Beginner Series: 1 - Getting to know FamilySearch.org - Kathryn Grant

well thank you elder farnsworth thanks for that beautiful prayer and thank you everybody for being here like elder farnsworth said i know there's so many other ways you could be spending your time today whether it's snapping or you know whatever it might be with your family and we so appreciate you taking time and you know we all pray that these classes will be beneficial to you and provide something valuable so let's go ahead and look at what we're going to be covering over the next four weeks so this is as we mentioned the basic family search series four classes one per week today's you'd as you know is getting to know family search just by way of a little preview next week we'll talk about adding and correcting information in family tree the next week is one of my favorites which is finding people to add to family tree and then finally we'll do tending your tree basic research skills you might look at this and go isn't that a little bit backwards shouldn't you have had basic research skills first so i wanted to just say that actually i've tried teaching both ways and when you teach research skills first in a in an introductory class there's not a lot of context and so people get either overwhelmed or bored because they hear you saying words and yet those words don't really have a meaning because there's not a lot of context so we found that if we will give you some experience in context first and then go into the research skills still at a very best basic level they make a lot more sense and they stick better so that's our plan for the next four weeks and i did want to highlight that the purpose of this basic series and it is very basic let me just do a little tangent here um i know there are some people on this call who are not at a basic level and you are very welcome and we hope that this will be helpful to you and if you fall into that category where you're like you know i've been a consultant for years and i've done this my hope is that this will perhaps give you ideas for teaching other people or helping other people but for those of you who have come because you wanted a class very very basic right at the beginning this is that class i mean we really are starting from ground zero so we hope that that will be very helpful to you if you've ever said i wanted to do my family history but i didn't know where to start this series is designed to answer that question so we want to inspire confidence and ongoing involvement by providing context i'm huge on context or sometimes people call it perspective or the big picture or whatever but if we don't have that context a lot of times we flounder at least i do so we want to provide the context to help you be successful we're going to teach some practical skills as well and then also one thing we want to weave through these classes is the great joy that comes from doing family history so in my experience learning family history is a lot like learning to drive those of you who know me know that i don't subscribe to the approach that is sometimes taken where people say oh you don't need to know anything about family search just get on and see what you find what i found is that often that leads to a lot of confusion and problems and ultimately discouragement so that's why i like to compare it to learning to drive so learning to drive is not that hard right most people can learn with very few exceptions but like drivers we got to be aware of a couple of things one is we do need to know the rules of the road as far as family history at least the basic ones and then we also need to know how to operate the vehicle which in this case for purposes of this webinar is the family search website so for those of you who are new and have found family history somewhat intimidating in the past which actually is a lot of people throughout the church i just wanted to give two words of starting advice one is as far as possible relax because we'll give you an opportunity to answer questions this will be very basic and we hope that it will not be a stressful experience at all and the second thing is regardless of what i say or don't say the spirit is the real teacher so i would invite all of us no matter what level we're at to listen carefully for what the spirit will teach you today and also write it down because if you're like me oh my goodness i was in sacrament meeting one day and somebody said like this amazing thing i thought it was so beautiful and i wanted to remember it and then i kept listening to the talk and i didn't write it down and then five minutes later i discovered that it was out of my mind and i could not recapture it so when the spirit prompts you with something that you want to remember take a minute and jot it down whether it's you know typing yourself a slack message or writing it on a post-it note or whatever it is but capture that so that it doesn't get lost okay that was the backdrop for the series and now this is what we're going to be talking about in today's class first of all the key to family history second introduction to family search after that the story of family tree which i think is one of the most amazing and perhaps least communicated stories in the church and i'll give you the reference to the book where this story is told and then finally we'll have two points about working in family tree remember this is still pretty basic and we'll talk about basic concepts that you need to know to be successful and then also how to get around in other words how to navigate how to get where you want to go so with that being said let's go ahead and dive in oh i did realize one other little piece of housekeeping i used to monitor the chat for questions and it was just so active which is wonderful um but then i would like lose my place or i wouldn't finish the presentation so we enabled q a so you'll notice on your toolbar there's a thing for chad and we encourage you to chat with each other and ask questions and the missionaries will be monitoring that but if you have a question that you would like me to address during the presentation particularly if i've said something that doesn't make sense and you'd like clarification i would ask you to put those in the q a so i will monitor the q a but i will not be monitoring the chat except at the end then we'll address any questions in the chat that haven't already been addressed and also i'll i'll stop at each section break to address questions in the q a so i see we've got one so this is the perfect place for it donna i believe is how you say your name donna price will we get a recording for later review absolutely we