[basseq]

I love family trees: they're interesting, complex, data-driven, and beautiful. There are some very challenging decisions you need to make to make a tree readable, like whose ancestors to show, whose children, and how far back. To give you a sense, I have ~3,500 people in my family tree. I want different trees to show, say: a) all descendants of a root ancestor, or b) all of my ancestors.

This is reasonably easy to use and build out a simple tree. Here are two opportunities:

1) There are some UI areas that aren't totally intuitive (e.g., double click to add name), and generally it feels to "clicky" (e.g., too many clicks to get to the action I want). I think your goal is super-simple and "delightful" vs. full-featured.

2) The 1:1 relationship lines get complex, as every parent is linked to every child (so you end up with 2n lines that all overlap).

[aqrashik]

Thanks. Trees that are too big do get hard to manage currently and it is something I have been unable to decide on a solution for. I was thinking of allowing users themselves to expand or compress ancestors and descendants ( which would mean even more clicks :( ) to focus on the part of the tree they were currently working on.

[yosyp]

This is very interesting insight! May I ask which software or service you use to keep track of your family tree?

[basseq]

Ancestry.com has the best UI and is the "easiest" to use that I've found. You can use it for free to just build your tree, but you'll feel like a second-class citizen. Their data sources are very good and easy to use, but you pay out the nose for them. (Obligatory note that I very much disagree with how Ancestry.com has set themselves up to collect money off the backs of researchers who often work for free, and will put your inputs behind their paywall.)

So Ancestry.com is a good place for research and for family tree management. I've set up the second half of my stack to generate HTML files, which I keep (publicly) on my personal site.

[k__]

3500?!

and I don't even know who my grandfather was...

[basseq]

I go both up (I know all but 2 of my 16 g-g-grandparents, and 22 of my 32 g-g-g-grandparents) and down (I'm tracking 14+ generations of everyone descended from my 10th great-grandfather).

I'm the kind of person that likes 100% completion in my video games, so the idea of "filling in" all the gaps is satisfying to me. The amount of public records on BMD (birth, marriage, and death—the "holy trinity" of genealogical data points) is staggering in most countries. From census and SSA records in the U.S. to parish records in Scotland, you can find a lot of information.