Changes to the FamilySearch Family Tree -- February 2016

As I watch the world outside my window, I can see the weather slowly turn from winter to spring. The snow begins to melt and the plants begin to grow and leaves appear on the trees. At the same time, I can also watch the changes in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree program. Overall, changes in the program are just about as regular and predictable as the changes in the seasons and the individual changes in the program are just about as random as the weather. If you are one of those people who moan and groan about the weather then you can really get down about changes in the Family Tree. As for me, I love the weather and I anticipate changes in the Family Tree with pleasure to see how they are addressing each small challenge.

Today, the Family Tree program is substantially different that it was when first introduced. If you keep focusing on what you knew yesterday, you lose the opportunity to grow and learn today. Well, enough pontificating. Each month for the past few months, FamilySearch.org has been summarizing their changes in a blog post. This month's post by Steve Anderson is consistently entitled, "What's New on FamilySearch -- February 2016." You could click on the link and see the more detailed explanations of the changes this month, or you could just use the program and get confused and alarmed when you run into something new. I like it both ways. In fact, I usually end up reading the post after I have noticed most of the changes from using the program. As usual, there are probably some changes that I may never use or even notice.

The changes this month include the following:

• The addition of the ability to add spouse and children directly from the Descendancy View.
• The ability to change the order of the sections on a Person's Detail page which I already wrote about
• The final general introduction of the Memories Gallery, already a topic in one or more of my previous blog posts
• Changing documents to photos and photos to documents in the Memories section. I can't remember when you couldn't do this but they did change the procedure
• Contextual Help in the Memories section, this expands the light bulbs in the lower right-hand corner of the FamilySearch.org screens
• You might have noticed all sorts of icons appearing on the photos. These let you do a number of things including rotate photos, download photos and add photos to a an album or archive
• In adding more icons to the photos there is also one for making comments
• They added a message link to the popup that comes from clicking on the name of a contributor

Now that wasn't as bad as an inversion layer of smog in Utah Valley was it?