We are excited to announce our latest update to the FREE Ancestry iOS app for the iPad and iPhone. This update brings a bright new look that feels right at home on Apple’s new iOS 7 operating system. Now you can easily add your living relatives to your tree using Facebook, read through your ancestors’ life events in story-like narratives, and dive into historical events that your ancestors lived through. Other new features include the ability to correct relationships in your tree and attach photos to life events.
Building your tree with Facebook
First of all, let’s put some concerns to rest—if you connect to Facebook using the app, we never post to Facebook on your behalf, and information from your family tree is never shared on Facebook. That said, this feature is a convenient and fun way to add living relatives to your tree or photos for living people already in your tree.
After you connect to Facebook we look for matches between the people in your tree and your friends on Facebook. If we find a match, you’ll see a screen like this pop up where you can confirm your matches.
We also look for people who are not in your tree. If we find relatives on Facebook who are not in your tree we show them as suggestions. Tap on them to either add them to your tree (Keep) or remove them (Ignore).
Historical facts
We insert historical facts into your ancestors’ timeline to shed some light on what was going on in the world when they were alive. You can tap on these to view other historical events from a decade.
Type-ahead menu
The type-ahead menu is handy when adding living people to your tree or if you need to correct a relationship.
- Adding living people: When adding someone to your tree, if that person is a friend on Facebook or saved in your contacts list, a type-ahead menu will appear so you can easily add their info. The icon next to the name in the menu indicates where the info is coming from.
- Correcting a relationship: If the person you are adding is already in your tree, you will see their name in the type-ahead menu with a little “family tree/pedigree” icon. To correct a relationship, start adding a new person where the relationship should be and select the person with the wrong relationship from the type-ahead menu. This will break the old relationship and define a new one.
Attach photos to life events
It’s easy to attach photos to life events. Tap on the event in a person’s timeline to view the details. From here, you can tap the “Add Media and Sources” button to view the event gallery. Then tap “Add Photo” to take a new photo, choose from photos saved on your camera roll, or pick from photos already saved to that person in your tree. Photos attached to events will appear on the timeline.
Layout changes
We moved a few things around to improve the layout of the app. Tap on the menu button to get to your list of trees, tree view, tree settings, people lists, and account info.
We hope you enjoy the new update. If you haven’t installed or updated to the latest version, you can get it FREE in the iTunes App Store.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback about the update or the app in general. Please feel free to comment below.
The Ancestry Mobile Apps Team
Don’t have an Apple iOS device? We have an Android app as well!