How Does the FamilySearch Family Tree Work?

LDS Media Library

The Family Tree at FamilySearch is a great online tree with many features that help family historians capture and consolidate families with photos, documents, stories, audio, etc. It isn't perfect, but it is a great resource for us. Check it out here! It is totally free and living people are private. You don't have to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and it is totally available anywhere in the world where Internet is available. It is easy to add sources provided by Record Hints (similar to "shaking leaves" on Ancestry.com). What are you waiting for?

If all of this sounds daunting, there are also many lessons to help you learn Family Tree. There is also a sandbox to play in. If that sounds strange to you, click here to find out more. 

Christmas Ideas and Traditions

Photo Credit: AlexR

Can you believe that it is Christmas time again? I love Christmas! It is so fun to get together with family and friends and celebrate the birth of our savior, Jesus Christ. Christmas is also a great time to create those lasting family memories and traditions that bind us together for a lifetime!

Our family has created some fun traditions over the years:

We do the traditional scripture reading.
When the kids were little, we acted out the nativity scene.
We have Christmas stockings and a tree. The tree is decorated with many ornaments that the kids have made over the years!
We always participate in our neighborhood food drive for the food bank.
For our Christmas dinner, we choose and prepare food from different countries.
We send Christmas cards.
We take lots of pictures.
We call family members that don't live close to us.
We used to bake Christmas cookies until I finally admitted that I don't like to bake. Some years my husband does the cookies now and some years we do without!
This year we created a family cookbook. Hopefully my kids will open it and at least look at the family history pictures.
At the moment, our favorite tradition is creating photo books for each of our grandkids. They are priceless and the grandkids love to see themselves through the past year. Desktop publishing has become so easy and affordable that my husband looks forward to creating the books every year.

As you can see, there are many, many ways to create family traditions. The list above is just a sampling of our family traditions. For more ideas, see these Christmas Ideas from FamilySearch!

Audio on Family Search!

Did you know that FamilySearch has now added audio to Memories? Wouldn't it be great if you could have heard your grandparent's voice? Maybe you can! If you have audio of family members, please share!

FamilySearch supports two audio file types, mp3 and m4a. The maximum file size is 15MB. Apple iOS only. I suspect that there will be support for Android users in the future. For more information and instructions on how you can make your Family Tree talk, click here!

Genealogy Bank and FamilySearch Partner to Digitize One Billion Obituaries

As an avid reader of obituaries, I am thrilled with this announcement! Obituaries provide so much interesting information, particularly for family history enthusiasts. I have found unknown relatives listed in obituaries as well as info about occupations, hobbies, political affiliations, etc. Start reading obituaries! You never know what little tidbit you will find that will be a golden nugget for your research!  To see the full article in the Deseret News, click here.

Free International Webinars on Doing South African Research -- September 6, 2014

Are you interested in South African research? The Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah is presenting a webinar on September 6, 2014 that will help get you started. For more information on times, etc. click here.

Too Busy To Write Your Personal History?

Samuel Leavitt's Journal to Westpoint
Public Domain

Wouldn't you  love to know what your great-grandmother did as a teenager? What was important in her life? What did she do for fun? I have often wished that I could travel back in time and get these questions answered by talking to my great-grandmother! Wouldn't that be so cool?

Dennis Brimhall, President and CEO of FamilySearch has often said, "What would our great, great grandchildren wish we had spent our time preserving?"

Writing our personal history is something that we are ALWAYS GOING TO DO, but many times we don't get around to it. Randal Wright spoke last week at the BYU Family and Genealogy Conference about writing your personal history, three words at a time. It is a great concept! Read the full article here.

"If a man keeps no journal, the path crumbles away behind him as his feet leave it; and days gone by are little more than a blank...A man might almost as well not have lived at all as entirely forget that he has lived, and entirely forget what he did on those departed days..." (Frazier's Magazine, July-December 1859, p. 147)

Another Great Partnership!