will elder farnsworth could i impose on you or ask you to put the link to the archive page in the chat for donna and then she'll have the link to where that recording will be posted okay i'll do that oh and donna oh she's correcting me thank you it's donna donna spelling is correct so it's not donna but donna cool thank you no she says no diana see that's the trouble with not having voice right did i say that correct diana yes that's a beautiful name so dionna thank you for your question okay i'm just gonna mark these questions answered and then we will dive into our presentation and elder farnsworth thank you for doing that oh and steve just said steve hi steve's in my steak too um that link the it when elder farnsworth puts it in the chat steve it will be visible to everybody so yes you will get that same link so thank you for that great question okay so what would possibly be the key to family history actually there's not a right or wrong answer to this but i'll tell you what i have found the key to be for me personally and that is to seek and rely on the spirit i love this this scripture here that probably a lot of you recognize the context for it you remember that jesus came to i'm like totally feeling the spirit right now you remember when jesus came to visit the people after his resurrection he came to visit the nephites and all those who would survive the great destruction on the land and then he said i've got to go for a while but i'm coming back tomorrow so prepare yourselves for when i come back tomorrow and i've always found it fascinating that the way the people prepared themselves was to pray for that which they most desired which was to have the spirit to be with them and i found the same thing in family history without the spirit doing family history is just research and it sometimes can be tedious and boring with the spirit it changes everything even research even difficult research becomes enlivened and well i think i've already got this later on i'm getting ahead of myself so let's go to the next slide but this is to me the key in doing family history is to seek and follow the guidance of the spirit you remember president nelson i was blown away in april of 2018 when president nelson said this as a prophet so in coming days it will not be possible those are strong words it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding directing comforting and constant influence of the holy ghost in that same conference elder larry wilson gave do you remember the amazing story of the church crew member i want to say he was a chaplain but i don't remember for sure i'd have to go back and read this conference talk but this young crew member he had served a mission before and then served i believe it was in the navy he um gave the captain advice as prompted by the spirit that saved the ship because they were going to do the opposite of what the spirit prompted this young crew member to do and afterwards the the captain bless him followed the advice even though it seemed counter-intuitive and afterwards after they'd safely made it to port he went back to the crew member and said if we hadn't followed your advice i believe the ship would have been lost but the interesting thing about this story is that then elder wilson commented that this young crew member had learned to listen to the spirit earlier in his life so it wasn't in the middle of the storm that he had to try and follow the spirit for the first time but he tried to follow it as a missionary he tried to follow it as a as a youth he'd try and i'm not he wasn't saying alert wilson wasn't saying that he was perfect at all but at least that he had made the effort to learn how to use the gift of the holy ghost what does this have to do with family history family history is one of the best tutorials in learning how to recognize how the spirit speaks to you what i found is that i experience the spirit in different ways at different times sometimes depending on the message sometimes it's a burning in the bosom like doctrine and covenants but do you know what a lot of times for me it's this soft gentle whisper no burning about it like it's just this very gentle prompting almost as if the lord is giving me room to say okay i've told you gently what to do are you going to have the faith to follow it so i i that's one reason i think family history is so valuable because there are so many opportunities to hear the spirit and each of us can hear in the way that it works for us in the way that spirit speaks to us and grow in that ability so my invitation to all of us whether we're extremely experienced or brand new or any place in between is to use family history to grow in your ability to hear and follow the spirit i can't even say the blessings that that has brought into my life and my prayer is that it will be the same for you okay with that important key to family history let's do a quick intro to family search so first of all what is family search the reason i bring this up is because i've noticed over the years that there tends to be a little confusion family search is actually two things one thing it is is a family history organization sponsored by the church so it's located in lehi utah it's got a building it's got workers it's got people that are trying hard to enable family history for members and non-members so it is an organization but it's also a website familysearch.org run by family search the organization in today's webinar we're mostly going to refer to or use it use that term to refer to familysearch.org the website where we do a lot of our family history family search is organized in a very logical way and that's one thing i love about it so right next to the logo are the sections of the family search website let's walk quickly we'll do a little tour actually just like a slide per thing we're not going to dive into any of them in great deal detail except the first one so quick tour family tree is the section of the family search website where we're building a shared pedigree search is where we look for historical records like marriage death birth census military and so forth records about our ancestors memories is a place that is fun for so many people because it's where you can upload photos and documents and even audio recordings indexing i betting a lot of you have done that that's where you have digital images and volunteers type key parts of that image of that record such as the name the date the place that makes the record searchable for all the other users of familysearch.org so to all of you who've done indexing i give you a huge and heartfelt thanks because you have made it possible for all of us to