New QRB Videos for Icelandic Research

We have published two new QRB (Quick Research Basics) videos, narrated by James Tanner: Starting Your Icelandic Research and Researching Records in Iceland. The first video covers important details in Icelandic history and introduces essential types of records in Iceland. The second video gets you started with the records and resources you need for effective research in Iceland. The videos...

Great Databases, Part 4

Here’s Part 4 in the Great Databases series of articles, highlighting cool and useful family history databases you can access online for free. See also the Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 articles for more databases to explore. Global Find A Grave—”Find the graves of ancestors, create virtual memorials or add photos, virtual flowers and a note to a...

Spotlight Videos 4-6

It’s time for a new round of Spotlight videos for The Family History Guide. If you missed the original set, you can see them (and these latest additions) on our YouTube channel, in the Spotlights playlist. Watch for another set of three videos to be announced in a blog article next week. These newest videos are also including below for...

The Power of Photographs

The Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) recently published an intriguing article titled “What the picture man told me” by Berkley Hudson. It’s a detailed account of how the author helped to rescue a huge assortment of photographs from the O.N. Pruitt photography studio. This studio produced high-quality black-and white photos around the 1930’s many of which told stories of...

If you don’t share it, you lose it! – Part One

Note: This article was published previously on the Genealogy’s Star blog site. I am writing about losing all the genealogical work you have done during your lifetime. Literally, if you do not share your work with others, particularly those in your family, you will lose it all when you die. I may have written about this before, but it bears...

Introducing Spotlight Videos

We’re excited to announce that we have created a new playlist on our YouTube channel, called Spotlights. These are 30-second videos that introduce some of the great features of The Family History Guide. These are ideal for sharing on social media, as warmups for family history presentations, etc. Each video has an end screen with a link that takes you...

Great Databases, Part 3

Here’s Part 3 in the Great Databases series of articles, highlighting cool and useful family history databases you can access online for free. See also the Part 1 and Part 2 articles for more databases to explore. Global Ancestor Hunt—Ancestor Hunt hosts 18 resource categories: yearbooks, obituaries, newspapers, church records, directories, naturalization, photos, cemetery records, voter records, probate and wills,...

New Look to Ancestry

Ancestry has recently made some welcome improvements in the look and feel of some of its basic screens, and The Family History Guide has made corresponding updates. Here’s an article from Ancestry that summarizes the new developments: https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/blog/ancestry-announces-new-visual-design-providing-more-modern-look-and-feel-setting-stage-more When you access your Ancestry homepage, there is also a “Take a Tour” button that introduces you visually to a few of...

Browsing The Family History Guide

With today’s advances in technology, we often become focused on getting quick answers to well-defined questions. Google, Wikipedia, and many other sites are wonderful resources for doing just that. However, there is another aspect to information-gathering, as Steven Johnson points out in his book Where Good Ideas Come From—”serendipitous browsing.” The hypertext nature of the World Wide Web makes it...