Press Release from FamilySearch.com

DC Thomson Family History and FamilySearch.org to Make Billions of Records Available for People to Search

October 16, 2013

DC Thomson Family History and FamilySearch.org to make billions of records available for people to search

More than 13 million records launched today on findmypast.com

LONDON, England and SALT LAKE CITY, Utah--Annelies van den Belt, the new CEO of DC Thomson Family History, the British-based leader in online family history and owner of findmypast and Genes Reunited, has announced a major new partnership with US-based FamilySearch.org that will give family history enthusiasts access to billions of records online and new technology to collaboratively research their family roots. 

DC Thomson Family History, formerly known as brightsolid online publishing, is collaborating with FamilySearch, which has the largest collections of genealogical and historical records in the world, to deliver a wide range of projects including digital preservation, records search, technological development and the means to allow family historians to share their discoveries. 

More than 13 million records from FamilySearch.org launched today on findmypast.com, including major collections of births, marriages and deaths covering America, Australia, and Ireland. Around 600 additional collections, containing millions of records, will follow. 

The two organisations have a long history of working together on historical projects, including indexing 132 million records of the 1940 US census and two hundred years of British Army Service Records (Chelsea Pensioners) in a joint digitisation project with The National Archives. 

Van den Belt said: “This is fantastic news for our customers all over the world. As a leader in online family history we will be able to offer access to a much wider variety of records dating back hundreds of years and the first batch are ready to search on findmypast. The convenience of searching many treasures from FamilySearch.org along with our own extensive collections will provide rich new insights for our customers. 

“This partnership with FamilySearch will accelerate the momentum of our next phase of global growth into new non-English-speaking markets and give more people more access to more records to uncover their family history. This really cements our position as a market leader.” 

“We are excited to work with DC Thompson Family History on a vision we both share,” said Dennis Brimhall, CEO of FamilySearch. “Expanding online access to historical records through this type of collaboration can help millions more people discover and share their family’s history.” 

DC Thomson Family History is the British-based leader in online family history, which operates major online sites including findmypast, Genes Reunited and the British Newspaper Archive. It launched in America last year with its findmypast brand.

DC Thomson Family History has a strong record of partnerships with non-profit and public sector organisations such as the British Library and The National Archives among many other major archives and organisations around the world.

Notes to Editors

About DC Thomson Family History 

DC Thomson Family History, is a British-owned world leader in online genealogy, with a record of online innovation in the field of family history.

• It boasts 18 million registered users across its family of online genealogy brands
• It hosts over a billion genealogical records across its family of brands including Genes Reunited and findmypast

DC Thomson Family History helps partners to digitise their precious collections, providing them with an archival quality digital surrogate of their records, or publishing existing indexes and transcriptions. 

Several successful partnerships with DC Thomson Family History include (but are not limited to):

1911census.co.uk with The National Archives; comprising 36 million records, this is one of the largest online family history projects undertaken by The National Archives and a commercial partner.

ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk is a pay-as-you-go e-commerce site operated by brightsolid as a partnership between the National Records of Scotland (NRS) and the Court of the Lord Lyon. The site allows searches of 50 million names, has more than 30 million images and over one million registered customers.

The British Newspaper Archive (BNA) is a 10-year partnership project between the British Library and DC Thomson Family History. The content for the website comes from the newspaper collection at Colindale Library, and the plan is to have 40 million, fully-searchable pages on the website by 2021, with at least 8,000 pages being added to the site every day.

About FamilySearch

FamilySearch International (online at FamilySearch.org) is the largest genealogy organization in the world. Millions of people use FamilySearch records, resources, and services to learn more about their family history. To help in this great pursuit, FamilySearch has been actively gathering, preserving, and sharing genealogical records worldwide for over 100 years. FamilySearch is a nonprofit organization sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Patrons may access FamilySearch services and resources free online at FamilySearch.org or through over 4,800 family history centers in 70 countries, including the renowned Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Media Contacts

Paul Nauta, FamilySearch PR Manager Phone: US +1-801-240-6498 Email: nautapg@familysearch.org 

Carolynne Bull-Edwards, Head of ContentPhone: UK +44 7932723866Email: cbull-edwards@brightsolid.com

Click to read related Frequently Asked Questions.

