THE FAMILY HISTORY GUIDE

The Family History Guide is a new website.

It looks like it will be a great resource for becoming familiar with FamilySearch Family Tree.
There are step by step instructions, handouts, videos, to help you learn how to use FamilySearch effectively.

Go to the very short overview by clicking HERE and see what you think.  I will be exploring it in the next few days.

Mary

FamilySearch: What Are All Those Tools under "SEARCH" ???

FamilySearch:  Hover over the word SEARCH or click on it to go to the SEARCH home page.

Click on each word to explore

RECORDS - This gives you  a blank search form to search indexed records.  Or you can "Browse All Published Collections" and search for records by area or topic.  You can view unindexed records also.

GENEALOGIES - Remember when you submitted pedigrees and family group records years ago?  This is where you can access genealogies people have submitted in past years. Sometimes they have sources listed. They are the old Ancestral File and Pedigree Resource File records.

CATALOG - The Family History Library Catalog is searchable by place, topic, author, film #, subject....  It is great to see what book and microfilms the Library has before you go to Salt Lake.  Sometimes a book or film will also be at BYU and you can find that out here.  Also some books are digitized and are available to read on your computer.  Which takes us to ....

BOOKS - These are books that have been digitized.  Search for surnames, topics, places, etc. to see what you can find available from your computer at home.

WIKI - This is a huge resource to help you learn about researching places, topics, record collections, and just general how-to's.  There are articles, links to records, links to outside websites, videos, and more.

Your assignment is to explore all these resources.  Have fun!

Then go and explore what's under the SEARCH button on Ancestry.com  

RecordSeek.com: a handy tool for sourcing

RecordSeek is a bookmarklet that you simply click on to create a record of a source you find on sites other than the one you are using to save sources.  It works to connect your source to FamilyTree or to Ancestry.

To get the bookmarklet - Go to RecordSeek.com

Follow the simple instructions to drag and drop their button to your Favorites Bar on your browser page.
(Browser = Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.)

Here are detailed instructions attach a source you have found to FamilyTree and to Ancestry.

How to use RecordSeek

Mary Pletsch

Webinars: A Great Way to Learn About Family History

I like to learn more about websites and records by listening to webinars.  One of the places I go to find webinars is Legacy Family Tree.  Right now I'm just watching those with the "Free" label on them.  Anyone can sign up for upcoming webinars and listen to them live on your computer.  I tend to sign up and forget or get too busy, but they will give you a link if you missed it so you can watch it free for a few days after the webinar airs live.  Then there are some webinars that they keep free.  Right now I'm trying to catch up on the free ones and I listened to one today that was EXCELLENT.  It was by Tom Kemp and it was on Genealogy Bank.  Click on this link to watch it:

Genealogy Bank Webinar

 Genealogy Bank is a website that is a paid subscription website because every time they let you see a newspaper page, they pay a royalty to that paper.  They do have an agreement with FamilySearch to allow access to the index of obituaries they have, so you will see them mentioned as a partner site on FamilySearch.  You need to be in a Family History Library Center (like BYU or the Family History Library) to see the images, or pay to have a subscription.

The value in this webinar is that it shows what you can find in newspaper articles to add to the stories of your ancestors.  There are free newspaper websites that you can try searching on using the tips he tells you about.

Here are two:

ChroniclingAmerica

Utah newspapers only:  Utah Newspapers

You have to play with names in searching newspapers.  They will only pick up the name exactly as it is written in the newspaper.

Have fun browsing webinars.  It's a great way to learn.

Mary Pletsch

Find Cousins: Descendancy Research

When we have a tree that many people have worked on through the years, we often have a hard time finding more ancestors.

Descendancy research helps us to find "cousins" that do not have complete family informations or who are not even in our trees.

There are links on the right of the blog to tools we can use for descendancy research, in addition to descendancy view in FamilyTree on familysearch.org.  Puzzilla and Virtual Pedigree are just two of many available.

Here is more information about it.  One is a video from FamilyTree.  One is the handout I gave in class.

Happy sleuthing!

Mary Pletsch

(Click on the description below)

 Descendancy Video Here

Finding Cousins Handout doc Here