. This exercise may uncover errors you thought you'd fixed or errors you never knew you made.

3. 2 Ways to Give Your Family Tree a Checkup

If you're working on your family tree pretty often, consider doing this checkup about once a month. You may find that you made a typo on a birth year that threw all that person's ancestors out of whack. You can do this checkup with Family Tree Analyzer or your family tree software program.

4. 3 Little Fixes for Your Family Tree

Sometimes I spot an error in a person's fact description. I know there's a good chance I made the same mistake other times in my tree. It might be a typo that gets repeated or a poor choice of words. Here are 3 different corrections you'll want to make in your family tree.

5. An End-of-Year Tune Up for Your Family Tree

We're only human, so we do make mistakes in our family tree. (Not everyone can FEEL themselves making a typo the way I do.) Here are a few data errors you may not have been looking for, but you'll be happy to find and fix them.

Dive into any of these 5 articles and your family tree's quality will improve.

How to Find and Fix Family Tree Inconsistencies

As I continue adding the missing source citations to my family tree, there's a nice side-effect. I get to review how I've recorded people's facts.

There's one type of fact I want to fix, but I need to be able to see the big picture first. Most of the 85,000+ people in my family tree lived in Italy. Between about 1815 and 1865, their birth record can include their baptism details.

I always record the baptism when it's available. But I didn't always put in the name and address of the church. I didn't think of it until I visited some of those Italian churches. I need a way to find all the baptism facts in my tree that are missing the church's name and address.

How can you find everyone in your family tree with inconsistent details? It's easy!

Family Tree Analyzer makes it very easy to get the big picture I need. I opened my latest GEDCOM file in FTA and clicked the Facts tab. I selected only the Baptism fact and all the relationship types. Then I clicked the button with wording that seems confusing*, but it's the right one. It says, "Show only the selected Facts for Individuals who don't have any of the excluded Fact Types".

*The button's wording confused me because I wasn't excluding any Fact Types.

This opened a new window with the results. I have 24,910 people with a baptism fact in my family tree. Since that's such a long list, I exported the results to a spreadsheet. Then I sorted the spreadsheet by the Location column. Now it's easy to see the locations that are town names, not church names.

Here's an example of what I see. Ten people have a baptism location of Apice (Apice, Benevento, Campania, Italy). A few other people have the full address of the church of San Nicola in Apice. A ton more use the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Apice. I need to:

• revisit the birth records of those 10 people
• see if their baptism happened in San Nicola or Santa Maria Assunta
• fix the address.

Why You'd Want to Do This

This exercise is all about consistency and thoroughness. I've been preaching consistency ever since I began this blog in 2017. That's because doing a task with consistency adds quality to the results. And if your family tree is important to you, you'll want its quality level to be high.

Never overlook consistency:

• Make Consistency King in Your Family Tree
• How to Batch Process Your Genealogy Documents
• Organize Your Genealogy Research By Choosing Your Style

To begin, I'm deleting the spreadsheet lines with duplicate church addresses. Instead of 100 lines showing me the location of the church in Pietrelcina, Italy, I'll keep only one line. This will be my reference for any Pietrelcina baptisms that don't name the church. I have 12 of those, so I'll go to each of them in my family tree and make the correction.

With the duplicate church names removed, my spreadsheet has 6,484 lines. Several are references to remind me of the church name in that town. I see that a TON of lines are from four towns whose source citations I haven't added yet. I'll be working on them soon.

Like every other big project I do, I'll chip away at the smaller groups of people first. I'll pick off the 10 from Apice, the five from Alberona, the 13 from Pago Veiano, and so on.

The first town I addressed is the one whose source citations I completed on Friday. It's called Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, and it's a bit sprawled out. While the population is small, the town has a bunch of hamlets, each with its own church. The spreadsheet showed me that I didn't have a street address for two of the churches I've been entering. I used Google Maps to see exactly where they are and made all my updates.

Next I need to find all the marriages that are missing the name and address of the church!

Need Another Option?

