OneWorldTree
I spent a little bit of time on Ancestry’s OneWorldTree today, checking out one of my lines (Abram W. Houchins and Martha Sneed). Turns out there’s a huge amount of information on their ancestors (thousands of names). Now, I don’t know that all of it is correct, of course, but it’s a start (and it’s a lot easier to verify it when I know what it is I’m looking for).
Why do I bring this up? Two reasons. First, there’s no way to download it from OWT. No link to download a GEDCOM, nothing. Annoying. I’ll have to go through it all by hand. There are 50+ generations. Yes, that’s right. Good thing it’s summer.
The other reason is that when you have that much genealogy, it would be really, really, really nice to get an overview of what’s there, where the holes are, etc. So I think Beyond needs supercharts, which will be overviews of your entire tree (or whatever part of your pedigree you choose, let’s say), shrunk to the size of a single page. I don’t know yet if I’ll just use a really tiny font size or if I’ll replace the names with something else (somehow). (Ideally it would actually be legible text, and since it’ll be PDF I’ll also include the option of printing at a larger size, 5 feet across or what have you.)
And finally, this is addicting. :) I’ve written on Footprints from the Past about what I found, and it’s really fun. Even if it’s not all accurate. (And half the fun will be verifying it and finding out that it really is true, or isn’t, or whatever the case may be.) I need more time!
At any rate, I’m really looking forward to being able to pull all this external information into my Beyond tree, greyed out so I know it’s not verified. With PAF it’s too hard to see at a glance what’s real and what’s not. I plan to go through OneWorldTree when I get Beyond to a usable state, seeing what’s been done on all the lines in my tree. Then I can add it all in, conflicting information and all, and start the work of verifying without worrying about missing stuff. Ah, it’ll be great!
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Posted in Beyond, Genealogy
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If I was you I would definitely double check all of the infomation that you found on the One World Tree. All of the information found there is user submitted and therefore a less than perfect source.
Another aspect that you should keep in mind about the One World Tree is that you can go onto the discussion boards and sometimes actually be able to contact whoever submitted the information that you found on your family. This allows you in the least to chat with the people and find out where they are getting all of their information from.
On downloading from the One World Tree- like you discovered- you actually can’t. However- one way to go around this is go to the website (ancestry.com) click on Family Trees and then on the right hand column you will see a link to the Ancestry World Tree. This is user submitted and free for the public to use. You can also download directly from this link.
Good luck!