A One-Tree or also called World-Tree is a communal, crowd-sourced attempt at creating a single genealogical tree of all peoples. Essentially, a merger of each database of each genealogist participating. They are popular in that your work is hosted by a separate entity and hopefully outlives you and your work. They make it easy to create and edit your tree online (as opposed to creating your own site and installing software to allow online editing and display of your latest work at all times). The downsides are when conflicts arise between genealogists who wish to document and edit a same / similar person but have conflicting information. (That is, difficult to have research stubs of un-sourced information or work in progress that is not well sourced yet. A need often required when trying to find a distant ancestor where records are not forthcoming.) This is different than services like AncestryDNA or MyHeritage which allow you to upload and keep independent your own tree (body of research work)); which then requires you to explicitly copy in fragments of others work that you find and wish to merge into yours.
Examples of One-Tree sites that exist today are:
Examples of One-Tree sites that exist today are:
- FamilySearch Tree
- Geni (now owned by MyHeritage)
- WeRelate
- WikiTree
External References
- Kitty Cooper's Blog Post on using One World Trees