find our ancestors in family search historical records when you index a record it ends up over here in search okay activities activities is relatively new to the website i would say within the last maybe few years maybe a couple years before the pandemic i love these activities but i also want to give a caveat sometimes we use these activities instead of trying to plan something that is careful and relevant to the person we're helping i'm speaking for those of us who may be consultants so i would just say these activities are totally fun and can help us get to know our family members i've seen them used successfully in family home evenings in youth activities but if you're going to help somebody with family history don't use these instead like don't use them as a random thing to do instead of really seeking the spirit and and finding out where the focus should be i hope that makes sense because i don't have anything against them they're totally fun but just sometimes i've seen people use them as kind of a a way to do something fast and easy and not really put the thought and effort into it and so um president nelson says all the time that he loves effort and that is one place in family history that is so true even little bits of effort bring great blessings okay last one is the temple area this is where whoops sorry did that too fast this is where the names that you have reserved for the temple show up it's got a lot of cool features that we won't go into but just quickly you can filter it like to see all the ceiling to spouse or ceiling to parents or whatever ordinance you might be looking for you can also filter by name and id up here you can also share ordinances with your family and friends or with the temples at large like you can put them in the big temple queue for people any place across the world to see and to to access to do the work for okay so today's focus is going to be on family tree this is a good time for me to check in the q a and um see that i see there's another question so luanne says in memories can we add in chronological order this i and she says can you tell if it will be soon so luanne may i defer that question to the end i'll tell you two reasons for that is that it's kind of a separate topic and the other was one is that i'm actually not sure i'll have to go out to the website and see because i believe it's possible to sort by chronological order if you've added a date but i'm not sure um if you can add them in order so yeah let me keep that question live and we will answer that at the end of the class luanne thank you that's a super good question okay so today's focus is going to be on the family tree section of the website where we're building a shared pedigree i would like to tell you the story of family tree i was blown away when i first heard this like i had no idea so in order to tell the story of family tree i would like to introduce you to one of my heroes his name is harry russell harry joined the church in 1912 at age 43 he fell in love with family history and he devoted like the rest of his life to doing family history he was blessed as some people in this class maybe today to have a family book with names in it it was for his abbott family this faithful man went to the temple for a total of 360 days so really if he probably you know didn't obviously didn't go on sundays probably didn't go every day so 360 days probably took him more than a year but he faithfully went found great joy in doing this temple work and then he went to saint george to visit family guess what they had and guess what they'd been doing yeah same book same names of course this was back before the days of the internet and before i believe if i remember right from reading the story there were only six temples at the time well they weren't communicating with each other they weren't sharing ordinances or anything nobody had really thought about that but bless his heart harry russell knew that if he was having the problem with his family number one likely it was a problem with other families and number two it would only get worse as the church got bigger because the church membership excuse me was relatively small at that time but the prophecies were that it would um roll like the mountain you know what is it the stone cut out of the mountain without hands and it would fill the whole earth so harry russell i believe under inspiration developed a plan and approached the leadership of the church and he said we've got this problem i only see it getting worse and i think we need a clearinghouse what today we would probably call a database or a repository or something but he said we've got to have something some master list of all the ordinances performed in all the temples so that we don't have what happened to my family happened to a lot of other families wealth church leadership agreed and they saw the wisdom of that and so they created a card file if you can believe it i mean when you think back with what they did with what they had we are so blessed and i think sometimes we take our blessings for granted i know i do so they painstakingly wrote and typed when typewriters were available because you can actually see microfilms of these cards in salt lake and at the byu family history library so they wrote and typed the ordinances that had already been performed in all of the temples existing at the time put them in this big card file and it became known as the temple index bureau and the temple and the index bureau the tib is the ancestor of family tree so there's been different iterations over the years some of you might recognize the name igi for international genealogical index that was one iteration fat new.familysearch.org was another iteration that has all they've all brought us to what we now know as family tree so if you'd like to learn more this is the amazing book it first appeared in byu studies and the handout link that i'm going to give you at the end of the class has a link to this document it's available free in pdf form on the web but if pdf if you find that to be a little bit of a pain or you'd rather read it on your your smartphone or whatever you can actually get it for a cheap cheap price a deseret book when i checked last i think it was like 11 bucks or something which is really cheap for a hardback book this it's published in hardback so um if you're interested and you don't want to fuss with the pdf pop on over to deseretbook and you can download it for your bookshelf app and it might be nine bucks either nine or eleven i don't remember but i just remember it was not even close to some other mainstream books as far as cost okay so that is the background story