What’s New in The Family History Guide – Aug. 2023

Summer is great time for vacations, family trips, family history – and for updating The Family History Guide. Here is a brief summary of what we’ve been up to lately, with content updates on the website: QUIKLinks—We’ve added several hundred QUIKLinks to record collections from FamilySearch, Ancestry, and MyHeritage. These can be found at the end of many Choices in...

Always New Records on FamilySearch.org

Note: This article was published previously on the Genealogy’s Star blog site.   If you look closely at the date these records were added to FamilySearch.org, you will see that they are the same day that this post is being written. The process of adding all these records and thousands more each day is complex. It starts with a pile...

BYU-I Pathways and The Family History Guide: Practice Exercise Initiative

BYU-Idaho and BYU Pathways Worldwide have teamed up to provide a popular Family History Research curriculum, available online and quite affordable (as low as $81 per credit). As noted in an earlier blog post on this site, this curriculum refers to The Family History Guide as an important resource in its downloadable course handbook. We are excited to announce a...

New QRB Video: Research in Italy

We’ve just added a new Quick Research Basics (QRB) video to our collection: Starting Your Genealogical Research in Italy, by James Tanner. You can view it in our QRB playlist, or in Goal 1: Research of the Italy country page, or in the example below. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more QRB videos coming your way!

Eight is Great! The Family History Guide Turns 8

It seems the time has gone by so quickly since those days in late 2014, when The Family History Guide started as a design on paper … and now it has website visitors from over 150 countries. July 25, 2015 was the day the website officially launched, and so we are turning 8 years old this week. Over the years,...

Researching the Pioneers

July 24 is the day the Mormon pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake valley in the United States. Genealogist James Tanner recently recorded a video for the BYU Family History Library, titled Crossing the Plains: Researching American Pioneers. This video covers the Oregon Trail, Mexican War, Mormon Trail, California Gold Rush, and much more. A link to the video is...

Update: More Practice Exercises Are Here

We are continuing to add Practice Exercises for country pages in The Family History Guide. As explained in our earlier blog post, the Practice Exercises are indicated by a colored dot: green for beginning level, blue for intermediate, and brown for advanced. Each exercise has open/close links that display a research statement, hints, and answers. At the time of this...

FamilySearch Places in The Family History Guide

We have recently added over 300 links in The Family History Guide to FamilySearch Places, which is a wonderful tool that helps you learn about and locate place names on a map, all over the world. These link additions include over 60 countries, all 50 U.S. states, 40 England counties, and 10 Canada provinces. A number of the pages have...

The History of Artificial Intelligence and What Will Happen to Genealogical Research as a Consequence: Part One

Note: This article was published previously on the Genealogy’s Star blog site.   Image Created by Microsoft’s Image Creator Somewhere between appearing in Isaac Asimov’s book, I, Robot, in 1950 and the latest StarWars movie or series, artificial intelligence became a threat to civilization as we know it for newscasters and pundits around the world. In a class at a...