This past couple weeks I have had an interesting experience with a patron coming into our Family Search Library. He lives out of the Bay Area but is working here on a temporary assignment. He decided he'd come in once a week on our shift and work while he's away from home.
He is a fairly young man and very proficient on the computer.
He had been on Family Search/Family Tree before and was quite excited about all his lines going back to the 1700s. He wanted to start with the end of one of his lines and move back in time adding names. I realized he was a true beginner in Family History at that point.
We discussed several of the basics, got him signed up for his accounts with the Partner sights and I gave him some basic information about verifying each generation with attached sources. He'd need do that to even know if he was connected to any of those many many names on the tree.
If all that panned out he would then have some credible information to go on to search for the missing names for his next generation. It was a pretty common first session with him. I gave him my card with The Family History Guide website <www.thefhguide.com> on it.
The other night when Scott came back he sat down and felt he was all ready to dive in and find a death record and a marriage record for a deceased relative. I let him get started and kept an eye on him. I could see he was getting pretty frustrated as his fingers flew over the keyboard he was not finding what he wanted. I asked him if he has looked at the Family History Guide. Nope, he had forgotten.
So we opened The Family History Guide together. We went to Project 9, found the state he needed. He found his records and got an inkling that is a little more complex then Googling. It was going to take a little more time and patience. But he also realized it is doable with the proper tools like The Family History Guide, The Family Search Research Wiki, etc. By the end of the evening he was attaching sources to his grandparents and using the Partner sites along with Family Search records to get the job done. His computer skills just helped him move along so fast once he got some basics. I am pretty excited about him as I think he will take the Family History Guide back to his home town and share it with others.
Tomorrow I will be posting about the recently brought forward section on the home page For Beginners. I am going to point this out to, Scott, next week and have him start going though some of the things I'll be featuring tomorrow.
The most fantastic thing with the Family History Guide is it can move you along so fast by just giving it a try. The learning potential is all there. But you have to put your hands on it. (I wonder how many times a week I say this to people?) LOL! So we'll take a look at the basics tomorrow! Make it a good day everyone!
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