of this miracle called family tree now let's go over some basic concepts oh i see that we've got another q a let me look in there and answer that before we start so sister moore says oh good question about memories will they ever make it possible to add videos to memories um sister moore i was told the reason they're not doing that is that it's very easy to have inappropriate stuff in videos and so they they've they want family search to be a g-rated site so in order to guarantee that they'd have to monitor all the videos which they don't have the staff to do so they're not planning on letting people upload videos to family search at least not in the near future what what the far future may bring is anybody's guess but for right now they've told us nope we're not going to allow videos that being said you can create a source and then for the web link you can put a link to the video but then i just definitely i'm not suggesting that to to game the system by any means because maybe you have this beautiful like family reunion video or something so just if you decide to do that be sure that you follow all the standards what is what are they called um guidelines for behavior whatever i can't remember the title at the top of the page but they're just really common sense stuff you know don't upload anything that you wouldn't want your eight-year-old to watch so it needs to be you know no language no violence no sex it just needs to be very it needs to be g-rated so um that's a way to have a video at least linked in your sources okay basic concepts for family tree it the goal of family tree is a little bit different than the goal of other family history websites and that is to have one complete accurate record for everyone who has ever lived on the earth linked to other records by correct relationships that's really family tree in a nutshell family tree is a shared tree all of us are working together to create one pedigree of the human family that is also very different from other from most other websites i think i've only ever heard of one possibly two other websites that were trying to build a shared tree for all users most others don't like my heritage ancestry if you create a tree there it's your tree you control it you control who sees it you control what goes on it but as you can imagine if you are imagine yourself as as church leaders trying to plan this website and as programmers trying to plan this website if you need to manage the temple work for all of god's children you can't have all these individually owned trees it's got to be a shared tree where we all collaborate together so in family tree there is no my tree or your tree it's all one tree that necessitated a couple of important things in family trees design or in other words the way that it works the first important point is that it had to be open edit which means basically that anyone can add or change almost anything there's a few exceptions to that such as people kept trying to baptize joseph smith yeah so i guess they either hadn't read the doctrine and covenants or didn't stop to think but people would like they'd add duplicates of joseph smith and then they'd go oh his temple work hasn't been done so they do his temple work so finally family search said we're just going to lock some of these records that have been that are having a lot of problems so royalty is locked early church leaders are locked there may be a few but honestly it's a very small percentage of the records in family tree most of them can be changed by anybody for those of you who use new family search you remember that that wasn't the case and remember all the problems that that caused by people not being able to edit things it just piled up garbage to be honest ron tanner the the product manager of family search compared it to a fridge where you kept adding stuff but you never cleaned it out and that was a really good metaphor that's about what it was like so moving to an open edit system was a huge benefit but along with privileges come responsibilities right and so the responsibility that comes to all of us with an open edit system is that it's designed to be what's called source centric which is just kind of a fancy way of saying that everything you put in should be supported by a trustworthy source source whether that's a birth certificate whether it's personal knowledge personal knowledge is acceptable but it does it shouldn't be well aunt molly said that she thinks that blah blah blah that's not a reliable source but if you for instance witness something firsthand like you're the mom and you were there at your baby's birth right and you can um you can provide evidence first-hand evidence of your child's birth date and so forth so if you have personal knowledge that's perfectly acceptable records are very helpful but everything should have some kind of at least one trustworthy source source and in many cases it's possible to find more so where are we today in family tree i also find this very very helpful for context and i acknowledge ron tanner's um information on this this is information that he shared at roots tech and other conferences so family tree today has about 1.3 billion names which is pretty amazing when you think about it but there's a flip side to that how many people do you think have ever lived on the earth since adam and eve well i don't know heavenly father knows but population experts have at least tried to estimate it they think that since man came to be that there are a pro the estimates i found by researching go between 100 billion and 120 billion so that let's take a midpoint as 110 billion so let's say approximately 110 billion people have lived on the earth since adam what is 1.3 billion compared to 110 billion that's like one percent so we've still got a lot of work to do one of the myths that goes around is that the church has already put all the names in family tree and we just have to find them there that's actually not true there are still a lot of people who need to be added and i'll tell you that one of the sweetest experience experiences of my life and the beloved steak members that i work with is finding somebody who's missing from family tree and adding them and feeling their joy that they're not lost any longer they're they're added to the family of god and they're able to have their temple work done so this again is credited to brother tanner uh in his presentation he said that the largest single tree he was curious and so he did some checking you know he's got access to the whole family tree database and stuff so he checked and discovered that the largest tree contains about 465 million people or about a