Why you should use WikiTree

Since I made WikiTree my public home for my family tree in 2019, it has continued to grow in ways that wouldn’t have seemed possible during its humble beginnings. As of this year, there are so many projects, groups and activities on the site that even if I wrote every day I could not cover all of them.

There are so many subscription/pay sites for genealogy that having an online site that is both free and has a community of supportive genealogists is something that deserves as much publicity as it can get. I have written about the site a few times, but as it serves such a large place in my own work, I am planning on doing a regular feature on an aspect of WikiTree that I use. For this first one, I am doing just a reintroduction.

Interested in my previous post? Find it here: Why I Use WikiTree

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For this first post, I want to share some of what makes WikiTree a fit for my needs as well as highlight a feature that I return to again and again, The Ancestor Explorer.

From the WIkiTree introduction website:

Where advanced genealogists and casual family historians collaborate on a global family tree for our cousins and descendants to enjoy for free, forever.

WikiTree was started 17 years ago and developed on the Wiki platform. It has expanded in ways even its founders probably didn’t envision. As of this writing, WikiTree has 1,425,929 community members and 46,646,195 ancestors in its common tree.¹

In its charter and since it is developed on the wiki platform, it will continue to be there for my descendants, also also for free, as long as there is an internet. As a genealogist without an “heir” to the work I’ve done, putting it somewhere that an unknown descendant can find is a very big factor.

Of course, privacy is a growing concern for us all, and for each profile you can pick from 7 separate privacy statuses, as well as change them at any time. There are rules layered into these statuses as safeguards for keeping living people invisible. For example, if someone is not marked as dead, their profile cannot be set to public.

For me, as well as those almost 1.5 million people who are contributing, WikiTree is the chosen place to document our families. As should be true if you have an online tree anywhere, I keep a copy of my work by regularly downloading a GED file into my local genealogy program (I use Rootsmagic) and anything truly private stays there (for example social security numbers).

Along with tools to create strong, sourced profiles, individual programmers have created a number of “apps”² that go along with WIkiTree that help you source, write main facts into a basic bio, list census records into tables, categorize your ancestor in terms of place or association, and so many more.

One of the best parts of WikiTree for me is the large community and the activities and features developed to give us some fun. This is also incorporated into the apps. One of my favorite apps is the Ancestor Explorer.

Using a particular person’s ID which is assigned to every profile on the site, (for example mine is Rogers-27419 as shown in the image above) you can check the status of whether any of your ancestors is in a particular group. Examples that have been useful to me are Mayflower descendants and New Netherlands descendants but there are 47 possible categories and that number continues to grow all the time.

If you are wondering if we are all fun and no work, other choices include functional categories for finding a particular set of profiles, such as by place or missing information (such as “unsourced”) and even by criteria you design.

Popular this time of year is the Witch category criteria. This search shows the convicted witches from the burning years in your line. I have three. I am not surprised, LOL.

WikiTree can be a little daunting to start. There is a LOT to adding an ancestor, but to do so, you only need to add the facts you have and a valid source. That source can be your own knowledge (for example with an older relative), a document in your possession, or an online source such as Ancestry or FamilySearch. The rest of it is all optional. The belief is that sometime in the future, someone else may find your added ancestor and have more information that they can then add.

You also must enter your own data until you find where your tree connects with the full tree. What that means is that somewhere in your ancestors are people that have already been added. For me, it took getting to my Great Grandmother Eva. If you start with yourself, add your parents, grandparents, and start to add great grandparents (depending on your age of course) it is likely somewhere there will be a link. Finding that link was delightful for me, and I admit when I continue to find new ones I still feel a bit of a thrill.

WikiTree is completely free, and people who join and sign the “honor code” get unlimited access to create, collaborate and share. Honestly the list of member benefits far exceeds any pay site I have ever had a membership to. Additionally, unlike pay sites that constantly seem to narrow their terms, in general WikiTree, as a collaborative tree, continues to want to expand. The common intention is to have well sourced profiles for every ancestor in our shared tree.

I highly recommend WikiTree to any genealogist who wants their information to be available indefinitely and who values a community of like minded (and sometimes not!) genealogists. There are tons of activities daily, weekly, monthly as well as just about every group you could think of for every category. There are multiple ways to contribute, lots of teams that participate in the regular ‘thons, and lots of genealogists who just quietly do their work.

You owe it to yourself to check it out if you haven’t yet. And if you run into problems, feel free to post here. I’m always happy to help.

1. This information is taken from the WikiTree Home Page as of October 31, 2026 ↩︎
2. Wikitree Apps are a collection of “helper” apps that have been written by individual programers. It has a separate login, but it is well worth it for the many different apps and utilities that are there. ↩︎