You can now have stories on your site. This is located under People in the menu. You can also show the titles of your most recently added stories on your homepage.

We are working on providing the ability to associate photos and names to stories.

Introducing Family Line Highlighting

We have just released a new feature that traces bloodlines within family trees. Just pick a list of names whose bloodlines you would like to highlight and designate a color for each name. Now, whenever a name that is a Descendant, Ancestor or Related by blood (depending on which option you choose) to any of these names appears anywhere in your family tree website, that name will be highlighted with the corresponding color and "bloodline" icon. 

Click the "Bloodline" icon next to the name and TribalPages will compute and display a Graphical Relationship Map depicting how they are related. Each name and photograph (if available) in the relationship chain is displayed along with the narration of the relationship.

TribalPages is pleased to announce its new Reporting features for all its Family Tree websites. In addition to the realtime graphical ancestor, descendant and family charts, TribalPages members can now generate various printable reports (with pictures) for any name in their Family Tree. Some of the Narrative Reports being offered are Ahnentafel (aka Ancestor), Descendant and Family Group Charts.

Printable Narrative Reports

While graphical charts are easier to navigate on a computer screen they do pose some printing challenges.  Large charts, spanning several generations, are difficult to fit on standard printer paper.

In addition to being easier to print, our narrative reports contain a great amount of detail.  Included in each report are dates and places of birth, death and  marriage of ancestors, descendants, their spouses and children. They may also contain Events (like Christening, Religion etc), Sources and Citations.

TribalPages members can now customize their homepage by changing its layout and adding custom widgets.

Layout Manager

 Choose between the classic layout or the multi-column layout. With the classic layout your homepage flows from top to bottom. The multi-column layout adds a sidebar to the left or right of the main body of your homepage. You can add, remove or configure several custom widgets on your Homepage. To use this feature, login to your site as administrator, click "Home" in the menu, then click the "customize" button.

We are enabling a new feature for our larger sites: Auto-Complete Direct Name entry.

On our smaller sites (less than 2,000 names), users can "jump around" using a drop-down list above the menu bar on their Tree pages (Family View, Ancestors, etc.). Here's a photo of the field on a small test site:

The problem is that as the number of names in a site grows, that drop-down list gets difficult to use, and then it starts to impact site performance (10,000 names in a drop-down list just doesn't work). For that reason, we've had to disable the drop-down for sites over 2,000 names.

TribalPages is very happy to announce the availability of our new Privacy Levels for all 200,000 Family Tree Websites.

This new feature allows site owners a tremendous amount of control over what information on their site is available, to whom, and under what conditions. This is a project that has been months in the making, and we want to thank the very patient and helpful Feedback Group who helped us get where we are.

Among many other options, sites can now allow public access to deceased relative information, while protecting living relative data with a Visitor Password.

Windows XP users, we have a treat for you!

One of our recent goals has been to add ways to upload many family tree photos at a time to your TribalPages site. Sending them one at a time is downright painful -- and you haven't been shy in pointing that out!

Our first tool to help solve this problem is specific to Windows XP. We'll release a second tool soon for other operating systems, but we've just finished a great beta test (many thanks to some of our high-volume users), and we're proud to be able to release our TribalPages Publishing Wizard for Windows XP.

The Publishing Wizard allows you to:

• Select many photos, or even whole directories to upload
• Resize them all at once while sending (which we love!)
• Send all of them with one click, with a great status screen as each photo gets uploaded to your site

All of this takes place from within your normal Windows XP environment, and uses standard Microsoft wizard screens: It is really, really, easy!

TribalPages is happy to announce the general availability of our new Connections Tool.

This new feature provides a simple and automated way to find new connections to other TribalPages sites.

Simply click on the "Connections" menu item (under Home) and find hundreds, even thousands of your family members that are also entered into other sites in the TribalPages Search Database. Our new Connections Tool walks through your site, checking each family member's name, birth, and death dates against millions of other entries, finding the best matches and giving you immediate contact information to help you find your fellow family historians.

TribalPages is proud to still offer completely Free Family Tree Websites. We continually improve these sites, including the recent addition of Custom Site Names, Citations, etc. The result is impressive: we now have hundreds of thousands of amateur and experienced genealogists who share their heritage using our services.

To support these sites, we rely on Advertising in the form of Image and Text Ads that are displayed on the Free Sites. We've been fairly conservative on the ads so far, and we'll continue to adhere to some guidelines about what we won't do:

• NO Pop-Up or Pop-Under Ads
• NO Floating Ads in front of Content
• NO Interstitial Ads (pages you have to click-through randomly)
• NO Ads that are explicit or inappropriate (especially to minors)

However, with our recent growth, we now have a very large, very targeted audience, and we'd like to better match them with our potential advertisers. (It is, in fact, the only way to ensure we can always host free sites.)

We have added the ability to add "Events" to each name in your tree.

You can use the Event functionality to add information about the life of the person in your tree: when they were Christened, when they Graduated, etc. You can also use it as a marker for important items you find, like a Census record that shows where they were at a particular date.