What’s new on My rOoOts

When you create a family tree, choose Import GEDCOM instead of starting fresh. Drop in your file and the tree is made for you, named after your family, with every person, fact and source in place. A GEDZIP file brings its photos along too. You can also do this from your home page or from the free tree maker before you sign up.

The tree tour now points out Members, Photos, Stories and Gifts & prints in the menu, and each of those pages has its own short tour. Replay any of them from Guided tour in the menu. If you click outside the tour card while it is open, it gives a little shake to show where to carry on.

When both partners in a couple have their parents in the tree, their card used to be drawn on top of other relatives in between. The tree now makes room for it, keeping the couple on the side of the family closest to you.

A married couple's card now gives each person the same space as everyone else on the tree: their photo, full name, years, star sign and badges, with the year they married on the heart between them. Posters and family books draw couples the same way.

Your home page now lists what is waiting for you: requests to review, new stories from relatives, and the people still missing a photo or birth date, each one a tap away.

Change your name, see how you sign in, and turn product news emails on or off. Download your account details and a GEDCOM file of every tree you own, or delete your account once your trees are passed on. Open it from your name in the menu.

On a computer, the tree and the fan chart keep every tool in one bar along the bottom, each with its name under it. Members lets you sort by generation, name or recently added and keeps loading as you scroll, so very large families open quickly. Pages and pop-up windows are tidier and easier to tap on a phone.

Files from programs that have moved to GEDCOM 7.0 import just like older ones, with their shared notes, date phrases, identifiers and alternate names kept. GEDCOM 5.5 and 5.5.1 files work exactly as before, and the import shows which version your file is before you start.

Upload a GEDZIP (.gdz), the GEDCOM 7 file with its photos inside, or a .zip of your program's export folder. Each photo lands in the right person's gallery, a group or wedding photo appears for everyone in it, and each person's main photo becomes their profile picture if they don't have one yet.

Export now offers GEDCOM 7.0 and a GEDZIP with all your family's photos, alongside the familiar GEDCOM 5.5.1 file that opens in every genealogy program. Your facts, notes and sources go with all three.

Drop a GEDZIP on the free GEDCOM viewer to see your tree straight away. Your photos wait safely in your browser and are added the moment you save the tree to a free account.

Press Import on your tree and drop in a GEDCOM, spreadsheet or JSON file. We work out which it is, add the people to your tree with their facts and sources, and give simple tips on where to start. One spreadsheet template replaces the four there were before.

Each relative in a profile now has a clear remove button, and deleting a person has its own button. On the tree, hover or tap a marriage line or a child's line to remove it. Everything asks you to confirm first.

The poster and family book are now made as a PDF at exactly the paper size you picked, with every photo, and download straight to your device. Phones used to crop posters and split book pages in two. On a saved tree, Export, then PNG or PDF, now opens the studio and starts the download for you.

Saving no longer fails when your browser is translating the page. Exporting a tree after opening Share works again without a reload. Adding a relative shows one message instead of two. Lines to children no longer hide behind cards in posters and books.

Start a tree without signing up, add relatives, import a GEDCOM file, invite family, share a link, add photos, record stories, cite sources, search old records, work out how people are related, use the fan chart, print your tree, and make a poster or family book. Each guide shows exactly what you will see, screen by screen.

Every screenshot is taken on a phone as well as a computer, and your phone shows you the phone version, so the buttons in the guide match the buttons on your screen.

Profiles and the members list now show the age someone reached, instead of counting on from today. Someone born in 1921 who died in 1998 now reads Aged 77, not Aged 105.

Family insights and the tree summary now count generations the same way the tree draws them. Trees where you have parents and grandparents above you were showing too few.

Open an ancestor and tap "Search records" to search FamilySearch, Find a Grave, BillionGraves, WikiTree, Google Books and the Internet Archive, already filled in with their name, birth and death years and place. It works in your own tree, in a tree you are still building, and on public family trees.

Enter the centimorgans you share with a DNA match from Ancestry, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA or GEDmatch and see every relationship that fits, with the typical range for each drawn as a bar. Built on the Shared cM Project, with a note for families from communities that married within themselves.

Save each match as you work through your list to compare them side by side, then email the whole list to yourself with a link back to each one.

Open anyone in your tree to see where they lived, worked and studied, when they moved or served, and where they rest, in date order. Dates keep their precision, so "about 1850" or "between 1850 and 1855" stays exactly that.

Back any fact with a source such as a census, certificate, register or family bible, with the page and the words it says. Sources are shared across the whole tree, and research notes sit alongside for leads still to check.

Files from Ancestry, MyHeritage, Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Gramps and others now bring in residences, occupations, burials, custom events, notes and every source citation, not just names and dates. Exporting gives it all back, so moving your tree here costs you nothing.

If you imported a GEDCOM file before today, its facts, notes and sources have been added to your tree from the original file.

Each person on a public tree now gets their own page showing who they are, who they are connected to, and the exact chain of relationships back to the rest of the family, instead of a list of names repeated three times over.

