Type of site Family history Created by Dallan Quass | Available in English Website werelate.org | |
Owner Foundation for On-Line Genealogy Slogan(s) The World's Largest Genealogy Wiki | ||
WeRelate.org is a wiki genealogy website, that provides genealogy tools and data. It bills itself as the world's largest freely licensed genealogy wiki, with almost 5 million wiki pages. Its information is free, and the site is non-commercial and nonsectarian. WeRelate had over 2.5 million person pages, over 930,000 family pages and 44,000 images in Jan 2014.
Contents
WeRelate.org is supported by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy and the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The site runs on the MediaWiki software.
Discussions are currently on-going about merging WeRelate into WikiMedia, where it would operate alongside Wikipedia as a sister project (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WeRelate). Such a merge would make WeRelate the de facto standard open genealogy database for non-living ancestors, in a field that currently has many confusing alternative projects. Discussions currently concern privacy (living people entries), sourcing and original research issues. As a completely open database however WeRelate cannot handle privacy controls required for living individuals' data. Many users thus use semi-commercial sites such as WikiTree in conjunction with WeRelate which are able to control living people's private data and make contact with distant living cousins, whilst keeping dead ancestors' data as creative commons. Both sites use GEDCOM data which can be freely copied between them for non-living ancestors.
Background
The site and software were developed in 2005 by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, led by president Dallan Quass. WeRelate is partnered with the Allen County Public Library, Genealogy Department Indiana, which houses the nation’s largest public genealogy collection. WeRelate has been listed in the top 101 websites for genealogy by Family Tree Magazine from 2008 through 2013.
In 2007, WeRelate and the University of South Florida's Africana Heritage Project launched a research project on slave genealogy, supported by South Carolina's Magnolia Plantation Foundation, including the resulting data in the global genealogy collection.
Organization
WeRelate allows users to upload GEDCOMs. The system produces a comparison screen for likely candidates, allowing users to determine if subjects are the same person. Duplicate pages for common ancestors can be merged at upload. Information about living people is not accepted; it is automatically replaced by the software with the word "Living".
Registered users are able to document their research, which can then be edited by anyone else. WeRelate has over 926,000 Source pages which contain reference and access information along with relevant links. Source pages also provide space for review and research tips. Users may link Person and Family pages to any relevant source pages. Users may also create MySource pages for references relevant to only their research such as family bibles, birth, death and marriage certificates. Scans of documentation may be attached to any relevant page.
Place information is essential to genealogical research. WeRelate has over 900,000 referenced place pages. Where applicable, Place pages are linked to Family History Library Catalog, and Wikipedia. Where geographic coordinates are available, a Google map is provided. Many pages also include timelines, population history, contained places, history, research tips and images.
Compared to other projects that let people publish and share similar data, WeRelate focuses on sourcing files with links to primary genealogy records, and rather than letting users maintain separate personal family trees, aims to align data from different sources into a unified global record.
Collaborative tools
WeRelate includes a family tree explorer, annotated images for sharing images of primary source documents or photos, and generates pedigree maps of up to five generations of data.