I love reading The Family History Guide when I have a few minutes to learn something new.   I was reading Bob’s blog post from August 25th and remembered I had planned to watch Bob’s recent Webinar for the BYU Family History Library. I had forgotten to do it.  So I stopped what I was doing and did it right away. I’m glad I did!  I enjoy webinars especially ones on The Family History Guide!  With all the innovations and inspiration that goes on, it is a nice way to catch up.

Do you ever think about your own preferred individual learning style? You should! I prefer visual and auditory methods mixed together for learning.  I love the slides used in the webinars along with the explanations about the features being presented. I like the many different ways we can use to learn about family history,  I think most of us use them but prefer some over others.

You may prefer to peruse a list of updates so that you can quickly choose the things you need.  Perhaps, the month by month list found on Homepage dropdown menu Misc. to see What’s New would be sufficient if you don’t have a chance to watch a webinar.  You can also look through that list of What’s New and choose one thing and then find it by entering it into the Google search bar on the Homepage.  Within the Family History Guide, there is a variety of learning style options for everything.

I used to go all over the Internet trying to learn things.  It was very time consuming and frustrating at times. The biggest problem I had when I was starting was discovering resources. I just didn’t know exactly where I should look.  I depended on others to help me when jumping into the technology of the information age. I needed people to guide me when I was stuck. I relied a lot on my mentor who is most gracious in helping. The reality is that “you don’t know what you don’t know”. I needed people to advise me so I could move forward. That feeling of gratitude for those that did guide me, motivated me to want to help others learn also.  If you benefit from The Family History Guide, please share it.

I’d listen to radio shows, podcasts, videos, I read various things, books, blog posts, etc. I would watch various training videos on different sites. I especially liked the training videos on Ancestry! Crista Cowan is their guru and has many YouTube videos that are very informative. I went to classes and conferences.  Eventually, I taught lessons, trained staff at the library, and gave presentations at conferences and by special invitation for various organizations and libraries. I studied different publications and read a lot. You name it, I did it.

There was no time for boredom, but I also felt frustrated.  I had big holes in my learning. I noticed the same things occurred for others when I was helping them at the Family Search Library.  The reality is that with the Family History Guide, that problem is basically a non-issue.

With it, you can quickly learn what you don’t know by following along with the just-in-time learning process for the Projects and other sections of the website.  No more guesswork, it is all right there for you in sequential order. And there are a variety of The Family History Guide YouTube videos, other videos, and articles to keep it interesting.  I am happy that soon we will be able to mark those we have read or watched with a filled-in star so we can find them more easily and also know what we have missed.  The Family History Guide has links within the Projects and other places like The Vault, that are also helpful.

I appreciate how very organized The Family History Guide is and how easily we can find the things we need to learn and then do our family history work.  I like how relevant, and current, and innovative it is.  I also love that we can now declutter our home library and pass on what we don’t need anymore. All the binders of syllabi, books, and countless handouts that are not being used, because I can just look in The Family History Guide for what I need!

I am excited we can take our mobile-friendly website with us on the go, and that we don’t have to remember everything.   If we lose track of something we can usually find it on the Homepage or in the Topics or on the Site Map and of course in the Google search bar.  If you haven’t looked at the Site Map you can find it near the bottom of the Intro dropdown menu from the Homepage.   Of course, you can also always contact us for help. Again from the Homepage, under the Misc. dropdown menu is where you will find Contact Us. As you can see, the Homepage is key to most things you need. Just open and click on the links until you become familiar with where things are. Having the Family History Guide is just a win/win all the way around, no matter where we are in the process of doing our family history work.

What are some of the ways you feel it has helped you?  I’d love to hear about your journey!  To comment scroll down below the other related topics to share your thoughts.  Thank you so much!