Frequently asked questions
In our family tree you can find people from different countries. To make it easier to get started, we provide the welcome page and "FAQs" in 4 languages. The presentation of the family tree is also multilingual as far as possible. Only the content of documents and certificates is always presented in the original language. This makes it more difficult if you do not understand the original language, but reduces our effort considerably. If any questions arise as a result, we are happy to help and ask you to contact us.
Please click on the link "Request a new user account", fill in all fields and send the request. The following email is for verification of the entered email address and by clicking the included link the administrator will be informed. The request will be reviewed and responded to in a timely manner.
Please note: We only accept persons with a direct connection to our family tree, because we also have to protect personal data of living individuals. If the administrator does not know the sender of the request, he will ask for proof of identity in the form of documents or other identification.
We are anxious to prove all life events and facts in our family tree with sources. Sources are only visible for logged in members. Besides the big online databases like Ancestry, Archion, Facebook, FamilySearch, Find A Grave, geneology.net, geni.com and legacy.com we have also found many documents in libraries, newspapers, church repositories, municipal repositories and state archives as well as WikipediA. Also from the source "Deutsches Geschlechterbuch" many data come from persons from the former eastern areas of Germany. Especially we like to use scanned documents and pictures of family members.
In addition, we have also received data from the following partners.
Sources and their digital reproductions are usually subject to copyright. Many archives restrict the publication of their archival materials. We abide by the restrictions and therefore make sources and associated media available only to registered family members.
The protection of personal data is of utmost importance to us.
We take into account the rules according to German data protection law. Accordingly, births are subject to a retention period for 110 years, marriages for 80 years and deaths for 30 years.
The software webtrees has mechanisms to ensure privacy on different levels. To see details of living people, a verified user account is required. Membership links the user to their place in the family tree.
We do NOT share the information gathered here with third parties, especially for commercial purposes. The data is stored in a SQL database, the media is hidden behind a firewall. The database remains in our possession. Only publicly available information is reproduced. Private data is not revealed by us and our users are held to the same high standards.
The software webtrees allows to display images with a watermark. To reduce the quality of unauthorized copies, our images are displayed only with watermark as a small protection. For logged in members the media are available without watermark. However, we also want to publicly present images about people who are not subject to the data protection concept.
With webtrees family trees and genealogical relationships can be presented and managed in a simple way on the internet. This allows both individual users and groups to enter and maintain their data in a data pool. The presentation and editing is possible worldwide with stationary and mobile devices via a graphical user interface. Protected by a sophisticated authorization concept, access control and data protection take place at various levels.
For this purpose, the program is installed on a web server and connected to an SQL database. From a technical point of view webtrees is a web based OpenSource application, which is based on PHP on the server side and JavaScript parts on the client side. For data exchange with other genealogy programs the GEDCOM standard is used.
We see a big advantage in the fact that our research results and data are located on our own web server and not on web servers of foreign organizations in other countries. The sovereignty of who gets access to which data is at our discretion.
The webtrees website provides a lot of useful information. This includes access to the user forum, a section with documentation, the current demo installations, helpful add-on modules, a list of user installations and supplementary information.
In the course of time, further manuals for webtrees have been published: