Family History Training Presentations

https://www.lds.org/topics/family-history/leader-resources/family-history-training?lang=eng&old=true

There are a wealth of resources for family history callings and support on LDS.org. These are three PowerPoint presentations ready to be used to teach members, Temple and Family History Consultants and Leaders and Councils. Each of these can be downloaded to your own computer and used to teach the appropriate group. 

Each of the presentations is about 15 minutes long without any discussion time and comes with a prepared script that can be used by the presenter. You may need to check out the setup because the presentations have embedded videos. You will need a device to show the presentations that will support both Microsoft PowerPoint videos and sound if you use the inserted video segments. 

They could be shown on a monitor or projected onto a larger screen. Since I do presentations practically every week and sometimes many times during a week, I am prepared with my own projector and computer. I also take an assortment of "dongles" or connectors that can connect my computer to HDMI and VGA cables depending on what might be available from the devices that are available where the presentation is to be presented. 

Screens often become a challenge. I have shown my presentations on walls or whiteboards when a screen was not available. If there is a small group, you can show the presentation right on your computer or iPad or tablet. 

I had to import the presentations into Keynote on my iPad to view them and see the included video presentations. 

A Suggested Checklist Before Adding to Existing Entries in the FamilySearch Family Tree

Lately, a number of people have been adding family members to my direct line entries in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree without adding any supporting sources and without bothering to read or review any of the existing sources, comments, life sketches, or Memories. This is nothing I can't handle. In fact, my daughter and I have developed several "standard" responses stored in a Google Docs file that we can copy and paste into the comments sections when we remove the unsupported and in almost all cases, totally inaccurate additions.

But the experience of constantly reviewing the entries is bothersome and annoying. If you are interested in the details, you can read my previous posts on "Finding Francis." Consequently, I decided to outline a suggested checklist of steps everyone should take before adding information to an existing entry in the Family Tree. You may think this is presumptuous of me to even think that someone might have to do anything before adding what they "know" to be absolutely correct information, but my personal experience compels me to attempt the project. 

Here we go.

Step No. 1
Starting with yourself, become familiar with your own family lines. Read the entries. Look at the sources. Review any Memories attached to the individuals.

This might seem to be a simple step but there are far too many people who jump into the Family Tree back where the lines end in blanks and start there to do some "research" to fill in the blanks. Those blanks in the Family Tree signify where researchers have been unable to find the next generation for over 100 years. In addition, just because there are generations and generations of people in a particular line does not mean any of those entries are correct or actually related to you or your family. In reviewing part of the Family Tree for a patron at a local Family History Center last night, I quickly determined that the people listed just two or three generations back were unsupported by adequate sources and lacked any credibility. However, I had neither the time nor the inclination to correct the entries since the corrections would involve some serious research over a long period of time. Unfortunately, I was limited to advising the patron that there was "some work that needed to be done to verify the entries."

One corollary to this step is that when there are no supporting sources for the information in the Family Tree, the information has to be assumed to be incorrect, incomplete or imaginary. The crucial information in this corollary must show a connection between the two generations.

While you are reading, looking and reviewing, you should also be thinking and asking questions. Look for the consistency and patterns of the dates and places. Make sure the entries you are considering are not duplicates.

This leads us to the next step.

Step No. 2
Once you have read, reviewed and looked at all the existing information, determine if you can find any additional sources, memories or other supporting information about the individual and his or her family.

If you don't understand what has already been done, then don't start adding in "your" information. You need to make an assessment of the status of the existing research about each individual you are considering. Remember, I am writing here about "existing" entries, not new information that you may have about your family. What is in the Family Tree is the accumulation of over 150 years of research and when there are extensive lists of sources, Memories, and notes, this means that the research that has already been done is worth considering. What it does not mean is that the research is correct. The conclusions of the past are not binding on the present. We have at our disposal an almost infinitely greater amount of information than was previously available.

Step No. 3
Do your own research.

Before diving into an established entry and starting to add information or making changes, do your own research. Verify the sources listed. Look at the original documents attached. Make sure that the entries are supported by valid conclusions. Be ready to defend your own conclusions with validly supplied documentation. There is always the possibility that you may disagree with the conclusions made that produce the existing entries. Check to see how many people are watching the entry you are considering changing. Be aware that all of those people may have done a lot of research about your family and may have good reasons for watching the entries.

