Christmas Tpstry Designs

The days are getting shorter (at least in the northern hemisphere) so that means Christmas is just around the corner. Now is a perfect time to start your Christmas Tpstry.

A Christmas Tpstry is a great way to gather your memories for the upcoming holiday season. The new Christmas Tpstry theme includes questions about your holiday plans, decorating a Christmas tree, remembrances from the past year and even a few about Santa Claus. The questions are designed to keep you busy throughout the whole holiday season. So you can get started now and continue to add new memories as you celebrate.

Be sure to share your Christmas Tpstry with friends and family by using one of our four new designs: Postmarks, Happy Holidays, Holly and A Child Is Born. Sharing your Christmas Tpstry is a great alternative to a mailed Christmas card. Santa loves environmentally responsible elves!

Trick-Or-Treat and Happy Halloween designs

Just in time for your spooktacular fun, our new Halloween Tpstry theme is here. The Halloween theme includes questions about costumes, scares, tricks and treats. Plus there are two visual designs to choose from: Trick-or-Treat (click for sample) and Happy Halloween (click for sample).

To get started, all you need to do is log in to Tpstry, create a “New Tpstry” and choose “Halloween” from the list of available themes.

The new Halloween theme doesn’t just have to be for this Halloween. You can create other Tpstries for Halloweens past. So resurrect those old photos.

And don’t forget to share your completed Tpstries with your friends. They want to remember your goblin adventures too!

Wow, what a busy summer. You may not have heard much from Tpstry lately, but that’s because we’ve been locked in a room making big changes to the site. We’re going crazy with cabin fever so it’s time to show everyone what we’ve been working on.

So without further ado, go checkout the updated Tpstry website.

Probably the biggest change that you will notice is that where the old site dealt just with family memories as one large group, Tpstry now breaks down your memories into smaller groups. This way you can have one Tpstry for your family history, one for your daughter’s birthday party, another for a vacation, you get the idea. By breaking down the memories into smaller groups, they become more manageable and easier to share.

We’ve also changed the Family Memories Website into a more concise, interactive postcard-like graphic. These graphics are simple to share and easy to customize. Each Tpstry automatically gets one of these graphics, which is themed based upon the theme of the Tpstry. Plus, each Tpstry graphic has it’s own set of sharing permissions. So you can share your family history Tpstry with one set of friends and share your daughter’s birthday party Tpstry with another set of friends.

One change that might affect some users is that we are going to be discontinuing support for GEDCOM import and export. As Tpstry continues to evolve, the data collected does not fit the GEDCOM file format nicely. Through the month of October we will keep the old website available at http://gedcom.tpstry.com where you can log in and export your information in GEDCOM format. Please note though, all your data has been moved to the new site and if you change any data on the old site, those changes will not be reflected on the new site.

We are so excited for everyone to start using our new site. Please stay tuned, as we will be adding more Tpstry themes soon. And as always, we’d love to hear what you think about the new site: what works, what doesn’t, what Tpstry theme would you like to see. You can reach us through Facebook, Twitter or our contact form.

Some of the things that we often hear Tpstry users say is that they wish they could import their existing research from a program like Family Tree Maker or Geni into Tpstry. This would save them a lot of time and they wouldn’t need to retype everything. Users also want to be able to export the data they enter in Tpstry so they can use it in other family history applications and websites.

Have no fear, we listened to you and made Tpstry better.  Now you can import an existing family tree from Geni or from a GEDCOM file into your Tpstry family. Plus, you can export your Tpstry family data as a GEDCOM file.

You can find the new import/export features by logging in to Tpstry then clicking on the “Import/Export” link at the top of the page.

Here are a few entries from our FAQ page about the new features.

Does Tpstry support the full GEDCOM format?

Computer programs and websites assisting with family lineage research commonly use GEDCOM files. While Tpstry does address family lineage, that is not Tpstry’s main focus. We are able to import and export person entries, births, deaths, families and marriages using GEDCOM files. A lot of the information in Tpstry does not fit the GEDCOM format. For this data, we add it as a Note entry to the associated person during a GEDCOM export.

Can I use the GEDCOM export as a full backup of all my Tpstry data?

No. Exporting your information into GEDCOM is an easy way to move data from Tpstry to other family history programs. However, it is not a full backup of your Tpstry data. For instance, images are not included in the exported GEDCOM file. If you export your Tpstry data as a GEDCOM file, then re-import it into Tpstry, some data will be lost. This is due to the fact that Tpstry collects data that is often not found in GEDCOM files.

Can I import my family tree from Geni.com?

