One of the things I love the most about The Family History Guide is how it allows a person to grow and learn independently.  Of course everyone needs help when they are getting started with family history, but how long can a person realistically sit at another person’s elbow as they go forward in their learning?  If we don’t foster that independent learning and their confidence that comes from it, we are doing them a disservice by creating a co-dependency.

I am not saying that we can only help them so long and then they are on their own.  Everyone is an individual with specific needs.  We should always be available to answer any questions that people have.  But if we don’t allow them to try on their own after a training period, they will not progress as they could and should.

 The Family History Guide provides so much of what we all need.  Instructions on how to do many things and resources of all kinds.  I like that the resources are together under one roof and that we can browse through so many of them. By browsing through them we can actually see what is available in the first place.  It is hard to Google a resource you have never heard of before. With the Projects, Topics and the Vault, the Newsletters, we can learn and move forward in a very unique way.  The Family History Guide…actually guides us!  What a perfect name!

Last week in the staff training at our library we had a great discussion about this.  When we went to the Countries in the Family Search drop-down menu we recognized that for each country listed in the program we can now just sit with our patrons and learn with them with the Family History Guide. If we have a lot of patrons we can help a person get started and then come back and help them after getting another person started on their country of interest.  We have a lot of diversity here in the Bay Area.  At least 21 different languages are spoken here and probably more.  We also have lots of ethnicities. Countries and Ethic sections solve a big problem for us.

We have a board with names of individuals that specialize in various languages and ethnicities in our Family Search Library. Of course those specialists are not always there when they are needed.  We realized that now we can all help anyone get started with The Family History Guide.  No one will have a wasted trip coming in to get started because we don’t know how to help them.  This is huge in my book!  No one needs to be an expert in everything, we just have to know where to look and where to point our patrons.  Even if they never return again, they have what they need to go forward when they walk out the door. We can give them the website <www.thefhguide.com> We can help a lot more people with this one amazing tool called The Family History Guide.

All of this applies equally to people that are learning on their own.  If we become familiar with The Family History Guide website we can help ourselves and also get help in any of the 5000 worldwide, free Family Search Libraries or Family History Centers. Of course you can always get help and guidance here on the blog too.  The other great thing is it’s not an app, so no downloading to a mobile device is required.  Anywhere we go if we have the Internet, we have The Family History Guide with us.