If you don't want to use Family Tree Analyzer, you have a few software options. These include:

• Family Historian (this is the best alternative option)
• Gramps (I didn't find an export-to-spreadsheet option)
• RootsMagic (not the free version, as far as I can tell)
• Legacy Family Tree
• Reunion

Think about your family tree. Is there a type of fact you're better at recording now than you were at first? Wouldn't you like to get it right? Export a spreadsheet and tease out the inconsistencies you'd like to fix.

The Ancestor Map of My Dreams for Free

Two weeks ago I searched for a website that would show all my ancestors plotted on a map. The best I found was a site called Genomelink with its Your Roots Map feature. But I wasn't satisfied with it at all.

On Saturday I found everything I wanted and much more. TreeLab is a free GEDCOM analyzer with extraordinary mapping features. Much like GEDminer, which I reviewed in March, TreeLab does a deep analysis of your family tree. And it does so in a split second! There's so much to explore with TreeLab, but let's focus on the mapping features today.

Using the TreeLab Maps

First drop your GEDCOM file onto the main TreeLab page. You aren't uploading it anywhere. The analysis takes place in the web browser on your computer in the blink of an eye. (Once again I'm in awe of computer programmers.) Click the Maps tab and then the Ancestor Map button. Identify yourself or whomever you want to analyze. I chose "showing up to 15G" because I could see at the bottom of the page that this plotted all my direct ancestors.

My quest to find the ancestor map I've been dreaming of is finally fulfilled.

The map shows my 4 U.S. ancestors (my parents and grandmothers) and my 413 Italian ancestors. Click the Filters button above the map to understand the colors. Different colored dots on the map tell you the level of ancestor. For example, 6th great grandparents have a purple dot. Larger dots mean more people. For example, one large dot on the town of Colle Sannita represents 132 of my ancestors. Hover over any dot for details. Click the dot for far more detail.

I love this visual. It's everything I hoped to find in my search two weeks ago.

Identifying Missing Places

Here's a project I need to do, and TreeLab is a great tool to help get it done. I have too many people in my family tree with no birth or death location. If you're going to analyze your GEDCOM, it helps to put everyone somewhere on the map.

I've been putting at least the country in blank locations as I come across them. But I have close to 9,000 more people like this. TreeLab to the rescue!

This free surname map is a tremendous genealogy tool.

When I click the Maps tab and the Surname Map button in TreeLab, I see the most common last names from my family tree. Each name shows how many people in my tree have that name. When I click my maiden name, Iamarino, I see all 816 people plotted on a world map. When I scroll below the map, there's a full list of 816 people in chronological order by birth. The details include each person's:

• full name
• year born
• year died
• birth place

This list makes it easy to see who has no birth place recorded at all. They're the ones I want to fix. You can click the Excel button at the top of the list to export these facts to a spreadsheet. When I do so, the Excel file also includes each person's sex and death place.

If your tree doesn't have 85,664 people, you can view these lists without downloading anything. My list of 396 people with the surname Gentile has only 5 people with no birth place. I can correct them without a download.

When I do download a surname, I can filter the spreadsheet to show everyone with an empty birth place.

Note: On TreeLab's Research tab, when I click Research Gaps I see that 77,408 out of 85,664 of my people have a birth place. That means 8,256 people need my attention. My score on death places is much worse.

Why This Matters

In 2008 I learned I could view Italian vital records on microfilm at a Family History Center. Four years later, before these records came online, I added 15,000 people to my family tree. And they all came from ONE TOWN—Baselice. (Here's what that process looked like.)

At the time, I didn't want to assume everyone was born in Baselice. I didn't even want to assume they were born in Italy! Now I know better, and I want my family tree to have better data.

Here's a good example. My 3rd great grandfather, Giuseppe Leone, died in Baselice in 1830. His death record names his parents and says he was born in Baselice. But when I entered his parents into my tree, I left their birth locations blank. After documenting thousands of 19th century Italians, I know they stayed put. No one came to those tiny, remote towns from another country.