Yes. To import your Geni family tree, log into your Tpstry family then click on the “Import/Export” link at the top of the page. Next click the “Import Geni.com” tab at the left of the page. The first step in the import is to allow Tpstry access to your Geni information. Click the “Allow Access To Geni.com” button and you will be taken to the Geni website. After you have allowed access to Tpstry, you will automatically be taken to the import page on Tpstry. The import page will now show a small family tree that shows yourself and your parents. The import process works by choosing your self or an ancestor on your family tree. The import will begin with this selected person and import all partners and descendants of this person. While Tpstry can handle many generations, we suggest you limit only going back a few generations. Person profiles, births, deaths and marriages will be copied from your Geni family tree to your Tpstry family.

Are questions like “Dad, did you ever meet George Washington?” common in your household? They are in mine. Getting young kids involved in family history is great, we just need to remember that they are still learning the concepts of ancestry and family trees. So you might have to start out with the basics.

Children know the world around them the best. It can be hard for them to imagine someone living a long time ago in a land far away. Here are a few things that you can do to introduce young children to your family’s history.

Keep It Simple
Most young children know who their grandparents are. But ask them who their dad’s dad is and they can get stumped. Simplify the family tree to help them understand. Tell them that dad’s dad is your grandfather. Mom’s brother is their uncle. Grandmother’s mother is your great grandmother. Using these types of examples help them understand the structure of a family.

Namesakes
Lots of parents, like myself, give their children names with special meanings within the family. It could be the name of a loved relative, or a family last name that isn’t used anymore. Explaining to your child where their name came from is a great way to expose them to their family history.

Grandparents’ Real Names
It is common for grandparents to have nicknames like NaNa, MeMa or Gran. There is nothing wrong with these names, but we also need to teach our children that their grandparents have real names just like us. Our kids don’t have to use these real names all the time, but this is knowledge they should learn.

Maiden Names
Maiden names can be confusing to kids. You mean mom had a different name before she got married? That’s weird. Talking about maiden names can be easier when you relate it to the names of maternal grandparents. This helps make the connection that mom is a child of those grandparents.

Exposing our children to their family history is easy to do, especially when done in small steps. While you are riding in the car or looking at family pictures, throw in a few questions like “Who is mom’s mom?” or “What is granddad’s real name?”. This will help them begin to understand how their family is structured and that George Washington was dead long before dad was ever born.

We’ve got some great news. Today we are announcing a partnership with GenealogyFreelancers.com to help make researching family history easier.

We know that sometimes questions on Tpstry can stump you. This often happens when the question is in regards to a person several generations back and there is no relative that remembers the answer. Do you give up? No. You get help.

GenealogyFreelancers is a great place to find a professional researcher to help you get past that roadblock. Using GenealogyFreelancers is easy. On their site, you can upload a project prospectus, or basically the ins-and-outs of what you are looking for. Then professional researchers from GenealogyFreelancers will look over your project and see how they can help you.

So where does Tpstry fit into this mix? Well, every research project starts out with the known information like names, places and dates. Since Tpstry already collects this type of information, we are making it easier to use this information outside of Tpstry. Soon we will be rolling out the ability to export your family information in GEDCOM format. This means that you can use Tpstry to enter all your known information, export your GEDCOM file and give it to your researcher. This gives the researcher a head start when investigating your family’s past.

Once your researcher has helped you find the answer to that stubborn question, don’t forget to enter that information in your Tpstry family.

So visit http://www.genealogyfreelancers.com to post your project prospectus or look for the “Hire a Professional Researcher” links within the Tpstry website.

Well, RootsTech is finally over and most attendees are getting settled back home. Before we left, we were able to get one last interview in for our 3 Questions series. Our last interview is with Amos Elliston, CTO of Geni.com. Geni is an online collaborative family tree site with over 50,000,000 people profiles in their trees. The ultimate goal of Geni is to create one giant family tree that connects everyone together.

This morning at RootsTech we had the pleasure to talk with Dick Eastman, of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter. What started out as a small email newsletter to a few friends has grown over the years to a large list of over 60,000 online genealogy enthusiasts. Be sure to drop over to Dick’s website and sign up for the newsletter.

One of the first blogs to review Tpstry was Thomas MacEntee’s Geneabloggers. Before RootsTech, we had never met Thomas in person. So what was one of the first things we did upon meeting him at RootsTech? Ask him our three questions of course.

We were fortunate enough to hear AC in two sessions at RootsTech. His first session was all about popular mobile applications that genealogists can use. The second session we heard him in was a panel discussion about genealogy blogs. After you watch our 3 Questions video below, be sure to check out his blog, Find My Ancestor.