Step No. 4
Once you have gone through all of the preceding steps, make your addition, change or correction including adding all of your supporting documentation and sources.

Don't be surprised if the people who are watching those entries respond in some way. They may have more information than you have already reviewed or not. If you add information or make corrections without explaining what you are doing or without supplying any additional documentation or sources, you can expect that your changes will be reversed sooner or later.

If you are used to working in the Family Tree, you might recognize that all of these steps can take just a few minutes or many days, weeks, months or years of research. Some information merely missing from the Family Tree and is now readily available. I do not usually expect any responses at all to adding new, previously unknown and unrecorded information to the Family Tree when I add the source for the information. But when I am working on existing, especially traditional, family lines, I always expect to be challenged when my research shows a change in the lines that varies from the "accepted" dogma.

Don't be surprised if you find yourself in the middle of a complicated and very difficult to untangle mystery. That is one of the real joys of being involved in family history.

Dealing with disinterest in genealogy revisited

Back in 2013, I wrote a very short blog post entitled, "Dealing with disinterest in genealogy." Now about four years later, it is time to return to this topic. I am writing about the personal experiences of many genealogists who find themselves surrounded by people who couldn't care less about discovering their kindred dead. Most of the writing on this subject is aimed at getting all of these apathetic people interested and I find very little attention paid to the genealogical researcher that has to maintain an active interest despite any support from family or friends. In some cases, the disinterest becomes active opposition.

Back in 2013, I was suggesting ways to get the rest of the world converted to doing their own family history. I haven't given up on trying to convert the world to doing family history, but now I am just as interested in what it takes for a researcher to keep going in the face of this apathy, rejection, and, in some cases, opposition. This sense of isolation may come despite being an active part of an active ward in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is easy for active members to find support for being involved in family history or genealogy from the scriptures as well as from numerous conference talks and even from church publications and websites. After all, the Church spends a great deal of time and money on temples and sponsors the world's largest family history organization, FamilySearch, as well has almost 5000 Family History Centers worldwide. From all this, you would think that your involvement in family history might be lauded or at least recognized.

Let me give you an example. One of my friends was recently released from serving as a Family History Church Service Missionary for more than fifteen years. At the same time, another member of her ward who was serving in a humanitarian capacity as a Church Service Missionary was also released. There was no mention made of my friend's family history service and I expect that few members of the ward even knew she had been serving for so many years. The second missionary, released at about the same time, was recognized in Sacrament Meeting and given a certificate of service. This is not an isolated occurrence. Church Service missionaries have a very low profile in their own wards and stakes. Even though I have been serving as a Church Service Missionary for years, I have been asked by my stake leaders if I would like to serve a Church Service Mission, while I was still already serving.

What can we do when we feel this isolation?

The first thing I would suggest is that you become involved in the greater genealogical community. Find your local genealogical society and join and attend their meetings and even give them your support. You will find a lot of people, who are not members of the LDS Church, who are absorbed in genealogical research. You may even find them ready to help you with your own research. As I have traveled around the U.S. and Canada presenting at genealogy conferences, I am constantly amazed at how wonderful and pleasant these society members are to me and anyone interested. I have had some very nice visits with genealogists of every possible background. This shared interest often opens doors to friendship.

Next, I would suggest that you volunteer to help in a local Family History Center or Library. You don't need to be a Church Service Missionary to volunteer and you will soon make a lot of friends with those coming to the Center. If you happen to volunteer in a Center that seems to be as deceased as your ancestors, then spend some time promoting the center and building it up. Constantly invite people you meet and know to come to the Center for help in finding their own ancestors. If you don't have a Family History Center nearby, try becoming involved with your local library or historical society. There are always opportunities.

Here is one "don't." Don't talk to people about your own genealogical research unless you are trading stories with another genealogist. Talk to people about their own families, not yours.

Get online with your genealogy. Start a family history oriented blog and promote it. Start a Facebook page about your family and research. Tweet about genealogy. You can find a lot of people with the same interest in genealogy online.

There are a lot of ways to get involved with genealogy on a social basis. You may have to look outside your family, ward and even your stake, but there are always opportunities to get involved with people.

