The Family Search Research Wiki August 23, 2017

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www.thefhguide.com

Today I want to talk about The Family Search Research Wiki. *It is somewhat like Wikipedia that most of us are familiar with already.

The Research Wiki on Family Search is a big topic and very a useful portion of the Search drop-done links on the Family Search website. Wiki programs allow individuals to contribute information in their area of expertise. It can be edited by anyone. At this time there are over 87,000 articles for our benefit.

The Family History Guide <www.thefhguide.com>has a tremendous amount of information on the Research Wiki.

See Project 4 Discovery: Goal 3 Form solid strategies to research your selected lines: Goal 3: Choice A: Step 5.
https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/A_Guide_to_Research

Here is the FS link to the home page of the Wiki:
https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Main_Page

The Research Wiki is full of Topics and How-to Strategies for finding the information you need to research, but you cannot search individuals on it. Search Places and Topics only.

Every serious researcher and trainer should be familiar with this resource in going forward in their family history pursuit. It is very comprehensive and I am sure we will be returning to it often here on Facebook.

It is invaluable in researching localities worldwide. If you go to Project 9 in the Family History Guide there is an awesome surprise awaiting you when you select any country or state. Double click on the beautiful banner photo and see what you find behind it. I learned of this just yesterday and I love it.

Thank you Kim Miller for pointing this out to me. I am so impressed with the ease in which The Family History Guide delivers just what we need, when and where we need it!

www.thefhguide.com

Why Do You Want to Have a Tree On More Than One Website? August 18, 2017

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Have you ever wondered why we need more that one online family tree? Sometimes it is good to think about the big picture. We encourage you to ask questions when you have them.

Each of the big databased websites, Family Search, Ancestry, My Heritage, and Find My Past have many records in common, but each also have many records the others do not.

Each of them will search and find records for you, each of them can save you time, energy and eliminate the need to duplicate your efforts while moving forward.

Each has things that are unique to their website, so we get a larger variety of information, if we at least add the first few generations to a tree on each of the big four.

Family Search is free to all, the others are paid websites. Each of them have different ways to search for records, etc. The Family History Guide is now developing the ways we can more easily learn how to use them. All the Family Search Libraries have a portal to the paid websites mentioned above. People can access the same information in over 5000 Family Search and Family History Libraries throughout the world for free.

By using these free resources we can fast forward in meeting our family history goals to find and properly add sources for our ancestors. In order to verify our genealogy we need to add records.

This is one of the reasons why these new Partner pages are so important, and why we are all so excited about the Family History Guide. It has added these companies so that we can all learn how to use them!

Another reason is that when the Family History Guide points us to various record collections, it will differentiate between which big companies have the records. It will default to Family Search when they all have the same collections and will alert us to when the others have different records.

Just this morning I got an email from My Heritage that they had found a Discovery for me adding 12 people to my tree. Since I already knew these people were my ancestors and relatives I saved them all to my tree on My Heritage. Now I can go in and capture some of the records I didn't have before to add sources to my Family Search Tree.

All of these websites including The Family History Guide the one that pulls everyone together under one roof, help me realize I am not alone in my quest. It is like having a lot of personal assistants help me to learn and achieve my goals. None of these things were possible just ten years ago.