Plus, I realized two important facts about Italian death records:

1. When the death record names the deceased's parents, it often says they were "conjugi di detto Terra". That means they were "spouses of the same town". Well, if they married in Baselice, and their child died in Baselice, it's safe to say that child was born in Baselice.
2. If someone died in the town but came from another town, the death record mentions their original town. More modern death records that have a placeholder for the deceased's birth place. On earlier records, it's common to state where the person came from.
   
   Here's an example. My 7th great grandfather's 1749 death record calls him "Domenico Mascia di Campolattaro". Domenico Mascia died in Colle Sannita, Italy, and had seven children there. But his death record states he came from the town of Campolattaro, about 11 miles away.

I'm going to pay extra attention to my direct ancestors who are missing places or using "Italy". A review of their documents may have clues I missed before.

For lots more help with understanding Italian death records, see How to Read an Italian Death Record REVISED.

Let me know if you agree TreeLab has more to offer than GEDminer. I plan to write about TreeLab's other features soon.

What Makes You Crazy About Genealogy?

I watched "Psycho" the other night. Anthony Perkins, in the role of Norman Bates, said one thing that got me thinking. When talking about his taxidermy hobby, he said, "It's more than a hobby. A hobby's supposed to pass the time, not fill it."

If that's true, Norman, what should I call genealogy? I retired because work was cutting into my genealogy time. I spend about eight hours a day on my family tree. I don't pass the time with genealogy. I fill the time with genealogy. And I couldn't be happier.

Oh, so that's what Norman means to say. He devotes so much time to taxidermy, and cares about it so much, that it's more than a hobby. Hobby isn't a strong enough word. I'd say devotion is a better word. I have a strong devotion to genealogy. That's what drives me to achieve more and more each day.

Once you understand your motivation to do genealogy, your goals become clear. Let them drive your family tree research.

What Drives You?

If spending all your free time on your family tree sounds too much like work, there's one element you may be missing. Call it a goal, a motivation, or a purpose. It's a driving force that will keep you excited by your genealogy "hobby" every day.

My earliest family tree goal was to gather all the census records for my closest family. Then I discovered I could view vital records for my Italian ancestors. After exploring one of my ancestral hometowns, I had a new goal. I wanted to document and connect everyone from that town. After finishing with that town, I moved on to the next. I have a handful of towns where I can connect almost everyone.

Before I do, though, my number one goal now is to create all the source citations I skipped in my giddy excitement. I have a spreadsheet that still contains more than 40,220 people who have no source citations. The documents are all downloaded to my computer, so I went for it, adding facts without sources. But my mission is to create a family tree that will be a treasure for anyone with roots in my ancestral hometowns. And that requires source citations so they can go see the documents for themselves.

Define Your Genealogy Motivation

I became interested in my family tree while planning my honeymoon in Italy. I did make it to my paternal grandfather's hometown on that trip, but I didn't know where to look.

Walking around Grandpa's hometown, I felt a physical pull deep inside me. I needed to discover my ancestors. I wanted to know all their names. Once I discovered the availability of Italian vital records, I made myself an expert on their towns.

What question or desire got you interested in genealogy? There are many reasons people spend time and money on genealogy, including:

• Finding a missing ancestor or birth parent
• Discovering where the family came from
• Solving a case of misattributed parentage
• Applying for dual citizenship
• Proving or disproving family lore
• Working on a personal, never-ending puzzle
• Bringing history to life in a meaningful way
• Preserving family history for future generations
• Sharing your findings with distant cousins

Once you define your genealogy motivation, you're ready for the next step.

Set Your Goals

Now that you've put your finger on what motivates you, what goals do you need to reach?

If your motivation is to apply for dual citizenship, you need specific documents. You must discover the place and date of birth of the ancestor through which you will ask for citizenship. How can you break that goal down into steps? Let's say you don't know Grandpa's town of birth in the old country. You have to seek out as many of his records in his adopted country as you can. Many records may include his town of origin. Make a list of every type of record that should be available for him. Censuses, a ship manifest, naturalization papers, draft cards, an obituary, a death certificate. Your goal is to find them and learn all you can from them.