third of that 1.3 billion they're all in one tree and one thing that warmed my heart so much that brother tanner shared with us in his presentation was that when he first looked up this information in family tree he thought i bet i'm gonna find it's mostly american mostly english or you know a little bit of europeans maybe scandinavian whatever but that it would be just a few ethnicities guess what he found in this big tree are people from virtually every country of the earth and he said that that was such a surprise to him in a beautiful way and just underscored to him how much we are all connected that we really are one great family so about a third of the people in family tree have been joined into this big tree unfortunately people like ron tanner are the only one who can tell what's in the big tree i can guess at it but i like often i can't tell if i'm working in the big tree or not one way to tell is if you like there's just a couple of names well then obviously it's not the big tree for example i'll be honest i do most of my work in the smaller fragments that are in family tree and that's perfectly fine the point is not whether you work on a fragment because eventually we're going to join them in right but the point isn't are you working in a big tree or you're working in a fragment the point is are you following the spirit and working in a place that you feel like you should be working in and if you do then wherever you're working is the right place so where does family tree data come from or where do the names come from this is also one of the biggest misconceptions that i've discovered in working with people over the years i first started started as a consultant back in i want to say 2007 so i've had the blessing of working with many people and that's actually one of the reasons that i started um presenting this information was just because there were so many misunderstandings one of the big misunderstandings is that the church has verified all these names and populated them into family tree and that that that's where they came from was the church that's actually not the case let's take a look at where they came from so first of all as we saw from harry russell's story the very first names that were gathered together were from church temple records and then later on from extracted vital records any of you who may not be familiar with the old extraction program it was the forerunner to indexing so it's basically the same thing people would look at microfilm and later on digital images and they would just basically index them and then oftentimes these extracted people that were extracted from the vital records were given to the temples so that there would be names for patrons who came to temples church membership records also are that information is fed into family tree i learned this when my uncle died so after he passed away his ward clerk marked him deceased then family search got a notification and they worked some magic on their end and lo and behold my uncle was visible in family tree with his ordinances so that data is also fed over and then finally it a lot of it comes from just user contributions so that might be through manual entry it might be through some of the old four generation programs but even when you think about it these other things come from members as well so the church membership record who gave the information to the ward clerk well the member who gave the information to the temple for these ordinances to be done the member so ultimately virtually all the information that's in family tree came from just ordinary people like you and me there's not some committee at the church that validates every name in family tree so what does this mean for us as users well essentially it means the quality of information is going to vary widely you're going to have the professional genealogist who's putting stuff in right down to the teenager or the new member or the person who's just starting out and that in my opinion is exactly how it should be because the gospel of jesus christ welcomes everybody family tree should as well and so you know what when people are learning there's going to be a learning curve and that's totally fine and we need to be patient with each other and loving with each other and if we find mistakes on family tree that somebody else has made we contact them in a loving way and we work together to make the tree the best that it can be duplicate names are an ongoing concern so we want to be particularly careful about recognizing and merging duplicates when we find them the bottom line is that we you and me all of us are responsible for the accuracy in family tree and that's another reason that the spirit is so important finally in this section i wanted to introduce one other very helpful concept in family tree do you remember that we mentioned that there's only supposed to be one record per person in family tree well how many like diego martinez's do you think have ever lived on the earth or joseph smith's or um you know other common names hans nelson depending on what country you're from there are names that are used over and over and over again so just having someone's name and even a birth year sometimes even a birth date will not identify that person uniquely and so family tree assigns everybody in family tree a seven digit identifier sometimes called an id number sometimes called a person id a pid a pid whatever it's all talking about the same thing this seven digit identifier that will always allow you to know that you're looking at a specific person so that identifier we're going to see some examples of using that pid later on okay we are now to the last section for the webinar let me see how we're doing on time okay 240. we're doing well and then we'll reserve the last portion of the class for questions but i see a couple of questions in the q a so we're at a good point to take those so anonymous says is it possible to merge a family from ancestry or 23andme to family search i don't know about 23 and me but i do know that it is possible from ancestry you can keep a tree in ancestry and synchronize it with family tree i would be really cautious on that because i i frequently find errors that have been added to the system to family tree from other tr from trees and ancestry or my heritage or whatever and it's not a problem with the functionality it's a problem with the information if that makes sense so if you're going to synchronize trees between families family trees so family searches family tree and a different system i would just make super sure that the tree that you want to synchronize in has been validated and is as good as you can