Signing up and Starting the Search
Before checking out OneGreatFamily, it’s important to evaluate the way you personally approach genealogy research and ask yourself: Did I pick up this hobby because I like looking at the results, or do I love going through records? Is tracing my lineage as far back as I can the goal, or is it getting to know each and every ancestor? Do I value speed and automation or do I value hands-on, personal work?
Leading genealogy research services typically offer access to a comprehensive family builder, which you can then populate with information using data gleaned from a huge site archive containing historical records and members’ family trees. This setup allows you to go either or both ways: you can go with a results-driven or research-driven approach, or a mix of the two. More niche services typically cater to the research-driven, touting exclusive and rare content that leading websites may not have in their archives.
Online Records Management
OneGreatFamily is at the opposite end of the spectrum. It does not boast of any sort of historical record archive; instead it calls itself an online records management tool–and one of the most technologically-advanced in the industry, too. Family tree builders are generally used to contextualize genealogy research; looking at each significant record separately may help you understand the lives of individual ancestors, but a well-done family tree helps you understand the big picture. It allows you to link all the records, photos and anecdotes into an unbroken, living and breathing, generation-after-generation familial narrative. It is that big picture that drives OneGreatFamily, and it is also what it offers to its subscribers.
Learning Center
With OneGreatFamily, you don’t start a search; they do it for you automatically. As there is no archive of historical records, after signup you don’t browse record collections. You can, however, go through the provided downloadable OneGreatFamily QuickStart Guide PDF; to get a feel for the service’s features. You can also check out the comprehensive Learning Center that does point you to other helpful resources that will complement what OneGreatFamily offers–there are links to everything, from genealogy research primers to guides for specific record types, and even a last names origin index.
8th Place5.5 out of 10Building Family Trees with OneGreatFamily
This is the crowning glory of OneGreatFamily: its Genealogy Browser. It is at the very center of the service’s unique, patented and advanced technology, and it is basically what you pay for when you subscribe. The Genealogy Browser works as OneGreatFamily’s family tree builder, and it’s the platform that you use to share your genealogy research with the site and the rest of its subscribers.
How It Works
To create a family tree on OneGreatFamily, you can import a preexisting GEDCOM (Genealogical Data Communication) file or create one by typing in pertinent details. The service recommends that you try to include about 15 to 18 names in your initial family tree submission–you can start with yourself and just work backwards from there–so it can use that data to hopefully start successfully linking your research to other related family trees that are already part of its database. This helps you, and it also helps OneGreatFamily. Its goal is to create one global family tree, and each bit of information counts; your research can possibly add to an existing family tree, or even connect and merge two or more trees that have never before been linked.
Unlike other services with similarly bundled-in features in their family tree builders, OneGreatFamily’s Genealogy Browser takes pains to check for and remove redundancies in matching family trees. The tool sends you hints and alerts for possible matches, and also does the same for possible conflicting information within otherwise compatible trees. Because of these features, it is easy to build on and add something new to work that’s already been done; rather than unknowingly going down an already well-trodden research path and wasting precious time.
Handprints and Starfields
Handprint is a view option available on the Genealogy Browser that allows you to select a name from your family tree and see a compact collection of that person’s relationships: father, mother, siblings, spouse, children. This is powered by what OneGreatFamily called Handprint Technology, and it is what they consider the equivalent of a person’s unique handprint–in the context of the person being represented as a name within the Genealogy Browser.
If Handprint allows you to go small, Starfield allows you to go large! It is the Genealogy Browser’s unique and intuitive interface that helps you make sense of your genealogy research and properly navigate your family tree. Starfield represents each name in your family tree as a node, and the tool makes it possible for you to zoom in and zoom out the screen display extensively. This way, you can explore and examine the minute details of a person’s profile, and also see hundreds of family tree entries at once.
Connecting and Collaborating
OneGreatFamily boasts of the ability to support hundreds of thousands of subscribers and guests using their site concurrently, and you don’t prepare for that level of traffic without offering great collaborative options. Merging family trees and evaluating hints and conflicts are based on other subscribers’ content–so in a sense, whenever you use the Genealogy Browser, you are already collaborating with everyone. There’s a more direct way to do it, though.
You can reach out and get to know subscribers that have submitted family trees related to yours, and even pair up or get a group together to work on just one huge and common family tree. Genealogy Browser has a Groups sections, where you can create, name and manage password protected groups for this very purpose. You can choose to be the creator and invite other members, or you can be an invitee. Anyone in any group you join will be able to initiate edits to your tree, so be careful! Note that you and your group members are now essentially working with the exact same family tree.
Paying for Premium Service
OneGreatFamily offers a free seven-day trial, but like most similar services, you will need to give your credit card information and pick a subscription plan to continue on with, should you fail to cancel your account before the trial period ends. Worth noting here is that even if you cancel, all of the information you’ve provided so far will be preserved automatically on the site in what OneGreatFamily calls a “free basic subscription”–the user benefits of which aren’t displayed anywhere on the site. In fact, apart from the free trial and the paid subscription, there is no other membership tier available upon signup; though if you look really hard, you’ll find an entirely separate and bare bones basic signup page.
| Subscription Tier | Cost Per Month | Billing Schedule |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $14.95 | Subscription renews automatically at $14.95 monthly |
| Quarterly | $9.98 | Subscription renews automatically at $29.95 quarterly |
| Annual | $6.67 | Subscription renews automatically at $79.95 annually |
You can pay month on month, or prepay to enjoy applied discounts. OneGreatFamily also has an Annual Plus Package costing $149.95, which bundles in a 60-minute consultation with a OneGreatFamily specialist with an annual subscription.
What's the Verdict on OneGreatFamily?
OneGreatFamily Review 2020 – Conclusion
Overall, OneGreatFamily is an example of an excellent idea hampered by underwhelming execution. The site looks dated, with dead links here and there, and many of the most important parts–the help/FAQ section and the Learning Center, for starters–are buried two or three links deep, with no way to access them directly from the front page. Also, it never quite tackles outright something that should be obvious from the beginning: if everyone’s just merging family trees, how do family trees grow beyond that, except through waiting for more people to subscribe? The answer: research, which means looking through records, which OneGreatFamily does not have, which means that–for the most part–OneGreatFamily is an ancillary resource at best. Unless you’re fine with just sitting around and waiting patiently for the next family tree breakthrough to come from the efforts of someone other than yourself, you’ll have to maintain at least one other genealogy research service account or subscription. For most, that’s one too many; but if you find that OneGreatFamily is a service you just can’t do research without, at least the subscription fee is reasonable.
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