Amiglia Your Family Tree

A new Web site shows a lot of promise as a way to build collaborative family trees. Built as a way to connect families - both across miles and generations - Amiglia is not a traditional family tree application, but more of a family tree photo album. It offers easy ways to share the latest family photos with each other, as well as to display and connect the oldest photos of common ancestors.

In concept Amiglia is basically just another online photo album like Flickr, but the family tree option is an interesting twist for genealogists. Albums can even be connected to each other, making it a great way to connect photos and profiles from living relatives for a family history book or upcoming reunion. When you upload new photos to your own album, they also get automatically uploaded to any related families albums. Instant sharing! You can also create a single family site, and provide your relatives with separate family passwords for upload rights, edit rights, etc.

Integration with Google Maps provides a neat way to share photos and reports from genealogical research trips, or even to display the migration of your ancestors in an interactive format. You can also produce a map that identifies all of your photos by location - fun for families spread out across multiple locations.

Amiglia still needs a bit of work. Family relationships such as step-parents, adoptees, etc. take extra work to identify (you have to establish divorcees as a married relationship, for example, and then edit from within their profiles) or can't be accurately portrayed at all. You also can't see an entire family tree at once, only browse through branch by branch. The site is still in development, however, with suggested changes and additions being implemented regularly.

Amiglia Basic is free, but limited to seven additional family members with contribution rights and 1GB of storage space for photos and videos. $49.95/year allows an unlimited number of people in your family album and 100GB of photo storage (about 20,000 high res photos) - it's a family membership, with the annual fee covering your entire core family. Amiglia Premium offers unlimited photo uploads and unlimited linked Amiglia sites for $99.95/year.

Best of all, the site is still in the final stages of beta - and is offering free lifetime memberships to anyone who signs up now. Amiglia is definitely worth checking out. Once you've played a bit, come back and tell us what you think!