make it family tree because it's a shared tree is not a place for experiments or hypotheses like i was working with a dear friend a couple years ago actually and we got in and found two trees that were very obvious duplicates of a couple of generations of a family and when we contacted the person they admitted that they didn't know which one was right and so they had just put both of them in and um as it turned out they were actually both wrong as we did more research but but the point is family search isn't a playground where you put unproven information because that's where people can reserve names for temple work so if you want a playground make an ancestry tree or make a myheritage tree or have it you know what some of the programs like roots magic keep your information on roots magic but when you add it to family tree you want it to be as good as you can get it doesn't have to be perfect but it shouldn't be intentionally sloppy or theoretical if that makes sense okay good question anonymous thank you and luanne says when a person passes on how do we obtain information from their profile there's been conflicting direction on this uh issue she says actually um i i've got to try and not cry i just had experience with this because my brother passed away just um a little less than a month ago and so the way that you luanne correct me if i'm misunderstanding i i guess i'm not sure if you're asking how do you get the information to the ward clerk so he gets it in family tree or how do you find it once it's there so there is no rule for getting it to the ward clerk just usually the ward clerk will be aware of the death and so a family member in the ward or a ward member will provide the death information to the ward clerk but then the way you find it once it's been marked visible in family tree is just search by the information that you have and if the temple ordinances are attached if they were i'm assuming from your question they're a member of the church um if sorry i just lost my train of thought so if they um were a member of the church and then the board clerk has marked them deceased family searches mark them visible then you just search by the information you know if you find them and ordinances are attached that is the record that came from the membership record so i hope that helps luanne if that is not what you wanted if i misunderstood your question please post a follow-up question and from renee we have i have experienced information changes on my work and trees from either indexers or researchers that has been incorrect and they've entered the death dates of another individual with the same name this is very frustrating says renee yes renee i think all of us have probably had that experience so that just speaks to what i was mentioning that it's so important for all of us to be very careful and follow the spirit and do our best that doesn't mean we're never going to make mistakes you guys now speaking generally not just to rene but um yes mistakes but if we're prayerful and careful what i've found is the spirit has told me when i've messed up and so and i pray for that i'm like heavenly father please help me know if i'm doing this wrong because i want to do it right so we need to be as careful as we can but if the other person is making the mistake then there's a messaging feature in family search and you can send them a message one thing i would say is that i've had some friends who've gotten some really nasty messages from other users sending a nasty message doesn't help anything and so if you send a message send a humble kind message that gives the person the benefit of the doubt and work together to correct the errors and then one more question from carol what should we do with duplicate sources from family search is it necessary to bring all of them into my tree carol in a presentation at either byu or roots tech the guidance that we got was yes please put all the sources there because um particularly you didn't say this carol but sometimes people will mark a duplicate source not a match and that confuses the search algorithm in family tree because when you say okay here's john here's a census that's about him i've attached it oops here's another census but i'm going to mark and it is about him it's the same one but i'm going to mark it not a match then family tree i'm personifying a computer says wait a minute so this census really isn't for this guy which means that these other sources over here probably also aren't for that guy and so family search just recommended to us even if it's a duplicate source added anyway and a lot of times they look to be duplicate sources but they actually aren't like one for an example one is at the county level in the united states and the other is at the state level so they contain the same information but they actually are different records from different repositories so um i hope that helps carol the but the short answer is yes family search recommends even if they're duplicate sources go ahead and attach them anyway oh luanne says yes how to find and i'm sorry about your brother thank you luanne it was actually a shock to our family he was diagnosed with brain cancer and was gone within about three weeks so and i'll tell you guys i can say this since this isn't a public webinar but is uh um sponsored by the church that this has this experience has um given me such a greater measure of gratitude for the atonement of jesus christ it's made it all that much more real and that's one thing i love about family history is it makes the plan of happiness so much more real so yeah luanne you said it was how to find so i just searched for my brother with the information that i had i of course knew his name i knew when he was born i knew his death date and that information allowed me to find the membership record or rather the family tree record created from the membership information and then i was able to join him into my tree pretty cool okay luanne you're welcome she put just put thank you in the chat or in the q a so you're very very welcome okay last section here for family tree again i mentioned i love the organization of family tree i think they've done our family search i think they've done such a good job of making the sections very clear and very obvious so the thing that i like about this menu we talked earlier about this top menu every time you click an item in the top menu you get a submenu that is particular to that item so if i click search it would be different memories would be different etc etc we're showing family tree because that's what we're focusing on so family tree has these one two three four five six seven items