Digging into sources in the FamilySearch Family Tree - Part Six -- What do we do with junk sources?

If you have ever gone into a store with a young child or two or more in tow, you probably said something like this: "Do not touch anything!" You may have even said the same thing several times during your navigation of the store. I suppose that all of us have latent memories of being told not to touch things in our childhood. If you have had the opportunity to go to a museum or other similar establishment lately, you might have seen an area of the facility dedicated to touching objects, such as bones or rocks or whatever. These exhibits are a reaction to the commonly imposed injunction not to touch anything.

Interestingly, those latent memories come back to haunt us in our adulthood.

As genealogists, we navigate through the online world with this childhood baggage completely intact. Now, we have a huge online collection of data called the FamilySearch.org Family Tree that is like the special exhibits in the more modern museums. We are encouraged to touch, change, edit, update, and delete information. This is a very scary prospect and goes against everything we have been taught since childhood. But like it or not, the Family Tree is full of junk.

Let me define "junk." Junk is "old or discarded articles that are considered useless or of little value." However, we also remind ourselves of the danger of discarding junk with the statement, "One man's junk is another man's treasure." In our society, we also have a class of people who have an extreme psychological fear of discarding anything that we call "hoarders."

As genealogists, we need to resist the temptation to keep everything. But at the same time, we need to discard only those items that have no value. Hmm. How do we determine the value of genealogical items? Good question.

The interesting thing about the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is that it is entirely public. There are no basements or attics to hide away the junk. All of the entries on the Family Tree concerning the deceased are entirely visible to everyone. In effect, we can jointly determine what is and what is not junk. Obviously, there will be disagreements. In those cases, we should err on side of preservation. But in most cases, the junk in the Family Tree is merely baggage left over from a hundred years or more of accumulation. Perhaps we can think of the process more as a pruning rather than a dumping of the data.

So what is junk in the context of the Family Tree? Of course, I am just expressing my opinion, but I will be very conservative in that opinion. Because of the topic of this post series, I am concentrating on sources. Here are a few examples.

First of all, this "source" is no longer available online. Here is what Ancestry has to say about this source:

OneWorldTree can give you hints about your family history but not necessarily facts. There are a number of sources consolidated in OneWorldTree and it's impossible to know if there were errors in member-submitted family trees. Also, occasionally the computer algorithms in OneWorldTree incorrectly linked people with similar names.

The link to the OneWorldTree on the Ancestry.com page, "OneWorldTreeish" no longer works. Do we keep this as a source? Doesn't it give us all the information about where the user obtained his or her information? Doesn't it let us all know where the information came from and provide us with a hint? The key here is that this "source" is no longer available. In this case, there are also historic sources that are cited to support the death and birth dates. Junk or not?

Let's look at another example.

Doesn't this entry fall into the same category as the first example? Do we keep it or not? Are Public Member Trees from Ancestry.com sources? This question raises an issue of our definition of a source. Do we really want links to other user contributed family trees as the support for the information in the Family Tree? I am inclined to think that we do not want this type of source.

Here is another example to think about.

This is not a source by any stretch of the imagination, even though the contributor is identified. The main reason for this conclusion is that the entry does not identify the document or record used to support the birth information. It might help to see who this "source" supported:

Neither this source or the previous one citing to the OneWorldTree give us any idea where the birth and death information were obtained. In addition, the birth information for this individual was likely calculated from the death record. However, no citation to a death record is provided. Putting these "sources" into the Family Tree gives an illusion of accuracy and dependability without any substance. This particular line continues on for many generations without any good or bad source citations. As I have noted previously, anyone can use the ID numbers or names of these individuals to see the entries in the Family Tree.

One last entry for consideration. This one concerns the following family:

Here are the sources listed. I have blurred out the contributors for obvious reasons. Any questions about whether or not this is junk?

I wouldn't mind examining the Church record of Adam's birth, but unfortunately, the source citation is not complete enough for me to find the record.

