New Tree Tool ???

[Katydid]

I do notice however, if you have a birth or death location listed dates are not needed for ancestor to be shown when match clicks on your tree.

I'm confused by this statement and also the assertion that if no locations or dates are given that changing the ancestor from "living" to "deceased" does not fix their "private" status. My experiences were different. I did some experimentation between my kits' pedigrees and observed 1) that ancestors with locations but no dates were indeed showing up as private and 2) once I changed an ancestor with no date or location information from "living" to "deceased", I was able to view that person just fine from other matching kits. Under the Genealogy privacy settings, I've set all deceased persons, regardless of the 100-year cutoff, to publicly viewable. Maybe that makes a difference?

Of course, expecting all existing kit owners to go in and fix every setting for every ancestor, or to follow Wcoaster's suggested Gedcom editing workaround, is not realistic. It's not going to happen. FTDNA needs to fix this problem.

[James Dotson]

I am on an Android device and parts of the page move off screen and will not scroll back to where I can see them. Since the rest of the site works fine I have to assume it is an issue with the family tree function.

[efgen]

once I changed an ancestor with no date or location information from "living" to "deceased", I was able to view that person just fine from other matching kits. Under the Genealogy privacy settings, I've set all deceased persons, regardless of the 100-year cutoff, to publicly viewable. Maybe that makes a difference?

Yes.

There are 3 privacy categories:

* Living people
* Deceased people born within the past 100 years.
* Deceased people born more than 100 years ago.

Each of these can be set to either Public or Private.

I believe (need to verify) that the first two are private by default, and the last one is public by default.

So if you have a deceased person without a date of BIRTH, then the system doesn't know if the person was born within the past 100 years or not, and errs on the side of caution by assuming less than 100 years. (I need to check on how this works if the date of death is already more than 100 years -- hopefully we assume the DOB is too!)

If you have a deceased person without a date of death, then we don't know they are deceased. (Similar to above, I need to check on how this is handled if we have a DOB more than 100 years ago.)

And I've submitted a request to IT to recognize words such as About, After, Before and Between for non-exact dates, since I don't think they are recognized at the moment.

Elise

[Katydid]

Yes.

There are 3 privacy categories:

* Living people
* Deceased people born within the past 100 years.
* Deceased people born more than 100 years ago.

Each of these can be set to either Public or Private.

I believe (need to verify) that the first two are private by default, and the last one is public by default.

Thanks, Elise. That is correct.

If you have a deceased person without a date of death, then we don't know they are deceased.
Elise

But this worked fine under the old system. I hope this is viewed as a bug and a report has been submitted.

By the way, we seem to have two threads going with basically the same name (just different #s of question marks). Can they be merged?

[ccollinsmith]

It works for me

It works fine for me on an iPad... easy to zoom in and out of the tree and see every level.

I agree with others though that a pedigree view would be helpful. Also it seems that there is a bug that reads all unclosed dates as "living" no matter when the person was born. Why not just apply the "living" privacy settings only to people born within the last 120 years? That would solve this issue without making people have to go in and tweak privacy settings.

[grahcom]

Adding a pedigree view would be of help, but overall so far this tree is far better than the old one... thanks FTDNA

[PeterLarsen]

I actually love this new tree. Not in its current state but considering its potentials. I hope FTDNA has done a great job in creating a versatile code base easy to add features to, like plugins or widgets.

It is a huge step, programatically, going from a stiff limited ancestors only tree to a tree that goes in all directions. The graphical presentation for all possible family situations is tricky to solve.

I agree with most of you here, we need a simple layout in addition to the default.

A suggestion to FTDNA about how to solve the private-issue on ancestors missing death date:
In the preproccessing state of uploaded gedcoms look for people born before 110 years ago and switch all ancestors of those to deceased

[efgen]

Hi all,

Please post feedback about the new tree in the following thread, which was started after the release on Monday morning:

http://forums.familytreedna.com/showthread.php?t=35780

I've moved 3 posts from today into the other thread from this one. This way, we can keep the pre-launch and post-launch discussions separate, and only have one main thread going with feedback.

Please also see my announcement/comments about posting feedback here:

http://forums.familytreedna.com/showthread.php?t=35790

Thanks!
Elise

[ccollinsmith]

I agree that it's an improvement. There are kinks to work out, but that's always the case with a new interface.

One other thing I found... If I try dragging from the matches, it automatically assumes a new person. Is there any way to merge persons? My sister is an mtDNA match (don't ask me why she did redundant testing!). I'd like to merge her match into my tree. There just doesn't seem to be a way to merge a match into an existing person. Am I missing something?

[efgen]

One other thing I found... If I try dragging from the matches, it automatically assumes a new person. Is there any way to merge persons? My sister is an mtDNA match (don't ask me why she did redundant testing!). I'd like to merge her match into my tree. There just doesn't seem to be a way to merge a match into an existing person. Am I missing something?

