What's New At Family Search?

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Blog Post August Updates


What's New at FamilySearch

Find out about all of the new improvements, additions, or other changes that are being made on FamilySearch.org to make it a more valuable resource for your family history needs.

RootsTech London 2019 Conference Announced

August 28, 2018 By FamilySearch

RootsTech has announced that the highly popular family history conference is expanding its international borders, beginning with the United Kingdom in 2019. RootsTech will host RootsTech London 2019 from 24–26 October, 2019 at the ExCeL London Convention Centre. For more info go to RootsTech.org/london. Full Story

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Complete Archive of Ellis Island Records—Now Online for Free

August 13, 2018 By FamilySearch

Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty are famous landmarks in U.S. history. The Statue of Liberty, located on Liberty Island, is a symbol of freedom. Ellis Island opened the gates to millions as the home of the Ellis Island Immigration Station—and millions of passenger arrival records for U.S. immigrants came with it. Now, a complete collection of Ellis Island passenger lists is available online and searchable for free at FamilySearch. Full Story

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Add Multiple Pictures in FamilySearch Memories—Share Your Family Stories!

August 9, 2018 By Leslie Albrecht Huber

Memories is a tool in FamilySearch that allows you to preserve and share your family’s most important moments by adding family photos, documents, audio clips and stories. You can then organize and tag them, attaching them to individuals on your family tree. This turns these treasured moments into heirlooms that can be passed down in your family and easily accessed by even distant family members. Full Story

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Family Search Solutions Gallery

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The Family History Guide

The Family History Guide Blog

"If you’ve been around FamilySearch for a while, you’ll remember the FamilySearch App Gallery, a collection of mostly handy but occasionally outdated apps and tools for family history. Now FamilySearch has replaced the App Gallery with the powerful new Solutions Gallery, with helpful categories and of some the latest technology for family historian. You can find the main link to the Solutions Gallery at the bottom of the FamilySearch home page.

As expected, The Family History Guide has a prominent place in the new Solutions Gallery. In fact, our website shows up in six different categories:

• Family Tree Management
• Specialty
• Photos and Stories
• Games
• LDS Access
• Research Assistance

Here’s a look at part of the page for The Family History Guide in the new Solutions Gallery:

Notice that the page mentions The Family History Guide is available in family history centers. You can find it in the Portal page at each of the nearly 5,000 family history centers worldwide.

There is also a link at the bottom of our Solutions Gallery page for Ratings and Reviews. If you haven’t done so, why not take a few moments and post a review on the site? We are grateful our terrific user community, and we are dedicated to helping each one in his or her personal family history journey."  By Bob Taylor creator of The Family History Guide!

More Breathing Space on The Family History Guide Goal Pages

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In the Projects section of The Family History Guide, Goals are the foundation piece. They contain the essential Choices, Steps, and resources needed for solid instruction.

One challenge that arises, especially as more content is added to The Family History Guide, is the length of some of the Project pages. For example, Project 1: Family Tree (in the Family Search Learning path) has 14 Goals and is quite long to scroll through. To minimize scrolling, there are links in the header area to take you to each Goal, but it still may seem like a lot of content for one page.

One Goal per Page

We will soon be introducing a one-goal-per-page approach for the Projects in The Family History Guide. No content will be lost; each Goal will simply be hosted on a separate page. This makes individual Goal pages easier to scroll through, and new content can be added without making the page seem overly long. Also, the header links will become the essential means for switching from Goal to Goal within a Project, instead of scrolling. Below is an example of the header links found in Project 1: Family Tree (FS). In the new format, each link would go to a different page, with the newest page replacing the earlier one in the browser view.

More Space to Breathe

Another adjustment we’re making is to add some “breathing space” around text on the page. The horizontal line width will be shortened a bit to improve ease of reading, and a bit of vertical space will be added around headings, articles, and videos. Below is a brief example of the new format:

Online Samples

You can see how this all works in several demo pages that we have posted online. To get started, go to https://www.thefhguide.com/project-1-family-tree01.html  This is the starting page for Project 1, and it has only Goal 1 in it. To get to the other Goals in the Project, simply click the Goal links in the header area.

Note : There are 14 demo pages, one for each Goal in Project 1. These demo pages are not yet tied into the main menu system of The Family History Guide. So if you navigate outside the demo pages and want to return to them, you’ll need to use the back button on your browser or click the main demo link shown above.

When Is It Coming?

We expect to have all the Goals in The Family History Guide, including all the Country pages, converted to the new format this coming week. There will be a follow-up blog about it a week from now, to review the changes for everyone. Meanwhile enjoy the demo pages!

Categories:Navigation​What is new at The FHG

Tags:Goals

Family Search, LDS.org and The Family History Guide

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The Family History Guide is becoming more and more prominent in the world of genealogy and family history.  Not only is it featured six time in the Solutions Gallery on the bottom of the home page of Family Search but it is referenced on many pages as a go-to place for further information on lds.org and familysearch.org

Here an example of what I mean, courtesy of Bob Ives, COO of the Family History Guide in an email I received this week.

https://www.lds.org/topics/family-history/my-family-history/learn-to-use-family-search?lang=eng&old=true#sign

Note the Blue highlights on this link.

The App Gallery has been replaced by the Solutions Gallery.  In doing so Family Search has eliminated all the Apps that are no long relevant and kept the ones that are.  Find it on the home page of familysearch.org  Sign in and go to the bottom of the page and click on Solutions Gallery.  There you will find the presence of The Family History Guide.  Here is a link to take you right to it.

https://partners.familysearch.org/solutionsgallery/s/gallery-profile/a2Rf10000079rxmEAA/00211  

Many Family Search and Family History Centers have added the Family History Guide to their toolbar at the top of their home screens. 

In my opinion, The Family History Guide is simply a miracle brought forth at this time to help anyone who wants to learn more easily, more efficiently and with more enjoyment. We can all learn from it.  Try it you'll love it. We can all have and learn independent skills with it and then can help others become acquainted with it.