Previous posts in this series

http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2017/05/digging-into-sources-in-familysearch.html
http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2017/04/digging-into-sources-in-familysearch_26.html
http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2017/04/digging-into-sources-in-familysearch_23.html
http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2017/04/digging-into-sources-in-familysearch_19.html
http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2017/04/digging-into-sources-in-familysearch.html

Finding Francis -- Part Three

http://theancestorfiles.blogspot.com/2017/05/fighting-good-fight-or-how-do-you.html

One of the basic facts of life in genealogical research is that all ancestral lines end. The point at which they end is sometimes not very evident to those doing the research. The FamilySearch.org Family Tree is a good example (or bad example) of the fact that many traditional family lines extend far beyond any accurate historical supporting documentation.

My daughter, Amy Thiriot, has posted a very helpful explanation about how one family with a prominent ancestor in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is confronting the issue of unsupported traditional extensions to a family line. You can see the post and the link above. The most productive response is to dig in and do some long overdue basic research in the historical documents. The unproductive response is to rely on the family tradition and add in unsupported and obviously inaccurate information.

By my own choice, I am in the middle of one of these situations. If more of the users of the Family Tree were carefully documenting their ancestry, this type of situation would be more common and many of these "traditional" and copied ancestral lines would disappear. As Amy explains in detail in her post, the inaccurate Tanner ancestral line is well entrenched. I determined that Francis Tanner's (b. 1708, d. 1777) parents had never been accurately determined. In order to spur interest and to emphasize the point, I detached Francis from his traditionally entered parents. All of this has been explained in detail in the posts cited below.

The effect has been that someone adds the traditional parents without adding any supporting documentation about once or twice a week. This happens despite the extensive documentation and analysis we have entered and continue to enter as we focus on the research. My research consists of a page by page examination of the historical microfilmed records. When and if I run out of microfilm and still haven't identified Francis' parents, I will be planning a trip to Rhode Island to continue the research onsite.

I have a standing challenge to anyone with an extensive ancestral pedigree in the Family Tree that I can find extensive and obvious errors by examining your portion of the Family Tree within a few minutes. The only lines where this does not happen are those that have been researched quite recently.

From time to time, I will keep posting an update to this situation and the conclusion if there ever is one to report.

This is an ongoing series but all the posts do not have the same names. Previous posts in this series.

http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-francis-tanner-conundrum.html
http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2017/04/revolving-door-ancestors-on.html
http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2017/03/finding-francis-part-two.html
http://rejoiceandbeexceedingglad.blogspot.com/2017/03/finding-francis.html

FamilySearch Labs disappears

For many years, FamilySearch has maintained a website called FamilySearch Labs (Labs.FamilySearch.org). Some of the innovative features of the main FamilySearch.org website have been tested on this little known and less used website. As of today and perhaps for some time now, the Labs website has disappeared. If I enter the URL, the former address goes directly to FamilySearch.org. The one most useful feature of the Labs website was and is the map of England and Wales Jurisdictions 1851. This feature is still online at Maps.FamilySearch.org but there is no evident direct link from FamilySearch.org to this "Maps" website.

There are several pages (or websites) contained within or associated with FamilySearch.org that are essentially isolated links. Sometimes knowledge of these isolated pages or websites is passed around the genealogical community, but some of them do not even appear on the FamilySearch.org Site Map.

By the way, did you know that the FamilySearch.org website had a sitemap?

Get Started with Web Indexing

Note: Those who are presently using the desktop version of the program do not need to worry. The online version may replace the desktop version, but you will still be able to do your indexing from your desktop computer. 

Web Indexing is now a reality. For the time being, both the downloadable version and the new web version of the Indexing program are available. One of the main advantages is that the program has now gone mobile. You can use your internet browser on your tablet or laptop. However, the program is not yet optimized for smartphones.

To get started, you will need a free FamilySearch.org account. You can see from the screenshot above that the Indexing program is in the main menu and Web Indexing is one of the main choices in the program. The FamilySearch Blog had a recent post about "How To Get Started With Indexing Online." Here are the steps they suggest:

1. Take a Quick Tour. Give indexing a try with a quick tour.
2. Review the Simple Guidelines. Take a minute to get familiar with a few important guidelines every indexer should know.
3. Choose a Favorite Project. With over 100 indexing projects worldwide, you’re sure to find one that interests you.
4. Find More Hints. Have questions about indexing in general? We’ve got answers. Check out these valuable resources.
5. Get Answers. Have more questions about web indexing? Here are answers to frequently asked questions.

Now that the program is mobile, I may have some unused time that I can use to squeeze in some indexing.