Category: Technology

Cleaning Up with Tree Sweeper

In a previous post, we said farewell to Find-A-Record, a popular program for updating and maintaining your data in FamilySearch Family Tree. It was featured in Project 1: Family Tree in The Family History Guide. Now there is a worthy successor to Find-A-Record: it’s Tree Sweeper, from the BYU Family History Technology Lab. In a nutshell, Tree Sweeper examines your...

Talking about Blog Posts …

You may have noticed something new in our blog articles… all 230+ of them! There’s a play/pause button in the upper-left corner of each article that enables you to hear the content via text-to-speech translation. Listening to the blog articles can be a benefit for the visually impaired, or for anyone who enjoys a podcast-style experience. The technology comes courtesy of...

Using Social Media to Capture Your Family’s History

Sometimes the thought of being a family historian can be overwhelming.  Social media can be an excellent way to keep up with our living and deceased family members’ history.  This past week has found me frantically trying to finish up last year’s family events with 2018 posts on Facebook.  One of the reasons I enjoy this is because our family is spread...

Learning More About Family Search Partner Websites

In 2016 FamilySearch announced the addition of partnering with other big genealogy database companies that have millions of records, subscribers, and great technology. These partnerships became a win/win for FamilySearch, Ancestry, Findmypast and My Heritage. The last three are all commercial websites that are competing with one another.  When FamilySearch, a free website, proposed sharing records for indexing records and...

The Family History Guide: Essentials for Everyone

One of the reasons for the remarkable growth of The Family History Guide is that it offers something useful and important to just about everyone. We’ve done a bit of thinking on this topic and come up with a list of 10 family history “audiences” and what might appeal to them in The Family History Guide. Some of us, of...

The Gratitude that Comes from Family History

Thursday is Thanksgiving Day in the United States. It is one of the most cherished celebrations of the blessings we receive from God. Many people make a concerted effort to be together with loved ones on this day. The airports and highways are jammed with Thanksgiving travelers every year. In the United States Thanksgiving Day usually includes a traditional feast...

Using Pinterest for Family History

Pinterest is a social media network that allows you to share and discover new interests by posting or “pinning” images and videos to your own “board,” which is a collection of pins with a theme or subject. Think of it as a type of search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo but with its own twist. Pinterest has an estimated 200...

Farewell to Find-A-Record

It’s with a note of sadness that we bid a fond farewell to Find-A-Record, one the most popular and effective online tools for FamilySearch Family Tree. In Project 1: Family Tree (FS) of The Family History Guide, Goal 9 was dedicated to learning and using Find-A-Record, which helped you find data problems, research opportunities, and possible duplicates across your family...

Setting Up for Success

Note: Most of this article was published previously in our Trainers, Consultants, and Directors Facebook page. It is republished here due to the increased interest it has generated for trainers and learners. When we teach traditional family history computer classes, we typically set up the class with a presentation screen at the front and rows of computers filling the rest...

Inside the Guide: The Other Side of Computer Basics

One of the handy features of The Family History Guide is the Computer Basics section. It’s primarily designed for those who are new to computers, or those who want to improve their basic computing skills for family history. Yes, there are even steps to show you how to turn a computer on or off (although beginners would likely need a...