FamilySearch Certified Programs

This information is from FamilySearch.org.

We may mourn PAF, but there are other programs available including Ancestral Quest, which is the natural extension to PAF. In Ancestral Quest, you can use either a PAF database or an Ancestral Quest database!

Partner News-July 2013

July 18, 2013 By Gordon Clarke

FamilySearch is pleased to announce the first four Tree Share certified applications that are PAF compatible: Ancestral Quest, Celebrating Family History and Me, Legacy Family Tree, and RootsMagic . RootsMagic is the first Tree Share Plus certified application. TenGenChart is now Tree Access certified. “Certified” means the product is compatible with FamilySearch.org and has features that conform to our strict standards of quality.

or Tree Access (tree read only) indicates that FamilySearch Family Tree data can be read from the partner’s application.
or Tree Connect (tree read and writing of sources) indicates that you can attach references about your ancestors to records, images, stories, and other media found on the internet. These attached sources of evidence can be viewed by anyone using FamilySearch Family Tree.
or Tree Share (full tree read and write) indicates that the partner’s product can reconcile tree data with FamilySearch.

or Tree Share Plus has the features of Tree Share and FamilySearch collaborative features including Discussions, Sources, and Change History.

Ancestral Quest and Ancestral Quest Basic are now Tree Share certified. Ancestral Quest is the easy-to-use, full-featured family tree program that received the “Most Comprehensive Syncing” award from FamilySearch. The Windows versions of PAF were created from an earlier version of Ancestral Quest, so PAF users will feel right at home using the screens, reports, and other functions. Ancestral QuestQ includes scores of new features not found in PAF, such as its Ordinance Reservation and Tracking System, which helps users keep their personal data in sync with temple records. Whether you are a PAF user looking for an upgrade, or a new user getting started, Ancestral Quest is the ideal program to help you organize your family tree.

Celebrating My Family Tree and Me is Tree Share  certified. Celebrating My Family Tree and Me offers elegant reports, charts, calendars, and customized printing; and unlimited storage of photos, sound clips, video clips, and other precious documents; generation of research books, slide shows, and scrapbooks. It provides simple notes and source citation entry and private online collaboration of group projects; and it imports data seamlessly from PAF and other genealogy programs.

Legacy Family Tree is now Tree Share  certified application.  Legacy Family Tree is the FREE genealogy software to organize, research, and publish your family’s tree. Use Legacy to print maps, get research suggestions, collaborate with other family members, cite your sources, publish books and shareable CDs, and do much more. Legacy makes it easy to work with FamilySearch and will measure your progress against the goals you set for temple work. Easily import from PAF and other programs. Get started today by downloading Legacy for free.

RootsMagic and RootsMagic Essentials are the first Tree Share  certified applications.  Winner of the FamilySearch award for “Easiest to Sync,” RootsMagic 6 genealogy software makes working with new FamilySearch a breeze, including reserving ordinances and creating temple trips. Import directly from PAF, new FamilySearch.org, and other programs. Take advantage of other features, such as running RootsMagic directly from a USB drive, SourceWizard, integrated web search, creating Shareable CDs, and much more. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced genealogist, RootsMagic makes family history easy.

TenGenChart  is now Tree Access certified.  With one click, FamilySearch users are able to create circular 10 generation pedigree charts for themselves or family members. The site also permits users to upload GEDCOM 5 files to seed the chart. Easy to use, TenGenChart is always free and creates huge 4 6x 36-inch charts.

See these new products and previously certified products at www.FamilySearch.org/products

 The diamond mark indicates products that were previously certified for new.familysearch.org.

 The check mark indicates products that are now certified for FamilySearch.org Family Tree.