If your purpose is to discover your birth parent, you need to take at least one DNA test. Then upload it as many places as possible. You'll have to spend your time taking online webinars to learn discovery techniques. Then explore your closest DNA matches. You may need to create family trees for important DNA matches. On any given day, your goal can be to solve one more DNA match and see how they connect to any of your other matches.

If your motivation is the never-ending puzzle, you'll never lack something to do. Your goals can be to document all your ancestor's siblings. Then find out who they married and document their families. Then move up a generation and do the same thing. If I hadn't found all the siblings, I wouldn't be able to see that my paternal grandparents were third cousins.

If your purpose is to help your distant cousins, publish your family tree online. Make your family tree as reliable and accurate as possible. Your individual goals can be to:

• Check your tree for errors and correct them
• Make sure your facts have source citations that any interested party can verify
• Seek out new record collections that may hold information for you
• Maintain a consistent, professional style in how you present names, dates, and places

Track Your Progress

Almost two years ago, I used Family Tree Analyzer to spot everyone in my family tree who had no source citations. About 87% of my people had no source citations. It was more than 70,000 people. Today I've got that number down to 40,220. It could take me another two years to finish this important project! And that's why I push myself so hard. My daily goal is to remove 100 people from that list. I've had days where I completed citations for more than 150 people. Those days usually end with a sore wrist from working my mouse so hard.

The point is, I always know where I stand with this goal. Seeing that huge number of unsourced people go down each day drives me to do more.

Does your family tree pass the time or fill the time? Are you lacking motivation? Would you be more productive if you had specific goals? Being productive makes me feel fulfilled. It can do the same for you.

And why was Norman Bates so devoted to his craft of taxidermy? Ask his mother's 10-year-old corpse.

This Free, Elegant GEDCOM Analyzer Is a Wonder

How does your family tree measure up? When I tried out Ancestry Pro Tools almost two years ago, I didn't care about its Tree Checker feature. I had free Family Tree Analyzer software to help me find all kinds of mistakes.

Even without subscribing to Pro Tools, my tree on Ancestry has a rating of 8.3 ("Very good"). What's keeping me from scoring a 10? A few data errors, lots of missing source citations, and what they think are 10,398 duplicate people. (They're not.)

But I found a new tool for improving your family tree rating called GEDminer that's outstanding! You've got to take a look at this thing. There's nothing to download, but you need to export your family tree's GEDCOM file first.

The instant, deep analysis of your family tree is worth a ton, but this genealogy tool is free.

GEDminer is a web-based program that's a very friendly way to see how your family tree measures up. If you're skeptical or want to see it in action first, you can view an analysis of their sample GEDCOM. Please understand your file is NOT uploaded to a server. The data processing happens in your web browser, and all the results go POOF! when you close your browser. (Your data may stay in your computer's cache memory for a while.)

Go to https://gedminer.com and drop your GEDCOM file in the box on the webpage. (The link to see sample data is beneath the box.) I dropped in my latest GEDCOM with 85,360 people. I know I'm missing tons of source citations—I'm always working on that. So where do I stand?

• My Tree Health Score is 75.33%. It says that's better than 55.56% of other users.
• I scored 74.09% in Completeness (defined as names, dates & places filled in). When I click on Completeness, it breaks this down into terrifying numbers:
  • 50,805 non-living people missing a death place
  • 47,995 non-living people missing a death date
  • 10,007 people missing a birth place. I have been putting a state or county into the birth and death place fields when I see they're empty. I have a long way to go.
• I scored 52.42% in Sourcing. This says I still have 40,616 people with no source citations. The spreadsheet I'm using for this huge task agrees!
• I scored 99.9% on Consistency (defined as free of errors & warnings). It lists 5 people with "data errors" for me to fix, but these are only a taste. They include people who were too old or young when their child was born. But the full, detailed list of data errors is in the next section.

Beneath these scores is a section called Quick Wins. This tells me my family tree has:

• 23 data errors (I worked on it and got it down to three errors, two of which are supported by the documents: an 88-year-old father and a 56-year-old mother.)
• 10,007 people without a birth place (I got it down to 9,953.)
• 40,616 unsourced people

The last two are also found above in the Tree Health Score section. But under Quick Wins, you can click these problem types and go to a new page filled with the exact details.

