Here are some reasons you might (or might not) decide to use WikiTree for your family history.
1.) Family history has a deeper meaning for you than basic genealogical ancestry
In casual usage, "family history" and "genealogy" are often considered synonyms. But there is a subtle distinction. Family history is about people's lives and relationships. Genealogy is more strictly about who's descended from whom.
Our uniquely-customized wiki tools and photo pages are ideally suited for showcasing the richness of people's lives. They're overkill if you're mainly interested in tracing parentage and including a few dates and locations.
2.) Information about your family comes from different sources at different times.
WikiTree is especially valuable if your family history is collected from multiple sources — personal stories, old documents, family pictures, websites you found through Google, genealogy books or resources, etc. — and is never considered complete and finished.
If most of your information comes from one source you may want to see if that source has a family tree tool connected with it. I don't mind naming the 800 pound gorilla in the room: Ancestry.com. As long as you're paying their monthly fee you have access to an amazing collection of resources. If you don't have many other sources and you plan to continue your membership indefinitely you may just want to save your data on their site rather than transfer what you find there.
3.) Other family members may want to contribute information.
WikiTree is designed for collaboration. Family members can add as little or as much as they want, whenever they want.
This factor may not be important to you if you've already been labeled "the family historian", as many of us have, and don't mind being the only one who enters information.
4.) Other family members may want to view your family history.
Through the years many of us have carried photo albums to family reunions, printed out charts, sent photocopies and disks to distant relatives, etc. Now anyone with an Internet connection can see the most current version of everything you've collected.
Other websites enable this. However, WikiTree has what we believe to be the ideal privacy balance. See the next item.
5.) Very distant relatives may want to view or contribute information.
Some websites allow anyone to see the information you enter. This is good for world history and genealogy but it's a problem if you want to include personal information in your tree. Information about living people can be especially sensitive in this age of identity theft.
Other websites enable you to determine all the people who can have access to your family history. This makes them safer than the totally open websites but they still have a privacy problem.
The problem is that families are like overlapping circles, not like isolated boxes. If you treat a family like a box then anyone outside the box cannot see anything and everyone inside the box can see everything.
Our unique Trust system enables you to customize the access you give to distant relatives. This way you can collaborate and share information without giving them access to all your family members' information.
6.) Some of your information may be relevant to historians.
You may not know it, and you may not care, but some of your family history is probably relevant to world history.
Your ancestors lived through dramatic historical events. You're living through them now. Modern historians have come to recognize that history isn't just about kings, presidents, and generals. We don't always know what details will matter because we can't see the forest when we're in the trees. It's the job of future historians to put small facts into context.
All family history tools are designed to be resources for your own future generations. WikiTree is also designed as a resource for future historians.