OneGreatFamily.com has been online since 2002, which is significantly longer than a majority of the other genealogy websites. From the very beginning, our services have been quite revolutionary to the genealogy community. Surprisingly, there are critical components of our services that have never been duplicated by others and make it critical for anyone who is even partially serious about doing their genealogy or building their family tree to have and maintain a subscription to OneGreatFamily. We have come up with 3 Core Concepts that explain what makes us so unique and how our cutting-edge, yet simple, approach to genealogy can greatly help you in building your family tree.

Concept 1: OneGreatFamily is a Single Global Family Tree 

OneGreatFamily is a single, global family tree which everyone helps to build. It's not just a collection of individual trees that people work on alone. This means that when ANYONE works on OneGreatFamily, they are also working on your tree, and when you work on your tree on OneGreatFamily, you are collaborating with others to explore their family trees. 

As OneGreatFamily members add to the global family tree, the system searches to see if any of the names submitted could be your ancestors. Even if we find some of your ancestors today, we may find more in a week, a month, or a year. Just think; while you're concentrating on a maternal line, OneGreatFamily may identify a breakthrough on your paternal side! Your next step forward could come when you are sleeping, making dinner, or enjoying an evening out with friends, all thanks to the efforts of tens of thousands of OneGreatFamily members.

Concept 2: OneGreatFamily Searches and Sifts For You

OneGreatFamily automatically does all the "search and sift" work for you. Let's face it, most of the effort being done on other genealogy websites is essentially "search and sift", where you initiate a search and then have to start sifting through the tens of thousands of matches you get back. Obviously, most of these possible matches will be wrong and a few may clearly be right. The rest have to be sorted and checked.

OneGreatFamily does all this tedious work for you. We compare all the people you enter into your family tree against every other person in the OneGreatFamily single, global family tree. Then, we sift the results and alert you of possible matches, which we like to call "Hints". Instead of endlessly sifting through obviously incorrect search results, OneGreatFamily focuses your attention and effort on likely matches. Also, when we find two individuals who are obviously the same person on trees submitted by different members, based on our patent-pending matching algorithms, we don't even bother you with them. Instead we automatically merge the two identical records together to combine their trees and eliminate the duplication. This avoids the even-more-painful task of having to approve dozens or even hundreds of obvious matches. It is this process of automatic merging that could end up adding thousands of ancestors to your branch of the tree.

Concept 3: OneGreatFamily Handles Different Opinions

OneGreatFamily easily handles differences of opinion. Sometimes genealogists disagree. Perhaps there is documentation supporting multiple dates for the same event or even regarding parentage. Since all evidence is valuable, we built OneGreatFamily to handle these situations. These discrepancies are called "conflicts". OneGreatFamily will never force you to accept someone else's information, nor someone else to accept yours. We call this View Preservation, because your view of your tree is always preserved for you.

Now, there are two primary types of conflicts: informational and relational. Informational conflicts occur when a fact is in dispute, perhaps a birth date or a marriage location. Relational conflicts occur when a family relationship is in question. In resolving both types of conflicts, you will be presented with your information and the conflicting information. You will then be given a choice to 1) accept the alternate information presented, 2) clear the conflict, which means you are satisfied with your information and no longer want to consider any alternative information, or 3) cancel for now, which will allow you to postpone making a choice until you can find more information.

Dive into OneGreatFamily and see what we can do for your family tree.