Click a type of error to see complete details about what you need to correct. Then export the full list as a spreadsheet and get busy.

• When you click to see your data errors in detail, the new page gives you the option of seeing:
  • All data errors
  • Date issues only
  • Age issues only
  • Relationship problems only (for me, these were all mothers who were too young)
  • Duplicate Facts only (for me, most of these are cases where I have two very different death records for people, so I recorded both)
  • Quality issues only (this would be key missing facts; I have none!)
• When you click to see your missing places or unsourced people errors in detail, the new page gives you the option of seeing:
  • All missing items
  • Line Origins only (these are the people you're stuck on—you can't ID their parents)
  • Missing Dates only
  • Missing Places only
  • Unsourced people only
  • People with no spouse (if we knew the spouse, they'd be in there, right?)
  • Missing Deaths only

Best of all, after you scroll to the bottom of a long list and click Show All, you can scroll back up and choose Export CSV. This gives you a spreadsheet to use to complete your fixes. You can tackle them one-by-one and delete them from the spreadsheet or mark them done.

I won't export my list of unsourced people since I'm already working on that. But when I'm finished with that project, I can use GEDminer again to see who slipped through the cracks.

While you're on that detail page, look close to the top of the page for four links:

• Suggestions
• Errors
• Vital Sharpener
• Tree Structure

Now:

• Click Vital Sharpener to see all the incomplete dates in your family tree. Sometimes we can't do anything about these because no records are available. But if the people are from the 1900s or later, try a new search on a site you don't use all the time.
• Now click Tree Structure right next to Vital Sharpener. These results have different categories to view:
  • Hidden Cousins tries to group together people with the same last name. That doesn't work well for my tree. Welcome to small towns in Italy.
  • Unlinked Individuals shows you the unattached people floating in your family tree. I have 184 people with zero connection to me. But they're in there on purpose. If more vital records ever become available, I may be able to connect them.
  • Duplicate Finder says I have 409 people with the same (or almost the same) name and birth year. I don't have enough information to be sure some are the same person. I'll review them and see if I can find a few that I should merge. You'll see that the list ranges in match-i-ness from 100% on down. My lowest duplicate is a 57% match, but they're worth looking into. They have the same name, same hometown, same father's name, and very close birth years.

The bonus facts this free tool displays about your family tree can be real eye-openers. And it's all interactive. Click around!

Still Not Sure? Here's the Old Way.

Before I found GEDminer, I planned to show you how you can use Family Tree Analyzer to find these errors. I'm so impressed with GEDminer, but you know I appreciate the heck out of Family Tree Analyzer. So here's what to click. You won't get your score, but you will get lists of what needs your attention. Get your GEDCOM file and open it in Family Tree Analyzer.

To find data errors, click the Errors/Fixes tab and under Data Errors select:

• Birth before father aged 13 and mother aged 13
• Birth after father aged 90+ and mother aged 60+
• Birth after mother's death and more than 9m after father's death
• Marriage before aged 13 and spouse aged 13
• Marriage after death and after spouse's death
• Facts dated before birth
• Birth after death/burial
• Birth after baptism/christening
• Facts dated after death
• Burial/cremation before death
• Child born too soon after sibling
• Child likely born too soon after sibling
• Male Wifes and Female Husbands
• Duplicate Fact
• Possible Duplicate Fact

One way to find duplicate people in your family tree is to go to the Errors/Fixes tab, choose Duplicates? then sort by Birth Date.

To find unlinked individuals, click the Main Lists tab. In the Relation column of the Individuals table, filter to select "Unknown".

Here's the report I used to make a spreadsheet of all my people who had zero source citations. Go to the Main Lists tab and find the Num Sources column in the Individuals table. Click the down arrow for that column and Sort A to Z. Filtering doesn't work, although it should. I exported the full list, then deleted everyone who didn't have zero source citations.

I hope you find this breakdown of problems inspiring and not discouraging. After you've made a good amount of corrections, go back and see the improvement in your family tree.

