Using the iPhone to survive a family reunion

I found an iPhone app that can be a big help when attending a family reunion. In the past when I would attend these things I was pretty much clueless as to who the people are. What I discovered is something called Shrubs for the iPhone. The way this works is you buy the app and put it on your iPhone. Next you open the app and if you are someplace where there is WiFi – in my case the hotel where a number of the people attending the family reunion were staying- and find a family member into genealogy and who has their genealogy data on a laptop you can get your family tree on your iPhone. Shrubs will give you a URL that you give to you family member to enter into their laptop (they have to be on the same wireless network for this to work) Once they enter the url a window opens on their computer and they go to where they have stored their genealogy data in GEDCOM format. A version of that file appears on the iPhone. Note – while it does get all of the family tree information if they have any notes in their file these get stripped out of the download/upload to the iPhone.

Next what I did was go to my grandparents and put that as a starting point. What that gave me was all of my aunts and uncles and all of their children (my cousins) and their children and so on.

You can search by name also. So if you know who some ones parents are and or their name you can find them and their children. Of course it all depends on how accurate and complete the original GEDCOM file is.

If you do not happen to be standing next to someone with a genealogy program you can have the file uploaded to a site and download it from there.

For the first time I was able to see all of my uncles and aunts and their children and their childrens children and so on. (I have over 100 first cousins on my fathers side so this can be a challenge.)

So what Shrubs does is allow you to have your family tree available on the iPhone. The thing to know is that this is NOT a program to generate genealogy data; rather it is a program to view the data and and does have the ability to add notes. The family tree information is READ only.

The nice thing is that you can look up people on the iPhone so you do not appear to be a total idiot at a family event such as a reunion.

Tags: apps, family reunion, genology, iPhone, shrubs