When a person has no children and won’t have children any more because he/she is for example deceased, it is now possible to show this state in your family tree by means of a genealogical sign. To mark a person as childless, you simply click on the profile’s arrow pointing down. Apart from the possibility to add a son or a daughter, you can set “No children” as well.

Instead of an arrow, the genealogical sign for an extinct line will be displayed below the person’s profile: Two crosses. To remove this mark and to add a child, simply click on the symbol.

Your Mom’s upset, refuses to wash your socks, your primary source of food has become the local Burger Hut? You’re even worried about your legal estate? Or you just want to show your love more than once a year?

No problem! Grab your Mom and fly to Paraguay, they’re celebrating Mother’s Day on May 15th! Your Filofax says no to such plans? Still no problem! Have a look here and pick a country.

The equivalent for Dad can be found here.

Let’s see what others say about us… We’ve had a look at recent posts in the Blogosphere. Here is what we found.

Joe has started his tree…
Solid “smacks” his lips!
Bert recommends us…
We’re recommended for educational computing here!
Some developers track down their relatives using our site.
We help to solve mysteries…
Someone named “H” likes us, too.
Mr. Vrabel likes the interface.
Stormy travels past our site.
And Tony found us via Lifehacker.

Thanks to all the bloggers!

As announced previously, we’ve been moving this weekend. Beating the odds, we managed not to break anything and all servers are in good condition. We love the beautiful new office that finally provides us with the space our expanding team needed so badly! To prove that we’ve been working, here are some pictures of us moving the office:

Constant growth of our crew has forced us to leave our cute little office in Hamburg. This weekend, we’ll move to… Hamburg! The new office will be right around the corner, no more than 500 m as the crow flies. To save ourselves from problems like the guys’ in the pictures, we will be packing everything thoroughly tonight and go about the transportation of all our servers and stuff on Saturday. As a consequence, we probably won’t be able to answer any customers’ requests until Tuesday at noon.

Our new address is:

OSN GmbH
Heimhuder Str. 72
20148 Hamburg
Germany

The map below shows our new location:

Größere Kartenansicht

Did you know that you can change the number of displayed generations in your tree? By clicking the icon “Settings” in the navigation bar of your tree, you will find the tab “Generations”.

Here, you can adjust the number of generations (2-10) of your ancestors as well as descendants individually. By checking the box “Highlight direct relatives”, the connections to blood relatives will be marked by a black line. The lines linking all other persons are light grey.

You can help others recognize ancestors and relatives by tagging them in pictures. There are some new features for editing the photos: Now, you can rotate and crop them and set links to other persons in the photos and comment on them.

To use the new features, click “Edit photo” in the detail page of the photo. The buttons “rotate left” and “rotate right” rotate the photo in the desired directions. “Crop” allows you to cut your picture. With “Add Note” you can mark (or tag) persons in the picture and add short notes. Simply drag the little box to desired spot in the picture and start typing in the name of the person you would like to mark. In the list, you will find all the persons to be considered automatically. When you’re done, click “OK” and “Save”.

Now, the person is marked (or tagged) in the picture. On mouseover, the note and the name will be displayed. A click on the tag will take you to the person’s profile. Additionally, in all profiles in the tree the link “Photos of XY” will be available. As soon as a person is tagged, the photo will show up in her/his profile.

We build a message system so that you can stay in contact with your relatives easily without having to know their email addresses. Furthermore, your correspondence with your relatives and friends is available to you at any computer connected to the internet, as it is stored on our servers.

To send an email simply click “Send XY a message” in an active relatives’s or friend’s profile.

You can also define individual recipient lists such as “all friends” or “all relatives” in your “Messages” section.

Did you know about the cool navigator feature in your tree? With that, you can search for a relative in your tree and pinpoint him or her at lightspeed!

Simply enter a first or surname in the panel that pops up when you click on the “Navigator” icon in the lower right corner of your tree. The display will jump to the name if it is among your relatives’ names, no matter if the person is currently displayed or hidden behind one of the green arrows.

We’re currently planning to build an “Infocenter” to provide you with all information for your first steps on itsourtree.com and some interesting facts about genealogy. And now it’s your turn: What information would you like to have in your infocenter?

Resources for genealogical research

• How to use?
• Where to find?
• What to do with the information?

Searches

• Search in list of ancestors
• Search for more information on ancestors/relatives
• Search in/for other sources

Genealogical research

• Historical information (old place names, emigration, immigration)
• Information on my family
• Information on specific ancestors

Information on heraldry

• Design of family crests
• Is there a family crest for my name?

Enjoy the poll!

With yesterday’s version, we did not only improve our application and fix some bugs but we also renovated our Terms of Use and the Privacy Statement. Both documents had been relics of itsourtree.com’s Stone Age and needed refurbishment due to the rapid development and realignment of the site. The new version has been adjusted to all future challenges and will assure you of the following:

1. The basic features of the website will always be FREE. Among these are all features we offer today.
2. We will NEVER pass on any personal data to third parties.

What’s new?

Basically, the texts have been updated and adjusted to new features such as the rights management and the search function that have been added to the Terms of Use. The new feature of uploading photo albums forced us to add a passage that prohibits the upload of forbidden or offensive content.

In the Privacy Statement, you will now find a passage about advertisement. With that, we would like to keep the option open to add advertisement to itsourtree.com’s website or emails in the future.

>> Terms of Use

>> Privacy Statement

We’ve got a new feature for you as a late Christmas present: loads of new options for your tree.

From now on, you’ll find the “Settings”-icon next to the other icons in the lower right corner of your tree. A click on it offers lots of changes to your tree which we are going to explain to you in the next days (e.g. ***-kicking rotating nodes! )

But now to the first part of the settings: the “Tree style”. Until now, it has only been possible to show the tree in a standard view. The new feature offers three new styles. Here, they are presented briefly:

The first option is the “Vertical style”. Here, you see all profiles in a vertical format. In this view, the tree doesn’t go from left to right but from up to down. In the other two variants, you can choose whether you would like to display your relative’s “names only” or “photos only”. All other information (like the birthday) remains hidden. Of course, this setting effects the printing layout, too.