in it and we're gonna go quickly through them we're gonna spend the most attention on tree in person and the others were just going to dash right through them so overview is a basic introduction probably you'll only ever need to read this once and then you won't ever look at it again it's just kind of a fun little intro to family tree tree tree in person are the two ways to see information in family tree le and that might not have made any sense so let's look at each one so tree views are always multi-generational so anytime you click on tree you're going to get more than one generation well if it's been entered in family tree but the purpose is to show multiple generations so let's take a look at that the tree views are a lot of fun so there's a menu at the top of any tree view that tells you the four types of tree views it's actually a drop down i expanded it for this screenshot but you would just click on the drop down then you could see all four of the different types of trees so they are landscape which means it goes side to side portrait which you would think it means like portrait picture portrait and it certainly showcases the picture portrait but you can have portraits in the other one too so um the big i think the meaning of portrait here is it's like portrait when you choose paper in your printer so landscape is wide and portrait is tall and that's on portrait instead of going side to side it goes top to bottom then there's the fan chart and i have to admit i'm partial to this one maybe because of the beautiful colors but in this one the ancestors are shown in concentric circles going outward and then finally we've got descendancy view which is particularly designed to show you go figure the descendants of a person so the main person's at the top and then their descendants are below so there's so much in common between the four tree views that i'm just going to show the basics on landscape and then we'll very quickly highlight some things in the other views one thing that's really important to understand when you're looking at a tree view chart is that there's always going to be a root person and a spouse if they have one entered all that means is they're like i've heard them called the center person the main person they're kind of the anchor so everybody else is shown in relation to them so for example in landscape view the root person's descendants are on one side and their ancestors are on the other you might have noticed that only a certain amount of information is shown but then there's these arrows well if you click the arrows on this side you get to see more descendants on the other side you get to see more ancestors also this is one of the best kept secrets that a lot of people don't know is that you can click and drag to reposition this tree just like google maps so you can drag it into any position like notice here some of the kids are cut off on the bottom here so i could drag the tree upward to see the rest of the kids and here's the menu that i mentioned earlier so that you can click this to show all the options and choose the one that you like and honestly i use different ones at different times depending on what seems to work best for what i'm doing at the time so navigating in portrait view is very very similar you've got the root person here kind of in the center you've got descendants below you've got ancestors above probably a lot of you have noticed the little arrows here you can click to show more ancestors going up and descendants going down the fan chart is a little bit different from the two views that we've looked at so far one part that is the same though is the root person is sort of in the center but you notice that they're like down from the center so they're not precisely in the center of the circle but the ancestors are shown above and the descendants are shown below and only one generation of descendants is shown on the fan chart and notice that there's only room for five people here so for families that had more than five kids you'll get this gray arrow bar and you can click this to expand and see additional children this is a cool little feature that the fan chart has that the others don't have and that is if you hover over anybody on your fan chart you'll get this little icon a fan icon if you hit that or click that it will put that person in the root position very fast easy way to do it you can also put people in the root position on the others we're going to look at how to do that in the in the few minutes it involves just a couple more steps not quite as easy as the fan chart but still pretty easy and still possible descendancy view so in this view the root person is at the top so the in this sense it's very different from the other views if you want to see ancestors you click this expand but usually it's only for the purpose of picking a different ancestor to see all the descendants for so you don't really view your ancestors there it'll only give you a couple of generations and you pick a person and then they come into the root position slightly indented from the root person is the root person's spouse and then indented even a little more is the first child second child um the second child's spouse and so it just keeps going down and down uh to show all the descendants of a person and all the like it doesn't just show like just the kids or whatever but it shows their spouse and then their kids and their spouses their kids and their spouses kind of like a hall of mirrors right not exactly but in any in any event it goes down and it just shows your whole spread of descendants as you move downward so one thing i did want to point out as far as these arrows over here if the down air if the arrow is pointing downwards it means this branch of the family is already expanded so notice we've got ann we've got her husband noah we've got our kids but if you see an arrow that is pointing to the right it means the branch is collapsed so here we just see joseph turnell but we don't see a spouse we don't see kids if we were to click this arrow then we would see his descendants and that brings us to the end of tree views now person as opposed to a multi-generational view is detail on just one person so again great organization on family tree they've got all your options for the person page here in the interest of time we're not going to go through them all but i would encourage you if you haven't looked at these already to just take some time to explore each one and just see what kind of information is found on each menu a couple of things i did want to point out which are super cool here if you click view tree on any person page it puts that