Public trees of well known families now show properly credited photographs sourced from Wikimedia Commons, so the tree reads as a record of real people rather than a diagram.

The tree on a public family page now opens at a readable zoom with a bottom control dock and a full screen mode, rather than fitting a hundred people on screen at once and leaving you to hunt.

The gift studio turns any tree into a print ready poster in one of nine designs, or into a family history book written chapter by chapter from the names, dates and stories already in the tree.

Send a relative one short question a week (where they grew up, how they met, what a grandparent was like). They answer in their own voice or in writing, from a link, with no account needed, and the answer is saved onto their profile for good.

Work out how you are related to someone in the kinship finder, then turn that answer into a real family tree in a single tap, with everyone on the path already placed.

Send a cousin a link and they add their own side of the family: their spouse, their children, their parents. Nothing joins your tree until you have reviewed and approved it.

One bottom toolbar instead of scattered controls, a starting zoom you can actually read, tap a card to add someone next to it, and a plain person list view for when the canvas is more than you need.

The kinship finder covers more of the world's family vocabularies, so the term it gives you is the one your family actually uses.

Every person on a public tree now carries a claim button. The tree's owner reviews the claim, and once they approve it the profile is linked to your account.

Add as many photographs as you like to anyone in your tree, each with its own caption, viewed full size in a lightbox.

Every public family now has an album page collecting all of its photographs in one place.

Open a summary of how complete your tree is: who has no dates, who is not connected to anyone yet, and where a generation is missing.

Adding a new person through the relationship picker now records the relationship straight away, instead of leaving you to link them afterwards.

Editing someone no longer resets their photograph back to the illustrated placeholder.

Large trees now draw the part of the family you are actually looking at, with expandable cards at the edges to walk outwards. Tested against an imported tree of 11,700 people, and there is no need to split a big family into separate trees to keep it working.

Found a public tree that is your family's? Ask for it. Once the request is approved the tree, and everything in it, becomes yours to edit.

Transfer a tree you own to another account, for when the family historian changes.

A short, anchored walkthrough on your dashboard and on the tree canvas, pointing at the thing it is describing. It appears on your first few sign-ins and then gets out of the way.

Downloading a tree you started as a guest no longer puts a sign-in wall in front of it.

Upload the GEDCOM file exported by any genealogy program and the tree appears immediately, with no account and nothing to install.

Take the tree away as a PDF, ready to print or send on.

Look up what you would actually call a relative in your own family's language, rather than settling for 'first cousin once removed'.

The iOS Files picker no longer greys out .ged files, and files with unusual characters in them stopped coming through garbled.

A directory of family trees shared publicly by the people who built them, each one explorable person by person.

A chat bubble on every page. Ask a question, get a reply, and carry on with what you were doing. Replies reach you by email too, so you do not have to sit and wait.

A file you uploaded is kept, so you can come back to it, start over, or sign in to unlock the full tree without uploading it again.

Generate an embed for your tree or fan chart and drop it into any website or blog, with control over zoom, direction and how many generations show.

Import members by pasting JSON directly, without first saving it to a file.

A plus button on any person's card adds a parent, sibling, spouse or child right there, already connected.

People without a photograph now get an illustrated portrait suited to their age and gender, so a half finished tree still looks like a family.

Download a blank family tree chart as a PDF to fill in by hand, useful for asking older relatives to write down what they remember.

Surname meaning lookup, gotra lookup, a baby name generator and a DNA relationship chart, all free and with no sign-up.

Four more free calculators, joining the relationship calculator and ancestor timeline generator. No sign-up, instant results.

The growing list of tools is now sorted by what you are trying to do, rather than presented as one flat list.

Create a read only link to your tree, your fan chart, or a tree you built before signing up, and send it to anyone.

Paste a share link into WhatsApp or a message and the preview shows a real picture of your tree, not a generic logo.

Record a birth or death as just a year, for when that is genuinely all anyone knows.

See your family as a fan radiating from any person you choose, switching between their ancestors and their descendants.

Add a photograph to anyone in your tree and crop or rotate it in place. Works whether or not you have signed up yet.

The family tree canvas was rebuilt for phones, and a person's profile opens as a centred card rather than a cramped side panel.

Start a family tree straight from the homepage with no account. When you are ready to keep it, create an account and the tree you already built comes with you.

The platform is now My rOoOts, with new branding throughout.

Guides on tracing a family line, reading old records, and understanding how relatives are named across different cultures.

Spouses sit together as a unit and children hang from the marriage between them, which is how a family tree is meant to read.

Very large sets of siblings fold up instead of stretching the tree sideways off screen, and lines no longer cross each other on their way between generations.

The tree now rejects a relationship that would make someone their own ancestor, rather than quietly drawing something that cannot exist.

Export your family as CSV or JSON, relationships included, so it can be opened elsewhere or kept as a backup.

Bring a family in from a spreadsheet with parents, spouses and children linked up on the way in, instead of as a flat list of names.

An email a week ahead and again on the day, for every birthday in your family, plus a notification bell in the app.

See what has changed across your families: who was added, what was edited, which relationships were drawn.

Skip the password entirely.