Taking the Next Step in Family Tree Analysis

Last week I showed you how to use a spreadsheet to gain insight into your family tree. If you're a Mac user, be sure to see the useful comments beneath that article from Mac user Mick.

In the article I challenged myself to tackle a bigger project. I wanted to use Microsoft Power BI Desktop software to further dissect the data and look for trends. I've always been a frustrated programmer, meaning I want to be good at it, but I get so frustrated! This time I got clear step-by-step Power BI instructions from Microsoft Copilot—what a lifesaver.

Working with the Data from Your Family Tree

The first step was to import my spreadsheet of everyone in my family tree into the program. The spreadsheet I exported from MyHeritage Family Tree Builder last week had problems. It wasn't possible to use that file because several rows didn't follow the format. So I exported my people from Family Tree Analyzer (old reliable). Once I imported the spreadsheet, I could see all the category names in Power BI Desktop. These include ID, LastName, FirstName, BirthDate, BirthLocation, etc.

How many ways can you think of to analyze your family tree?

Next, in Power BI Desktop's Report view, I created a table to hold all the data. I gave it some visual formatting to make it easier for me to understand:

• Bold column headers with a color background.
• Alternating white and light green rows like some ancient, pleated computer printout paper.

Note: I'm using the town of Colle Sannita in these examples because it's so complete in my family tree. About 95% of the available vital records are in my tree. The other 5% are records of people from out of town or who I can't identify.

Then I used the Filters column to the right of my table and added one data field: BirthLocation. I chose Advanced filtering, not Basic filtering. This let me filter down to any birth location that contains a certain town name, like Colle Sannita. When I click Apply filter, I can see that it's working. Hurray!

But I want to see how many people that filter includes. How many people in my family tree have I documented as being born in Colle Sannita?

I consulted Copilot to find out how I can do this. First I had to add a new function to my data fields to count the rows. The Copilot guidance used the generic title of RowCount for this. Next, to show the row count, I had to add a "card" to display it on. I did that and formatted it until I got what I wanted: a whole number with a comma to show thousands. My total count before applying a filter is 85,362 (bigger than it was last week). To make it more straightforward, I changed the function's name from RowCount to People. Now my card says 85,362 People.

Let's put it to use!

• When I filter BirthLocation to contain Colle Sannita, I have 25,120 People.
• When I filter BirthLocation to contain Baselice, I have 17,335 People.
• When I filter BirthLocation to contain New York, I have 902 People.
• When I filter BirthLocation to contain Bronx, I have 293 People.

I can do this with MarriageLocation and DeathLocation. I can do it for last names. I'll clear out my filter and drag LastName into the Filter section. I'll type my name, Iamarino, in the search box, and I see right there that I have 815 people with that last name. When I click Apply filter, the main screen shows the filtered list of people and the card says 815 People.

Getting More Specific

Now let's try two filters at once. I know there was an earthquake in Colle Sannita in 1805 that killed many people. I'm going to drag both DeathLocation and DeathDate into the Filters area. Using Advanced filtering, I'll choose:

• DeathLocations that contain Colle Sannita, and
• DeathDates that contain 1805.

Combining these filters leaves me with 54 people. I know the earthquake happened on 26 Jul 1805, thanks to Colle Sannita expert, Dr. Fabio Paolucci. I see people in this list who died well before the earthquake. I'm going to change my DeathDate filter to "contains 26 Jul 1805" or "contains 27 Jul 1805". This brings the list down to 28 people. (I can't add more than two dates, but a visual scan of the dates showed that all the victims seemed to die on these two dates.)

I created another filter to find years with very high or low death counts. I added a filter for DeathLocation that contains Colle Sannita, and one for DeathDate. I can keep changing the year and clicking Apply filter to see how many deaths there were. Here are a few results:

• 1810 had 113 deaths
• 1811 had 165 deaths
• 1812 had 145 deaths
• 1813 had 88 deaths
• 1860 had 126 deaths

I wanted to find a way to export or graph these numbers, but FRUSTRATION! My only choice would be to keep changing the filter and jot down the results in another spreadsheet. (Any programmers reading this are laughing their heads off.) I tried creating a dashboard that could show the results of various filters, but it didn't work. If I do make a separate spreadsheet, I can use Excel to turn the data into line graphs and bar charts. I have started doing this. See the image below.

