Thanks for all of your feedback. Many have asked for the ability to see a whole family. This release shows some possibilities with a descendancy view.

Changes in this version include:

• Right to left descendancy view
• Vertical alignment when a couple is expanded
• RINs are visible when a couple is expanded
• Highlighting now shows repeated ancestors
• Fixed dropping of international characters
• Various other fixes

We know we have a long way to go. Please keep sending comments.

We need a Senior Web User Interface Software Engineer to help us on our project. We’re serious about making the user experience of genealogy accessible and engaging for ordinary people. If you’d like to help push the envelope on the next generation of family history software then take a look at the job description. Just go to the LDS Church Employment Opportunities, enter 0600189 into the Keyword or Job Number Search box and click Search. You can also contact me via e-mail (lawyerdc@ldschurch.org) with inquiries about the job.

In response to your feedback we have made several changes to the Pedigree Viewer. Please keep the feedback coming!

v0.1.7 – 18 Oct 2006

• Added christening date (when no birth date is present)
• Moved alpha list to left and enhanced functionality

v0.1.6 – 17 Oct 2006

• Added smooth scrolling to the navigation movements
• Added ‘move to family’ when clicking on alpha list
• Minor cleanup work on alpha list

v0.1.5 – 16 Oct 2006

• first attempt at an alpha list

v0.1.4 – 12 Oct 2006

• Navigation arrows
• End of line markers for wife and husband (rather than only showing it if both are end of line)
• Several cosmetic changes to improve look & feel

v0.1.3 – 11 Oct 2006

• End of line indicators
• Fixes Mac OS upload problem
• Resolves various GEDCOM related issues

We continue to get great feedback from our users. We’ve been impressed by the thoughtfulness of the feedback and some of the great bugs that have been reported. We’ve also been encouraged by many kind and supportive comments. Thank you!

Here are some of the recent updates:

• Fixed the problem when uploading from a Mac
• Fixed some issues when we weren’t able to display some GEDCOMs
• Added end of line indicators

We’ve been busy processing all of the great feedback you’ve sent us. Keep it coming. As we analyzed the comments we chose a few of the more common issues reported and have already updated the site to make it better. Here are some of the more noticeable changes we’ve made:

• Added marriage information to couples
• Added ‘helpful tips’ to try to get past some of the questions people had about navigation
• Added a cancel button to the upload progress box
• Fixed lots of annoying bugs

There are still a couple of issues people may run into:

• Uploading from a Mac doesn’t seem to be working
• Occassionally an error is returned after uploading a GEDCOM and the pedigree isn’t displayed. Please refresh your browser and try again if this happens. We’re still trying to get this one figured out.
• Even after the pedigree is displayed there is a message in the status bar of the browser that says, “Transferring data from familysearchlabs.org…” If you can see the pedigree it has finished transferring the data.

Wow! Thanks everyone for a great weekend. Our team was so impressed with all of the thoughtful feedback. It has really helped us to get a feel for what we need to do to enhance the Super Duper Zim Zam Zoom Pedigree Viewer. I can’t emphasize how important your feedback is. Please, please, please keep sending it.

Here are some interesting stats from this past weekend’s usage of the pedigree viewer:

• Total GEDCOMs uploaded: 943
• Most generations displayed in a pedigree: 146 gen w/ 1,429 individuals
• Most individuals displayed in a pedigree: 6,357 individuals in a 69 gen pedigree
• Unique visitors: 342
• Users submitting feedback: 18%
• Distance winners: 1 user from South Africa, and another from Australia

About 55% of the GEDCOMs we processed were our sample GEDCOMs. The other 45% were submitted by users. I hope to post a list of common issues and most requested enhancements later today.

Well believe it or not we’ve managed to put our super duper zim zam zoom pedigree viewer up where people can play with it. We were so excited to make this gadget available that when we took the server over to the facility it is currently in, the whole team wanted to come – and they did.

We’re also pretty jazzed about the FamilySearch (TM) Labs concept in general and hope to not only continue to enhance the pedigree viewer but share other promising projects we’re working on.

We know there is a long way to go to really make this viewer a useable tool but we hope that you’ll have fun experimenting with it and share your thoughts on how we can improve it by sending feedback to. We’d love to hear from you!

Just in case you stumbled into the FamilySearch (TM) Labs blog before you found the website- the website is www.familysearchlabs.org.