Posts from 'Did you know...?'

If your growing your family tree quickly, you will probably know the problem: you need more space on the screen for your tree!

When you click on “Full screen”, all you see is your family tree, the header and footer are not displayed. A click on “Normal view” will take you back to the usual view of itsourtree.com.

To show your relatives if you’re online or not, you can enter your account data of one (or more) of the various messengers that we support (ICQ, Skype, AIM…). The little icon (online/offline) will show your relatives your online status.

Most of these messenger services have disabled this feature by default and you have to enable it before your status becomes visible to your relatives. On Skype for example, you can change this setting like this >>.

Have you tried the alternative way to display your family tree? Apart from the classic style, you can look at your family in an ancestor circle. You find the icon to switch to this display method in the lower right corner of your tree.

In this view, the next relatives (max. 5 generations) are displayed. When you click on another person in the circle, the circle will be reloaded and then displayed from this person’s view.

Of course, the circle can be printed as well. Here, you can choose between printing empty (grey) nodes or not. With the slider to the left you set the number of pages your circle is to be printed on.

Currently, you can choose between eight different language versions for your family tree and we’re still expanding. With these languages we should be able to cater for a large part of your family.

If your relatives come from other countries or have another mother tongue, you can invite them in their language directly after entering the email address for the invitation. Whereever you enter a person’s email address, you can choose from all our language versions by using the drop down box next to the address field. With a click on “invite” an email in the appropriate language will be sent.

Start learning foreign languages now on parentistretti.it, meusparentes.com.pt (or meusparentes.com.br), verwant.nl, verwandt.de, familleunie.fr, moikrewni.pl, miparentela.com.

A vCard is an electronic business card that you can save in your email client with a mouseclick. Furthermore, you can use vCards in mobile phones or PDAs or send them by email. The data saved in a vCard can be business and private addresses, websites, telephone numbers and much more. It’s a pretty neat way to manage your contact data!

That is why we added a feature that lets you export your family’s contact data as vCard as well. In the profile, you can click on “Export as vCard” to download the person’s contact data in vCard format.

When starting a family tree, the “newbie” sees a help window for the first steps. If you would like to see it again, simply click on the info-icon in the lower right corner of your tree window.

The baloontips explain all the basic things to do when you’re new to Itsourtree.com: How to invite relatives and friends, how to export the tree to a GEDCOM file, how to move the tree and so on and so forth…

You can navigate between the entries by clicking “Back” and “Next“, to close the window click on the little “x” in the corner.
If you need more help or further details, please have a look at our Help section.

We’ve added the possibility to print your profile page! To do so, scroll down your profile page and click on “Print this page”. The same feature is available for your family list and the calendar.

We’re planning to make the page exportable as a PDF file, so that you can save the content of the page in a PDF.

(click to enlarge image…)

Frequently, we get requests of members how to change a person’s email address when he/she has changed the provider or to erase typos. Here’s the solution:

If you had a typo in a person’s email address or if you’ve sent the person’s invitation to the wrong email address, simply click on the person’s “profile” link in the node. You can now enter an “Additional email address” and reinvite the person with the new email address. After saving, you can delete the wrong email address by clicking “Delete“.

If you want to change your own email address, you can do that in your “Settings“. In “Email and password“, you can add or delete additional addresses and set your primary email address (you will receive all notifications to your primary email address). As an email address is needed for your login, you can delete all email addresses except one.

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.

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.

People keep asking us why they can no longer edit this or that profile.

In most cases, the answer is quite simple: The profile in question is “claimed”. Once someone you invited accepts your invitation and participates in building your family tree, he/she claimes the profile and is the only person who can edit or delete it. In your tree, profiles that have been claimed by your relatives no longer show the Profile button to you.

If you have any photos of your relatives, why not add them to your tree? To upload a portrait picture in your tree, you have to follow these steps:

Clicking on the photo space in a person’s node opens a dialogue box. Click “Browse” to choose a photo. The two arrows on the left rotate the image. You can also cut the photo and choose which part of the picture will be displayed as the portrait.