Twile

Earlier in the month at WDYTYA? Live in Birmingham I met Kelly Marsden, co-founder of Twile, at a display on the periphery of the Findmypast area. 

Twile had been in the news in February when it won two awards in the Innovator Showdown at Rootstech in Salt Lake City including People’s Choice. Findmypast made a strategic investment in Twile.

Some family historians enjoy the process of researching their family history and recording it.  It's all about the challenge of finding out about people in the family tree, Others get more of a thrill from sharing the information, unfortunately sometimes even with those who'd rather not know. Twile is for the sharers, presenting family history in a visual format appealing to generations who'd rather take advantage of flexibility of information on a screen rather than a piece of paper.

I was invited to try Twile for a free trial period, anyone can do so at twile.com.

What's it about?

With Twile you can create a rich, visual timeline of your family history, made up of milestones and photos that tell the story of you, your ancestors and your descendants.
You can view a timeline for your whole family, starting from your earliest known ancestor right up until present day.
Or you can view a timeline for a single person on your family tree, to explore their life from the day they were born.

A three minute video at  https://twile.com/video/timeline illustrates the basics.

There was a gentle learning curve in using Twile.
You can enter information person by person, event by event, or import a gedcom and add to it.
I found it sometimes easier to delete an item and re-enter rather than trying to edit.
It would be helpful to have a way to suppress all but the major life events so you can just see an overview of the BMDs in the family.
Two timelines are available, for WW1 and 2, to add to an individual or family timeline. While a good idea these are detailed and tend to swamp the family information. It would be good if one could select just the items of interest. This can presently be accomplished by adding custom events but requires re-entering the information.

Twile is filling a niche in the market for those who want to share their family story, or stories, in an attractive online timeline format.