WeRelate.org is the largest freely licensed genealogy wiki and has almost 5 million wiki pages. Supported by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy and the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, it provides genealogy tools and data as a free public service, on a non-commercial, nonsectarian site.[1] Of its almost 5 million pages, WeRelate had over 2 million person pages, over 694,000 family pages and 19370 images in April 2011.
WeRelate allows users to upload GEDCOMs. With more than 26,000 registered users, collaborators often find common ancestors. The system produces a comparison screen for likely candidates, allowing users determine if subjects are the same person. Duplicate pages for common ancestors can be merged at upload.
Users are encouraged to document their research. WeRelate has over 926,000 Source pages which contain reference and access information along with relevant links. Source pages also provide space for review and research tips. Users may link Person and Family pages to any relevant source pages. Users may also create MySource pages for references relevant to only their research such as family bibles, birth, death and marriage certificates. Scans of documentation may be attached to any relevant page.
Place information is essential to genealogical research. WeRelate has over 900,000 referenced place pages. Where applicable, Place pages are linked to [2] Family History Library Catalog,[3] and Wikipedia. Where geographic coordinates are available, a google map is provided. Many pages also include timelines, population history, contained places, history, research tips and images.
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The site and software were developed in 2005 by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, led by president Dallan Quass. WeRelate is partnered with the Allen County Public Library, Genealogy Department which houses the nation’s largest public genealogy collection.[4] WeRelate has been listed in the top 101 genealogy websites by Family Tree Magazine[5] for the past four years running (2008–2011).
In 2007, WeRelate and the University of South Florida's Africana Heritage Project[6] launched a research project on slave genealogy, supported by South Carolina's Magnolia Plantation Foundation, including the resulting data in the global genealogy collection.[7][8]
Standardized page formats are generated by fill in the blanks forms or by uploads of data in the GEDCOM format. The data includes records for current and historical inhabited places and names (given and surname), and is an open wiki with discussions associated with each entry.
Compared to other projects that let people publish and share similar data, WeRelate focuses on sourcing files with links to primary genealogy records, and rather than letting users maintain separate personal family trees, aims to align data from different sources into a unified global record.[9]
WeRelate includes a family tree explorer, annotated images for sharing images of primary source documents or photos, and generates pedigree maps of up to five generations of data.