GenCircles is one of the newer sites for family trees. Your best bet is to search first on the ancestor's and the spouse's name. If the spouse is female, just use her first name. Quite a few researchers omit the maiden name. So it is best to not try to find it. If you get too many responses this way, add the father's name of the ancestor. If you get too few responses, omit the spouse's name and use only the father's name with the ancestor's name.
You could also search on birth and death years. If you do, we recommend that you not search on exact years, but rather search a range of years. If you are not sure of the year, or if the person who submitted the family tree was not sure of the year, you may fail to get a match if you search on exact years.
GenCircles also provides automatic matching and other support if you submit a GEDCOM file to their site.
How to Search GenCircles for Family Trees
- Best Way to Search: Go to Active Searches for easier searching. At the Active Searches page, you need only to enter your ancestor data once to search all the websites listed at the left. Active Searches is a free service that creates the optimal searches for your ancestor data.
- Manually search GenCircles yourself. This will open a new window so you can refer back to the search hints above.
GenCircles Website Capabilities
See the definition of terms for any questions on the meaning of the entries.
| x | free searches |
| x | free viewing of pedigrees |
| paid viewing | |
| free downloads of pedigrees | |
| paid downloads | |
| x | contact information for submitter |
| x | ability to see all the names submitted by a particular researcher |
| ability to restrict searches to updates since a specific time | |
| x | searches with spouse's name |
| x | searches with parent's names |
| x | searches by place of birth |
| searches by place of marriage | |
| x | searches by place of death |
| x | searches by country |
| x | searches by state, province, or political subdivision |
| x | searches by date |
| x | ability to specify date ranges for searching |
| x | searches by exact spelling of name |
| searches by metaphone | |
| searches by soundex | |
| * | ability to automatically find possible matches in your ancestry |
* If you submit your family tree to this website.