December 28, 2007 The place index has been updated and is available for editing again. The index now includes maps and much-improved information about historical place jurisdictions. Check it out!
December 16, 2007 We have started to feature example pages on the main page. We plan to feature a new page about once a week. We are looking for nominations of pages to feature. Please don't be shy -- many terrific pages have been written over the past months. If you have written or know of a page that you would like to see considered for a featured page, please nominate it!
December 15, 2007 The place index review is complete! Volunteers have spent hundreds of hours improving and cleaning up wiki pages for non-US places. We're now running an automated process to rename non-US (and some US) place pages and update their content based upon the corrections. The process is expected to take approximately two weeks, during which time the place index will be unavailable for normal editing. We'll announce when the process is complete. The new place index, complete with maps and historical information in many cases, will be a terrific resource!
November 4, 2007 The primary WeRelate server experienced a hardware failure that caused the site to be down from 11am-6:30pm today. We apologize for the inconvenience. All of the data was restored from one of the backup servers; no information was lost.
October 15, 2007 WeRelate, the USF Africana Heritage Project and Ideas4 have announced plans to build a free, central Internet database for digital images and records of African American genealogy, history and culture. The database, which will be called Afriquest (http://www.afriquest.com), will be built using collaborative software. Anyone will be able to add images and records to the database or draw images and records from the database for research purposes. Access to the images and records on Afriquest will always be free. ( read more )
October 11, 2007 Please help us review the place index! To make ready for much-improved indexing at the end of this month, which will index pages within 15 minutes of their being edited (instead of overnight), and will provide much better search over names, dates, and places, we need to rename the place pages to include all levels in the jurisdictional hierarchy. So Place:Sydney, Australia will become Place:Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. We renamed places US and Canadian places already last Spring; it's now time to rename the rest of the places in the world. But before we can rename places they have to be reviewed - to look for errors in place hierarchies that will be much easier to correct now than after the renaming. If you are interested in donating a little time to help with this important task, please read the instruction page.
October 3, 2007 To help pay for hosting costs and ensure the longevity of WeRelate we now have ads. We're experimenting with several different formats and expect to settle on one in the next few weeks.
October 2, 2007 A new version of the Family Tree Explorer, with a much-improved animated pedigree & descendants view, is now available. ( more info )
September 14, 2007 Welcome new users! Over 1700 people registered this week, adding more than 150,000 person pages. WeRelate now has pages for over 1 million people and families. Thanks go to our terrific volunteer administrators who make this site possible. If you are interested in helping volunteer, leave a message for Solveig.
September 14, 2007 In related news, the GEDCOM uploader has caught up from the backlog. New GEDCOM's are now typically processed in under an hour. Finally, the Tour and Getting Started videos have been updated to reflect the new look and feel. If you haven't watched these videos, they're highly recommended.
September 13, 2007 Due to the unexpectedly-high load yesterday, indexing did not run last night. Indexing will run tonight, so that pages added yesterday and today will be searchable tomorrow. Pages were created for over 50,000 people yesterday, resulting in 750,000 people so far.
September 12, 2007Our busiest day ever. WeRelate experienced today more than 10 times the traffic that it normally experiences. An estimated 150,000 people in uploaded GEDCOM's were enqueued to be added to the site. This is causing a problem for the GEDCOM uploader, which typically doesn't handle more than 50,000 people a day. We're working to improve the situation, but in the meantime there is a two day wait for new GEDCOM's to be processed.
September 2, 2007 Pages added since August 20th were not getting indexed (and were not searchable). The problem has been fixed and pages are indexed nightly again.
June 26, 2007 The USF Africana Heritage Project and WeRelate.org announced today that they will collaborate on groundbreaking historical research sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, SC. ( full article )
June 20, 2007 If you haven't been inside the Allen County Public Library's fantastic new library building, the Federation of Genealogical Societies' annual conference August 15-18 is a great time to visit. We will be sharing a booth with the Library. Stop by and say hi!
June 18, 2007 A community website without a way for people to reliably communicate with potential cousins isn't as effective as it could be. Starting July 1st we will require people to have confirmed email addresses in order to edit pages. For information on how to check whether your email address is confirmed, or to enter and confirm your email address, see Help:Preferences.
April 11, 2007 Got 15-30 minutes a day? Want to help create the number one community website for genealogy? We're looking for volunteers. You don't have to be an expert - just have a desire to help others.
April 7, 2007 You can delete pages where you've made mistakes and want to start over. You can delete Person and Family pages if you're the only person using (watching) the page, and using the Family Tree Explorer you can delete everyone in your tree in case you want to re-upload your GEDCOM.
March 22, 2007 Over 85,000 person and family pages have been created at WeRelate.
March 8, 2007 Over 60,000 person and family pages have been created at WeRelate.
March 5, 2007 GEDCOM import from the Family Tree Explorer is now ready for prime time. Over 40,000 pages were created during the test period in February.
February 21, 2007 Based upon a conversation at the Watercooler, we now require that people log in to edit pages. This will help us connect with those who edit pages we are interested in, and will reduce spam.
February 3, 2007 We're testing GEDCOM upload in the Family Tree Explorer. If you'd like to participate, launch Family Tree Explorer, then select File in the Family Tree Explorer menu and click on Import. Choose a GEDCOM file to upload and press Import. Thanks!
January 20, 2007 Happy New Year! Get a sneak preview of our upcoming Family Tree Explorer. With this tool you can easily navigate and add pages to your famliy tree, view descendancy trees and ancestral trees for each person and view a sortable index of your tree. Have fun :-D