It didn't take long to enter facts into a new spreadsheet to make these line graphs.

Going Deeper

Next let's try a 3-part filter. I'm wondering if the girl babies outnumbered the boy babies in my ancestral hometowns. I'll create a filter that contains a BirthLocation of Colle Sannita and a BirthDate of 1810. I'll include Gender, which shows me the Female/Male split without my having to touch it. Then I'll keep changing the year.

• In 1810 there were 199 births: 103 female and 96 male. Girls win.
• In 1820 there were 170 births: 79 female, 91 male. Boys win.
• In 1830 there were 177 births: 93 female, 84 male. Girls win.
• In 1840 there were 139 births: 71 female, 68 male. Girls win, but it's a close one.
• In 1850 there were 210 births: 114 female, 96 male. Girls win.
• In 1860 there were 206 births: 113 female, 93 male. Girls win.
• In 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, and 1910 the boys win. Change in the water?

Now let's take a quick look at the marriages I've documented in Colle Sannita. There are two main churches, but the one in the heart of town is much older. I'll filter the MarriageLocation to those containing the older church: San Giorgio Martire. Wow! I've got 4,119 people who I know married there. I'll change the filter to show the location of the newer church in the area called Decorata. I've got 245 people who married there.

How are these both odd numbers? My guess is because of people who had more than one marriage. Only the preferred marriage appears in this database.

One more filter for the road. Italians have a tremendous reverence for the Virgin Mary, so they use the name Maria a LOT. Even the boys got Maria for a middle name. So, how many people in my family tree from Colle Sannita have a first name that contains Maria? 21,491 people!

I'd love to hear your suggestions for other ways to dissect the facts in my family tree.

Use a Spreadsheet to Analyze Your Family Tree

My family tree is an enormous database with 85,363 people. People often write to me to ask why their great grandparents are in my tree. They want to know how I'm related. Many times I'm not an actual relative.

That's when I have to explain the purpose of my family tree. I've connected entire towns through blood or marriage. Everyone in there has some type of connection to me. It's a jigsaw puzzle with no border pieces. It never ends, and I love that.

When you export your family tree to a spreadsheet, you can pull out statistics you can't get any other way.

I need to find a way to create statistics about my family tree to help explain why their people are in there. I don't see any reports in various desktop family tree software that would do the trick. The Ancestry.com version of my family tree gives a few stats in its tree overview:

• People 85,363
• Photos 11,233 (at least 10,000 are document images)
• Documents 13 (these are PDFs)
• Records 1 (no idea what that is)

That isn't what I want. If only I could use an Excel spreadsheet to sort and filter these stats to the surface.

I won't use Family Tree Analyzer today because readers point out it doesn't have a Mac version anymore. But a lot of software doesn't have a Mac version. I've been saying that since 1984.

I downloaded MyHeritage Family Tree Builder, and then found out it has no Mac version. {sigh} Let's get on with it.

Choose Your Software

First I found an article titled "5 Best Free Gedcom to Excel Converter Software for Windows". It recommended these programs you can download:

1. Gramps. This one may work on your Mac and on Linux, too.
2. MyHeritage Family Tree Builder. This has tons of features, especially if you sync it with your tree on MyHeritage.
3. ScionPC. Last updated in 2016.
4. Oxy-Gen. Last updated i 2023.
5. GEDxlate. This is so old it may not work on your Windows computer.

Export Your Data

I imported my latest complete GEDCOM file into MyHeritage Family Tree Builder. Every day I export two GEDCOM files from Family Tree Maker (my program of choice). One excludes media and notes, and one includes everything. Then I went to the Edit menu in Family Tree Builder and chose Export to Excel. I clicked Export list of people, but you can create a custom export if you wish.