If your sister's name on her kit and her name on your tree match up, then you should get a purple link icon next to her name in the tree, suggesting that you link them.

The name matching looks at the surname, given name and middle name. For women, it also looks at the spouse's and father's surnames, to attempt to match the name on the kit with the name on the tree.

If you use abbreviations for the names in the tree or on the kit, then they may not match up easily. I had that problem with some of my kits when I was playing around with the beta tree, so I sent IT some detailed examples, but some refinement may still be needed.

Elise

[suttonwho]

I can't cope with the view at all and echo what others have already said. It reminds me of everything I hate about searching matches family trees at Ancestry. I just want to scroll across one page with all the ancestral names quickly in a single chart, not have to fiddle about with arrows and new pages of potential lines, then having to back track and check another page grouping, more arrows, more backtracking....

I DO like being able to drag and drop known family members into my tree (father, kids etc). I also like the idea of possible matches being listed. I'm less sure about the idea that they can be added without their (or my) consent if the possible matches turn out to be as ridiculous as some of the 'matches' I hear about at Ancestry.

[justsmith]

In my opinion, this new family tree is much too difficult to navigate and search. Here are the problems for me:
1. Locations. We used to be able to quickly scroll over a name and see dates and locations. Now we have to do a double click to get to a person’s profile page before we can see a location. I would like to see the scroll over function returned.

2. Everything is too spread out. If I minimize the page enough to see several generations, all I can see are truncated names with no dates. I would have preferred a compressed horizontal layout like the pedigree view at ancestry.com.

3. I get lost with this new layout. I have been viewing all sorts of family trees for over 30 years and have never had a problem figuring out where I was on a tree. But this new tree layout is a nightmare to follow. Again, a compressed horizontal view would be much better.

4. The picture icons take up an enormous amount of space. I would much rather see locations in that space.

5. I am very concerned about privacy and consent with the new ability to so easily drag a match into your tree. As far as I can tell, we don’t have to give permission for someone to add us to his or her tree, which I am not happy about. Will we even know if someone adds us to their tree? I can’t find the answer to that question in the help section. I can see that this feature will be very useful for adding immediate family members to your tree. However, if FTDNA thinks that our distant DNA Cousins won’t add us to their tree before contacting us and confirming the relationship, or that they won’t connect us to fictional ancestors, then they are living in a genealogical dream world. This happens all the time at ancestry.com and it will happen here. I would like to see permission required before someone can do this.

6. I never wanted the ability to create an elaborate tree at FTDNA complete with pictures and family stories. I have that elsewhere. All I want from FTDNA is the ability to quickly search for common names, dates, and locations. This new tree layout does not provide that.

[ragnar]

Too difficult to use. I like the old gedcom layout better. I guess I won't be looking at any gedcoms from now on...

[tommypeters]

Who did they choose for beta testers? Apparently not group administrators trying to get their work done as quickly and efficiently as possible. I don't consider myself as much of a group administrator, as my group has few members who aren't immediate family. I'd love to know how the administrator of a rather large autosomal project is going to manage with this new tree.

Many beta testers have given about the same feedback as everyone here, but nothing was changed based on that feedback.

[Inge]

In my opinion, this new family tree is much too difficult to navigate and search. Here are the problems for me:
1. Locations. We used to be able to quickly scroll over a name and see dates and locations. Now we have to do a double click to get to a person’s profile page before we can see a location. I would like to see the scroll over function returned.

2. Everything is too spread out. If I minimize the page enough to see several generations, all I can see are truncated names with no dates. I would have preferred a compressed horizontal layout like the pedigree view at ancestry.com.

3. I get lost with this new layout. I have been viewing all sorts of family trees for over 30 years and have never had a problem figuring out where I was on a tree. But this new tree layout is a nightmare to follow. Again, a compressed horizontal view would be much better.

4. The picture icons take up an enormous amount of space. I would much rather see locations in that space.

5. I am very concerned about privacy and consent with the new ability to so easily drag a match into your tree. As far as I can tell, we don’t have to give permission for someone to add us to his or her tree, which I am not happy about. Will we even know if someone adds us to their tree? I can’t find the answer to that question in the help section. I can see that this feature will be very useful for adding immediate family members to your tree. However, if FTDNA thinks that our distant DNA Cousins won’t add us to their tree before contacting us and confirming the relationship, or that they won’t connect us to fictional ancestors, then they are living in a genealogical dream world. This happens all the time at ancestry.com and it will happen here. I would like to see permission required before someone can do this.

6. I never wanted the ability to create an elaborate tree at FTDNA complete with pictures and family stories. I have that elsewhere. All I want from FTDNA is the ability to quickly search for common names, dates, and locations. This new tree layout does not provide that.

Seconded!