In your account’s “Settings”, you can set what information can be found with the search function. Now, we’ve revised this option and added the photo options:

You can now set in your privacy settings who may see your photo albums, your favourites and the photos you’re tagged in.

(Click image to enlarge…)

Genealogy, as you all know, can be a complicated thing, especially when it comes to cycle relationships, in other words, when a person appears more than once in the family tree (Don’t know what to do if this is the case in your tree? Then have a look here: Cycle relationship help).

If our epoch-making ( ) tutorial can’t help you, you can as well go the whole hog to complete your confusion and watch the following video that was made to visualize a hilarious song by the American country singer and novelty song artist Ray Stevens: “I’m my own Grandpa”. Enjoy!

As you already know, on itsourtree.com you can search the entire worldwide data base for names and, if they allow it, contact the people you found. This way, you might find out about relatives you didn’t know about, come to know ancestors or branches of your family tree you suspected to exist but did not know where and when.

If you’re looking for relatives to expand your family tree, you will probably not want to search our database for everyone with your surname but only for living people. Our constantly growing data base may turn up with too many results, so we added a feature that lets you choose between “All persons” and “Living persons”.

We’ve added two more tooltips to the site to help new and unexperienced users. The tooltips are shown when you touch the question mark with your mouse cursor:

The first tooltip explains the birth order of siblings. You can either set the birth order for every profile or enter the date of birth. Then, the birth order will be determined automatically.

(Click image to enlarge)

The second tooltip helps with cycle relationships and gives examples of the phenomenon.

(Click image to enlarge)

On Sunday, the photo albums and profile images could not be displayed for about 6 hours. The amount of emails on this topic showed us that you’ve noticed that, too. Whatever the guys over at Amazon were doing, their server where we store the photos was inexplicably unavailable. So please don’t blame it on us, we’re innocent.

But don’t panic in these cases: The images are safely stored and will be displayed again as soon as the connection to the server is reestablished. For those of you who tried to upload a portrait image during the server downtime: Please try again, the photos will now be stored correctly.

In a German cave, fourty 3,000-year-old skeletons were found last week. Uwe Lange (48) and Manfred Huchthausen (58) live only a few miles away from the cave and have been identified as direct offsprings of the cavemen by means of a DNA test. This fact makes their family tree the oldest in the world and the two men famous in the media, as there are 100-120 generations between their ancestors from Bronze age and them.

…you will probably want to use one of our avatars to fill the gap in your ancestor’s profile. As previously reported, we’re constantly adding new avatars to our collection and you can add them to your relatives’ profiles with a click on “Edit portrait” in the person’s detailed profile. For your convenience, you can now add an avatar picture as portrait image directly from the photo upload window in your family tree. Simply click on “Choose avatar” to get to the avatar collection directly.

There are quite a few family trees in our database with several hundred profiles. These trees could not be displayed without the little green arrows that lead the viewer to another part of the tree:

The number in the arrow always has to be calculated by our server, everytime you login or change your tree’s view. To speed up this process for those of you who have a large number of profiles in the tree, we’ve changed this feature, so that if the number of profiles “behind” the arrow is larger than 99, the system will only show this information and the node will look like this:

 You haven’t seen this live in your own tree yet? Well, this is your incentive to add and invite more relatives to your tree!

To some ears, Chinese names might still sound a little strange. But for most of us, the original way of writing them probably is a much greater problem, at least on internet sites where system fonts are not supported… If you’ ve got relatives from China and want to add their names correctly, you can now use the new setting “use system fonts” in the tree’s preferences under “Name format”.

Enabling this action will change the display of your relatives’ names slightly, but you will be able to insert for example Chinese letters as well. Of course, you can also print your tree with the system fonts, too.

It’s been all over the media today: A British pensioner claims to have the world’s largest family tree with 10,000 people and William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great among his ancestors. He spent around GBP 20,000 and 28 years on research. As he started his tree when the word “internet” was science fiction for most of us, he had to follow the paper trail to his family’s past. That is why his work is clearly a remarkable achievement and so the odds are looking good that he makes it to a Guinness World Record. Here’s his homepage.

Most of you already know the partnership icon that is displayed on the connecting lines between the profiles. You can (de)activate them in the tree’s settings under “Node style”.

 The three existing icons “married couple”, “ex married couple” and partners…

 have been complemented by another: Ex-partners (non-married couples) are marked by the following icon:

From now on, itsourtree.com supports Adobe Flash Player 9 only. The latest version allows us to print the tree, use the navigator feature and to add cycle relationships to the family tree. Most of you already use it anyway, but for those who cannot enter their tree: Here’s the solution. You need to update your Flash Player to the latest version and don’t worry, it’s easy. Simply click on the image below:

 Some users (especially those who still use Internet Explorer 6) may encounter difficulties with the installation. In this case, it will probably help to deinstall the existing Adobe Flash Player before installing the new one. To do so, choose “Adobe Flash Player X” in the Windows control panel under “Software“. Afterwards, you install the latest version.

To check the Flash Player version on your system, please click here.

We recommend the latest version of Mozilla Firefox  or Microsoft Internet Explorer for a perfect view on your family tree.