The Blog
News, business, and more...
AncestorSync™ To Bridge The Gap Between Desktop and Online Family History
For immediate release
Real-Time Collaboration, Inc. Unveils AncestorSync™ To Bridge The Gap Between Desktop and Online Family History
AncestorSync™ enables you to synchronize your family tree, source documents, citations, and notes across all of your computers and a web pedigree of your choice.
Orem, Utah (Real-Time Collaboration) May 10, 2011 – Real-Time Collaboration has announced the release of their latest offering, AncestorSync™, which allows you to seamlessly download, upload, or synchronize your family tree from your online pedigree to your personal computer, and back again. AncestorSync™ is the first service on the market that allows you to easily move all of your family history work from a desktop genealogy program to an online pedigree without anyone or anything getting lost in the process.
AncestorSync™ has partnerships with FamilySearch, Geni, Inc., and ourFamilyology, Inc. and is a joint venture of Ohana Software, LLC. and SharingTime, LLC., wholly owned subsidiaries of Real-Time Collaboration.
“AncestorSync™ is precisely the type of service we envisioned when we created the Geni API. Genealogists no longer must choose between their favorite desktop software and Geni. With AncestorSync™ as the bridge, they can maintain their offline tree while taking advantage of the incredibly rich data and collaborative community Geni offers,”
states Noah Tutak, Geni CEO.
“AncestorSync™ makes interfacing you genealogical data with FamilySearch family tree easy. One product to read, write and synchronize your tree regardless of the desktop software you may own,” says Gordon Clarke, FamilySearch Web Services Product Manager.
“AncestorSync™ will be of great value to genealogists by expanding their ability to work with their desktop application and sync their data with our online service. We look forward to adding this feature for our customers,” says Brandy Sacco founder and owner of ourFamilyology.
AncestorSync™ supports a variety of program formats including: Ancestral Quest, Legacy Family Tree, PAF, RootsMagic and GEDCOM. It will soon support The Master Genealogist and MacFamilyTree. AncestorSync™ will be available in June for a budget-friendly $15 annual fee, and is PC and Mac compatible.
About Real-Time Collaboration, Inc.
Real-Time Collaboration melds social networking capabilities with state-of-the-art family history and genealogy technologies to connect individuals around the world who share common ancestors. Real-Time Collaboration is based in Orem, Utah.
For more information about AncestorSync™, contact us at info@ancestorsync.com or 1.877.436.3256 or visit our website at www.ancestorsync.com.
SharingTime Beta3 : Ancestor Crawl Control, Performance Improvements, More Data
Once again SharingTime is pleased to announce new tools for New FamilySearch that will make your Genealogy research easier and faster. We have just finished rolling out SharingTime Beta3 with the following new features:
Ancestor Crawl Control
New Crawl Controls
Part of the core functionality of SharingTime is the Ancestor Crawl. When our ancestor crawler looks up information about your ancestor we can start to do neat things with the information it finds like delivering the live search bar as a fast way to jump from ancestor to ancestor and notifying you when your ancestors are updated.
Previously we only crawled 16 generations of direct ancestors. Parents of parents, etc. With this release of SharingTime we are happy to introduce several new types of crawling, and we’re ready to hand over the reigns to you, the user. Along with the ability to start and stop the crawler whenever you want, we have the following four crawl types for your enjoyment:
Ancestor Crawl
Add 9 generations of ancestors to your account, starting with the currently selected ancestor. Your nearest 16 generations are automatically crawled when you sign up to give your quick and other features search a starting point, you can extend your tree if you choose, or start from other ancestors that aren’t direct ancestors.
Ancestor Circle™
The Ancestor Circle™ crawl adds the current ancestor, their parents, their spouses, their children and their siblings to your account. These are the same people we check when looking for possible contributors with the Contributor Circle™.
™
Descendant Crawl
The Descendant Crawl starts with the current ancestor and adds 9 generations of descendants to your account. Due to privacy restraints, we can’t add (or even see!) living people so you won’t be able to use this tool to find living collaborators.
Update Crawl
The update crawl will add or update the current ancestor immediately. The update crawl skips ahead of any other entries in the queue.
Ancestor Watch™ with More Data
With SharingTime Beta3 you can now Watch any ancestor you can access in New FamilySearch. When watching an ancestor who wasn’t in your account, they will automatically be added.
Ancestor Watch™ will now notice when LDS Ordinance information changes for an ancestor and when marriage, christening and burial information changes.
Other Performance and Features in SharingTime Beta3
Beta releases 1 and 2 were released with functionality as the main goal. With this new release we focused on making our system really hum. Quick search is really quick, login should be faster and the crawler won’t slow down the entire server anymore. As with giving a car a good tuneup, most of the work this time around is under the hood, but you should feel the difference as you take it for a ride.
Logging in to New FamilySearch with the combined login now has an info image to show you that it’s working. Previously the browser would appear to be doing nothing while handing the login process.
Live Search now doesn’t start searching until you have entered 3 characters. Previously it would start searching with one character and have too many results to be practical.
Some place in the code would print unknown dates as December 31,1969. You shouldn’t see those incorrect dates anymore; if you do, send us a support request and we’ll get them fixed.
Send Us Your Feature Requests
Is there something you wish were easier to do in New FamilySearch? Do you have a great idea of a tool or report which would make genealogy easier for you? Send in your feature requests and suggestions, and we’ll see what we can do. Enjoy the new Beta release!
SharingTime Beta2 : Ancestor Watch™ and Bug Fixes
The SharingTime team would like to say “Thank You!” to all the beta testers who are participating in our beta testing. SharingTime is meant to be a tool that make genealogy research and collaboration easier for beginners and experts alike. Your bug reports, suggestions and comments are very important for that process and for improving SharingTime.
Announcing Ancestor Watch™
Along with many bug fixes (see below) and some minor performance tweaks we rolled out today, we also released a new feature called Ancestor Watch™.
If you’re anything like me, Ancestor Watch™ is going to rock your world. I have ancestors that I have reached a dead-end with. With Ancestor Watch™, you simply mark those ancestors as Watched and continue on your merry way. When something about that ancestor changes in New FamilySearch their name and a list of changes will appear on the Recently Updated Ancestors list in the SharingTime plugin.
Want to try out Ancestor Watch™ but you don’t know who you should Watch? Some good starting places include ancestors you are currently researching, your end-of-line ancestors, ancestors that are missing data and anyone else you’re interested in watching.
Why Watch an ancestor, you ask? In the case of my dead-end ancestors, I hope that someone out there has the information I’m missing and that they add it to New FamilySearch. When that happens maybe I’ll find out where exactly Patrick McGuinnes was born and who his parents were. If someone else contributes similar information to what I already added to New FamilySearch – yet another spelling variation on McGuinnes, perhaps – at least I will have someone to collaborate with!
Read more