The export to Excel command in any software creates a .CSV file. CSV stands for Comma Separated Values, and you can use any brand of spreadsheet software to open it. Even though your software says "Export to Excel", it is not creating an Excel file that you may not be able to use.

Open that CSV file with whatever spreadsheet software you have—even if it's Google Sheets. Then save it to your preferred format. I have Microsoft Office 365, so I saved my file in Excel's .xlsx format.

Make Your Data Easier to Use

Now you can view the results in your preferred software program. The first thing I always do is make the top row (with the column header names) bold, and freeze the top row. That way the headers are always visible as I scroll. I went ahead and made some columns wider so I could see their contents. Next, I hid a few columns I'm not going to use:

• ID
• Prefix
• Married Name (No!! Birth names only.)
• Death cause

I rearranged a couple of columns, too. I moved Last name before First name, and Gender after Suffix. I clicked Sort on Excel's Data menu and sorted my 85,363 people by Last name then First name.

Now we're ready for some statistics!

Start Filtering

On Excel's Data menu, I clicked Filter. This puts an arrow (indicating a menu) beside each column header. I clicked the arrow beside Birth place and typed Colle Sannita in the Text Filters search box. That's my paternal grandfather's hometown.

This tells me my family tree has 25,122 people born in Colle Sannita. (I can look at the bottom of the Excel window to see how many records fit in this filter.) The beauty of the filter is that it will select any place, any address, that includes Colle Sannita. That's something I can't do any other way.

I can change that filter to see that my tree has (listed from most to least):

• 25,122 people born in Colle Sannita (repeating this for comparison)
• 17,335 people born in Baselice (my maternal grandfather's hometown)
• 10,409 people born in Pesco Sannita (birthplace of a 1st great grandmother)
• 2,789 people born in Santa Paolina (birthplace of a 2nd great grandmother)
• 2,696 people born in Circello (birthplace of a 3rd great grandfather)
• 1,962 people born in Sant'Angelo a Cupolo (this town's records begin in 1861, keeping this number low)
• 935 people born in Apice (birthplace of a 3rd great grandmother)

I had no idea what these totals would be, and it's exciting to see them. I've been working hardest on Colle Sannita for a long time because I have the most ancestors there.

Now I'll use the filter on the Marriage place column. This shows me I have recorded (listed from most to least):

• 8,200 marriages in Colle Sannita
• 4,400 marriages in Baselice
• 3,914 marriages in Pesco Sannita
• 1,502 marriages in Santa Paolina
• 1,314 marriages in Circello
• 538 marriages in Sant'Angelo a Cupolo
• 338 marriages in Apice

I've been busy, haven't I? But what I see is how much work I need to do in many of my ancestral hometowns.

Filter Out More Facts

Another fact I can filter is any date (birth, marriage, or death) that includes a particular year. I typed 1855 into the text filter search box and found that my family tree has 542 people born in that year. In most of my ancestral hometowns, record keeping began in the second quarter of 1809. So how many people in my family tree were born in the first full year of civil record keeping? I'll type 1810 in the text filter search box to see that it's 581 people.

A big part of my family came from the town that started keeping records in 1861. So how many people in my family tree were born in that year? I'll type 1861 in the text filter search box to see that it's 539 people.

If I wanted to take the time, I could track trends in my towns by using two or more filters at once. I can filter to show one town and one year. This shows me that in 1860 the town of Colle Sannita recorded 206 births and 126 deaths. I've taken the time to work ALL this town's available vital records into my family tree, so those numbers are good.

Take the Next Step

I could use this data in more powerful software to report on birth, death, and marriage trends. For instance, there's Microsoft Power BI (BI = Business Intelligence), which I've used before. I've noticed that some years have a much higher death count than others. This could point to a terrible disease sweeping through the town, or an earthquake. If I were to create such a report, it would give me more insight into the lives of my ancestors.

It's been a long time since I used Microsoft Power BI to analyze my family tree. Now the software has AI features to make it easier to use. It sure sounds like I need to try it again.

Wouldn't you like to know where your family tree has the most roots? What other details would you filter for?