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.) 


 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Walking Where They Walked: Park Hotel

Image
Park Hotel, Rock Springs, Wyoming, September 2013, RR&B 19 Elk Street, Rock Springs, Sweetwater, Wyoming The Park Hotel opened in 1914 and was the hub of Western Wyoming until the late 1950’s. It was the largest and most modern hotel in the city. Advertisements boasted of hot and cold water in each of its 38 rooms, twenty of which had private baths and toilets. The fourth floor was added in the 1920’s. The Park Hotel catered to commercial men and automobile tourists traveling the Lincoln Highway. The hotel had a boisterous barroom and a sedate restaurant with sparking white table cloths. Rock Springs Miner, 30 January 1914, page 1, Wyoming Newspaper Project online. One memory of the Park Hotel, is related by Thomas P. Cullen, “One summer afternoon while walking up Elk Street toward the C Street Crossing, my attention was drawn to the small crowd assembled near the north end of the Park Hotel. A slight man, of short stature, stood rolling up his pantlegs...
Read more

What is a mortcloth?

A mortcloth, or pall, is a funeral cloth used to cover a coffin in the funeral ceremony or the deceased prior to burial.   The deceased’s family usually rented a mortcloth from the local church and after each use, the fabric was washed and readied for use again.   The word comes from the Latin word “pallium” meaning cloak. The Mortcloth case of 1792 begins:   “ For many centuries, and probably up to the 20th, the Church of Scotland was the sole supplier of mortcloths.   As the name would suggest, they were cloths used to cover the dead prior to burial, and after use, were washed ready for rehire. The Church hired these for a few pence, or in some cases loaned out these cloths, until the time of the funeral. The revenue raised by this service, typically around £40 pa, was distributed to the poor of the parish at frequent intervals.”   In the late 1780’s a local Society of Colliers decided to purchase and rent out their own mortcloths preventing the loc...
Read more

Bagillt, Flintshire, Wales

Image
Bagillt, Flintshire, Wales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagillt) The parish of Bagillt was gazetted on 23 May 1844, having been created from the townships of Bagillt Fawr, Bagillt Fechan, Coleshill Fawr and Coleshill Fechan, which were formerly in the parish of Holywell. It is located in the Northern part of Wales. (Genuki, http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/FLN/Bagillt/index.html)   The 1841 British Census finds Margaret(2) Roberts, aged four years living with her parents and siblings in Bagillt, Flintshire, Wales. In 1831, J. Poole penned: "Bagillt is a bustling place, and will continue so, as long as her smelting and coal works go on in their present prosperous state. Well conducted boats go from this place to Chester every day; with a favorable wind, these little barks make the 17 or 18 miles in little more than two hours."   (J. Poole, Gleanings of the histories of Holywell, Flint, St. Asaph and Rhuddlan, 1831 as qtd.  in http://www.genuk...
Read more