Access to the Twile website is now free to anyone who wants to build a visual, interactive timeline of their family story.
While the website is aimed primarily at family historians, it is also designed to encourage the rest of the family to add their own content, including the younger generations.
A Twile timeline consists of photos and milestones, such as births, marriages, and deaths, that tell the story of your family from your earliest known ancestor right through to today. You can build your timeline by adding information and photos for each person, and you can also build a family tree, import a GEDCOM file, and import from Family Search.
Photo: Twile.
Award winner
You may recall hearing about Twile winning last year’s People’s Choice award at the RootsTech genealogy conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Twile receives financial backing from Findmypast and other investors. Last fall, they announced the launch of a feature that let’s FamilySearch users generate a family history timeline and share their research online with other family members.
Paul Brooks, chief executive officer of the UK-based company, said, “When we started Twile, our vision was for all family members to share and collaborate on their family story. We want family historians to share their research with their family and we want the whole family to get involved – we felt that the paid subscription was getting in the way.”
Easy to register
To get started on Twile, you must first sign in with an email address and password or through Facebook. No other information is required. It is easy to create a timeline, but probably faster if you first upload your family tree GEDCOM file.
Privacy is a key part of Twile’s offering and the company wants to assure customers that their personal data is secure and will never be sold.
First attempt less than stellar
I gave the timeline feature a quick try, entering the names, dates, and photos of only three people. At first glance, the timeline didn’t do much for me, but I suspect there are features I overlooked and, admittedly, adding only a couple of people is not a fair test.
What I would like to see added to the website are a couple of examples of dynamic timelines to inspire me to keep going. If the examples are there, I could not find them.
Next steps for Twile
So, how does Twile plan to make money going forward since they will no longer be charging customers to use their core product? They plan to introduce some optional add-ons in the future to “enhance the Twile experience.”
I uploaded a gedcom and then created a timeline of all people. It’s great to see the comings and goings of interrelated families. But you can also choose one of several groups of people and easily see important vital events that might have affected various family lines. I couldn’t, however, find a way to download the timeline, so would have to rely on screenshots.
I registered even adding a photo of myself. Then went on to continue. I began to put in my father’s information, but somehow jumped to another screen. Couldn’t go back. The screen gave me a choice to add an event. It chose my birthday in 2015. I clicked it, it added it. That was the end of it. Nothing else was hot. I couldn’t go any further to add more events or go back to finish my father’s information. I’m sure it is operator error, but how to I receive more instruction?
Glad to know I wasn’t the only one to struggle with this site.