The Family History Neighborhood


Understanding:  FamilySearch, FamilyTree, 

Historical Records, Ancestry, 

Findagrave, and Personal Software 

Floor Plan of FamilySearch
Imagine FamilySearch as a house with several rooms.  FamilySearch includes the whole house with many rooms, similar to a house floor plan.  Your personal tree and ancestor information is a room in our house entitled FamilyTree.  If you click the “search” tab you are able to search historical records, which is another room in the house.  The historical records and FamilyTree are two separate rooms in the same house. When you source a fact in FamilyTree from historical records, you are adding a door from your tree to the room with the historical records.   Photo’s is another room in FamilyTree.  When we tag a photo we add a door from the tree to our photographs.  So, a single ancestor in FamilyTree may have two doors—one door leading to sources and a second door leading to photo’s.  Other rooms in our FamilySearch house include the Catalog, WIKI, Learning, Indexing, and Books.  Not all of our rooms have names and dates in them.  For example, WIKI, has no names, but it leads to databases to look for your ancestors.





 



Ancestry.com is a separate house in our family history neighborhood.  Ancestry has databases and family trees.  It is   similar to the FamilyTree house as described above with many rooms and doors connecting the rooms.Ancestry.com also has a learning center room with valuable information.





 



Fold3 is another separate house in our family history neighborhood.  The Fold3 house is different in that it does not have any family trees, but it contains valuable records.





Findagrave.com is another house in our family history neighborhood.  
It is similar to a one room home because it only contains one type of information:  burial.  There are photographs of headstones, or data obtained from cemetery records and personal family records on selected individuals.



 Enhancing the Neighborhood


Now, this neighborhood I have described above is an Internet tool.  They are all separate databases with unique and varied information, and there are many different databases in several of the sites.  They are all searchable and valuable for documenting, sources, and aiding in researching our ancestors. 


 
Next, I would like to introduce personal family history software.  Now this is different from the homes in our genealogy neighborhood.  Personal family history software is like adding a grocery store to the neighborhood.  It fits in as a building, but it functions different from a home and it is used differently!   A store has different purposes than a home, and personal software has different uses than databases.  There are many different personal software programs:  RootsMagic, Legacy Family Tree, Ancestral Quest, Family Tree Maker, and PAF.  (note:  PAF is no longer updated or supported, but you can still use it).  (Here is a list of the different genealogy software programs on a comparison chart.) 


 




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