FamilySearch adds to its online YouTube Channel

I find that few members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are aware of the fact that the Church as well as FamilySearch.org have extensive YouTube.com Channels. Here is one of the most recent additions to the FamilySearch.org Channel entitled, "Opening New Tabs in FamilySearch -- Robert Kehrer."

Here is a list of the Church related YouTube.com channels. You might want to subscribe to some of them and receive notices from Google about new uploads.

• Mormon Channel
• Mormon.org Channel
• Mormon Tabernacle Choir
• Mormon Newsroom
• LDS Youth
• Prepare to Serve!
• FamilySearch Channel
• BYU Family History Library

Here is another example from Ron Tanner entitled, "Ron Tanner - Merging Duplicate Records in FamilySearch."

If you really want to get a scope of what the Church has in the way of online videos, look at the following screenshot:

Architectural details of the Provo City Center Temple

A most amazing place and most amazing video. I have seen nothing like this before.

A Guide to Starting Your Family History in 10 Very Basic Steps -- Step Three

This is an ongoing series on starting your family history research in 10 very basic steps. The steps so far are:

Step One: Start with yourself.
Step Two: Find out what has already been done.

Now I will move on to Step Three:

Step Three: Choose a reasonable goal

The new Find, Take, Teach model of doing family history is based on the resources in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. The process follows a flow chart showing how to get started. The idea is find an ancestor or cousin that needs temple ordinances. Then complete those ordinances and teach someone else the process. The "Find Your Family Names, A First-Time Guide" is available online as a PDF file or you can order printed copies. Here is a screenshot of the first page of the Guide.

The first step, if you have a lot of names in the Family Tree is to find an ancestor born before 1800. My experience is that you need to be careful in following your family lines back to make sure you are actually related to that person. You can look carefully at each generation of your ancestors to see if the information looks accurate, is supported by sources and the places where events occurred is consistent with reality at the time the events occurred. This last issue means that you look to see if the places are consistent with the ability that the people had to travel. If you are considering a family where the events, such as birth, marriages and deaths occurred in different  states, colonies, counties or even different countries, then you need to do some research to find out if you have the right family members.

As a beginner, if you have no or few names in the Family Tree, then your choice of what to do is wide open. You can choose any one of your family lines to work on. FamilySearch will usually provide research hints that may add information to the individuals in your segment of the Family Tree or may not. All of the record hints need to be evaluated for accuracy.

At this stage, you may need to ask for help. FamilySearch.org has a Get Help menu on every page of the website and also has a long list of programs or apps that might assist you. The FamilySearch.org App Gallery has over 100 helpful programs. One of the most helpful to beginners is The Family History Guide. This is a sequenced, structured program with over a 1000 resources to help you learn how to approach the Family Tree and also how to get started doing some research. FamilySearch.org also has a Learning Center under the Get Help menu that has hundreds of classes and other instructional videos to teach you how to get started.

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? 

Remodeling the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah

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This is an interesting time lapse showing the progress on remodeling the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. I posted a photo of the plastic sheet up for the construction, but this gives a little better idea of the extent of the remodel.

A Guide to Starting Your Family History in 10 Very Basic Steps -- Step Two

This is an ongoing series on starting your family history research in 10 very basic steps. The steps so far start with Step One:

Step One: Start with yourself.

Now I will move on to Step Two.

Step Two: Find out what has already been done.

Discovering what has already been researched and documented concerning your own family history may appear to be a simple or very complex proposition depending on how involved your extended family has been in genealogical research in the past. The issue here is whether or not you want to re-do all of the previously done research. When I started doing research into my family about thirty or so years ago, I spent years in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah trying to discover what had already been done on my own family. That survey is still going on today. I am still today actively discovering the parameters of the research that has already been done.

What has changed over the years is that we now have the tools to compress the initial time I have spent over the years into a manageable process.

