New Family Search and affiliates

The announcement of the ‘New’ FamilySearch website is stirring a lot of interest throughout the world.
I have been a beta tester of the new design for a long time and am excited to see it be revealed to the rest of the world. It provides a unique forum and repository for the [...]

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Links and great finds

We’ve talked about the vast family history resources on the web. Here are more sites that are worth visiting and bookmarking. Be sure to try the BYU Relationship Finder site..
Do you need a genealogy form including just the census records headers? You’ll find them here BYU Genealogical Resource Forms
Have you [...]

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Research Guidance

When we are struggling in our research, we often forget that there is an excellent resource available on the web….. FamilySearch Research Guidance. If you haven’t used the Research Guidance files in the past, take a few minutes and see if they hold the hints or ‘guidance’ that you [...]

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Oral Histories / Interviews

Today is a good time to prepare your oral history interview tools and questions for the coming summer family reunions and similar gatherings. Many if not most of your grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc., that you want to interview will be at these events. If you plan ahead, you can schedule an hour or [...]

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Pay It Forward

Most of us are ‘beholding’ to someone else for some if not much of our ancestral knowledge. Mom, Aunt Fran or Uncle Johnny collected family history information for years and eventually you received a copy of their work. You’ve added to that ’starter seed’ of data, photos, histories, etc., since, but few folks [...]

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Family History TV on your computer

RootsTV
Did you know that you can watch TV on your computer? Many commercial programs provide full shows on their sites, but my favorite WebTV site is RootsTV. Based here in Utah, the programming is created by family history researchers from around the world. When I last counted, there were 23 [...]

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Tools and Views

I’ve spent part of two days helping some cousins get started in family history research this week. Both of them had some experience with family history software, so we focused on some other software tools to help in their quest.
Both of these sisters and I are now in a research ‘team’ working on [...]

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Life Browser and other goodies

The folks in the FamilySearch Labs are at it again. I’m certainly happy to see the church turn this small group ‘loose’ to create wonderful web based tools for Family History Research…..
Recently, they asked for comments on a new tool they are creating called ‘Life Browser‘. When I looked at it, [...]

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Digital storage media

If you haven’t experienced failures in your storage CD’s or DVD’s yet, you will. It is just a matter of time. I’ve seen more than a dozen of my genealogy backup CD’s fail during the past 18 months.
So, what did I do wrong? I burned the data to [...]

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Filing Source Documents

You have collected a stack of birth, marriage, death and other primary source documents. What do you do with them once you have transcribed the data into your database?
I suggest that you:
Gather all the birth, marriage and death certificates for your family together and put them in acid-free sheet protectors this week. [...]

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