IAJGS Conference: Creating a Collaborative Family Website using Treelines.com

This was my last class on Wednesday. I was at RootsTech when Treelines.com won the award for the 2013 Developers Challenge. In fact I was sitting next to Tammy Hepps when the awards were made (one of my claims to fame). The class is described as follows:

Treelines.com is a website for collaboratively building family trees, sharing stories, and collecting pictures in a beautiful, low-key setting that appeals especially to the non-genealogists in a family. In this class you'll learn how to upload your existing family tree to Treelines or create a tree from scratch, how to add and edit people in your tree, and most importantly, how to create interactive, timeline-driven digital scrapbooks for all the meaningful people and events from your family's past. At the end of the class, you'll have a solid understanding of the unique ways Treelines allows you to present and share family history, and you'll be ready to invite family members to join in the fun with you.

I think you need to know a little bit more about Tammy,

Tammy A. Hepps is the creator of Treelines.com, a family story-sharing website and winner of the RootsTech 2013 Developer Challenge. With a degree in Computer Science from Harvard, she has fourteen years of experience in digital media, leading technology initiatives across the content, commerce, mobile, and social spaces. She has been working on her family tree for more than twenty years and combines in Treelines.com her depth in genealogy, technology, and storytelling. 

She serves on the Board of Directors for JewishGen and the Philadelphia Jewish Archive Center, and the Board of Advisers for the NY Family History School.

Treelines.com is a story-centric program presented as a series of images and text accompanied by a timeline. Here is another screenshot of one of the stories showing how the text, images and timeline interact:

As Tammy says, "Treelines are storylines for your family tree." As I have said before in posts about Treeline, it is an elegant and very easy to follow way to present family stories. The process of creating a Treelines story is straightforward and the program also provides a format for creating a more traditional looking pedigree. The program is primarily private, but can be made public on the site. You may very well find Treelines to be just exactly what you have been looking for in an online format. 

Trees on Treelines can be expanded by adding interrelated stories. The program contains the full view of all records and images. Treelines is presently a free website.