My experience is that most beginning researchers vastly underestimate how much previous research has been done on their particular family. One of the most powerful tools for determining the extent of the documentation available from others about your family is to begin putting your family tree online on one of the large genealogical database programs such as FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, Findmypast.com or MyHeritage.com. You could also use a family tree program such as Geni.com or WikiTree.com. The advantage of the four large database programs is that they generate automatic record hints. They all have the advantage of not only, in some of the programs, automatically finding records pertaining to your ancestry, but also provide contacts with other family members that are working on their own portion of a shared family tree.

Historically, genealogy has been a solitary pursuit. With the advent of online family trees, all that has changed and it is far easier to collaborate with family members. To the extent that you are aware of the content of online family trees, you can avoid much of the duplication of effort that was rampant in the past. Having your family tree on more than one of these programs increases the probability that you will find the limits of the research that has been done on your particular family. Depending on your own particular family circumstances, you may actually be overwhelmed at the number of potential relatives discovered by these genealogy programs.

Putting a family tree online is the electronic equivalent of doing a survey of your immediate family members. The way that genealogy was traditionally taught to beginners was to urge them to contact immediate family members for their information about the historical family. A large online database programs have created their own community of potential family members. This community can extend far further than it did in the times of paper-based genealogy.  It is still important to gather whatever information and documents you can find from your immediate family members, but it is even more important to review what is already available online. It is entirely possible that carefully maintained family documents are already duplicated and readily available online. For example, my great-grandmother gathered genealogical information for many years and published what she had in a book. That family book was difficult to obtain because of the limited number of copies that were printed at the time. Presently, the book has been digitized and is online on the FamilySearch.org website. On the other hand, there may very well be personal documents that are absolutely essential to understanding your heritage better in the sole possession of your relatives. In these cases what the online family trees do is to provide a way to discover the identity of your relatives and give you a way to contact them.

One distinct advantage of doing a careful family survey to determine the extent of the knowledge about your family already possessed by your family members is that you become more aware of the identity of your ancestors and the details of their lives. Research becomes more meaningful when you know the identity of the people you are researching.

 Previous posts in this series are listed here:

http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-guide-to-starting-your-family-history_22.html
http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-guide-to-starting-your-family-history.html

A Guide to Starting Your Family History in 10 Very Basic Steps -- Step One

This is an ongoing series that outlines ten very basic steps to starting your family history.

This is Step One -- Start with yourself.

It may seem overly simplistic, but you start your family history with yourself. Your history is beginning of your family's history. Your personal family history may include photos, diaries, journals, memorabilia, certificates and other items that will have value to tell about your life to your family in future. You should begin now to digitize and share those items that can be shared. This should especially include anything that you alone can relate or identify. You can learn about writing a personal history from a number of websites. Here is a short list to start you off.

• Write a Personal History
• Family History Quick Start, Writing your Personal History
• Leaving Your Enduring Legacy
• How to Store and Preserve Your Personal History
• Library of Congress, Preservation Directorate

The Library of Congress website is especially helpful in providing up-to-date information on preservation and conservation. Their instructions cover the following types of collections:

• Paper
• Books
• Photographs
• Scrapbooks and Albums
• Newspapers
• Comic Books
• Audio-Visual: Grooved Media, Magnetic Tape, and Optical Discs
• Audio-Visual: Motion Picture Film
• Asian Bindings

I have been keeping a journal for over forty years and just because of the consistency and longevity, the journal has become a valuable historical record. Because I kept a detailed journal, I have been asked to supply the dates for some events that were not recorded by other methods at the time they occurred. The time to start recording your own life is right now. If you don't care to write by hand, then use your computer. If you don't like either method, then start recording your history or use voice recognition software to write your history.

I recently helped a friend record a few recollections from his life. He died shortly after I did the recording and his family were so grateful I had prevailed on him to record what I did. You may not think your life interesting or important but I can assure you that your grandchildren will appreciate your efforts to document your life. Your children may come around sometime but don't expect this until you are almost ready to die. If you have no children, then there is an even more important reason to record your life.

Previous posts in this series are listed here:

http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-guide-to-starting-your-family-history.html