person in the root position in the tree view follow if you click follow here it will darken the star and you will get a notification anytime somebody makes a change to this page and i think i want to say it's weekly now i think it seems like there used to be an option for having it daily but i don't think that option is available anymore somebody please correct me in the chat if i'm wrong about that but i believe that the notifications come weekly and they come to family search messaging so i apologize i don't have it on the the screenshot i've actually it would be up here and oh my goodness somebody correct me so there's the icon the call out icon that looks you know like a speech bubble and then there's the bell icon and i cannot remember for the life of me which is which so just know that if you look on either the bell icon or the um the one that looks like a chat bubble that under one of those that's where your follow notifications are going to show up so somebody please if you know that please put in the chat what the correct one is because i have completely forgotten okay so but this is really this actually goes back to the question and i apologize i forgot the name of the person that said it but that they were frustrated at the changes people are making that aren't correct and so if you have an ancestor that is having a lot of bad changes made to them you might want to follow them and then that way you're notified of the changes very quickly after they happen so you can address them and they don't just stay there for a long time because have you noticed when errors are in family tree they tend to snowball view my relationship is so cool whenever i'm helping people in my steak i love to show this for the names of people that they add when you click it you get a graphic that shows how you're related to the person so in this case john william bescoby he's my third cousin three times removed and that just makes it more real for people when they can see how they're actually related to this person that they're looking at in family tree okay this is a good time to talk about the summary card let me see how we're doing on time here ah it's almost three o'clock how did that happen so i will need to do this quickly almost any time you click on a name you're going to get a summary card right now there are two styles the summary card is very much what it sounds like it shows a summary of the person's information this is the old style this is the new style ultimately i'm guessing everybody will be switched to the new style but for now i get some in some places in family family tree and i get the other style in other places but it doesn't really matter because they show the same information so to navigate with the summary card if you click tree this is the one i was talking about if you're on portrait or landscape and you click a name you get the summary card then if you click tree it puts them into the root position in the tree view and here's how it looks on the the newer format if you click person it goes to the person page but guess what the name takes you to the person page two who knew right and i'll have to admit to you i click the name more often than i click the person just because it's a bigger target it's easier to see and easier to land on so again they'll just both take you to the person page here is what it looks like in the new style name isn't quite as big so who knows maybe i'll start using the person icon but again the name and the person icon will take you same place to the person page uh you can click sources discussions or memories on the summary card to go straight to that section so suppose that you brought up the summary card and you immediately knew that you wanted to look at a photo well you don't have to hit details and then memories you can just hit memories on the summary card and go straight in to the memories tab recents is awesome it shows you the persons that you have most recently viewed up to 50 so it's a very easy way to get back to where you were working before or if you said oh i looked at this guy's mom you know like a couple of hours ago but i've looked at so many people since then well you can scroll through or you can actually search in this box and you can find people that you've been working on recently and easily get back to them so click the name to view the person page and click the tree icon to see this person in tree view find pretty much what you'd expect right you search within family tree that's the one thing that is important to point out sometimes people think that this is also searching historical records but it's not it's only searching in those 1.3 billion names that are actually in family tree right now and as you can see you can if you choose find by name you can search by name place and a birth range and also other events you can also search with other relationships but here you're searching kind of by facts right names places dates or relationships on find by name but you've also got find by id which can be very useful like if you jotted down a pid and then you know maybe a couple of weeks later you come back you want to go right to that person this is how you can do it just click find by id type the id in and click find when you do that you get a list of results and i wanted to point out on this this i've noticed is also sometimes confusing to people when they're new to family tree so they'll get a list of results and go great now what i'm i'm looking at this person where do i go from here well it's kind of like google search and so when you get the the results you can actually click on them to go to more information so in this case when i click on john joseph bescoby's name i get a summary card and as you saw from what we just went over this allows you to navigate to different places the summary card allows you to navigate following you remember we talked about how you could click the star and be notified of changes to people they call that following if you click this list right here or excuse me this choice right here it takes you to a list of everybody that you're following so that can come in handy last of all is my contributions and it will show you graphs of your contributions to family tree i will tell you why i like this sometimes does it seem like your work is not making a difference or that your little contributions are just that that they're little they add up and that's the thing i have loved about this is just occasionally i'll go in i'll go wow i spent half an hour on monday night i spent an hour on sunday you know just little bits of time here and there but now i look at this and i see those efforts are really adding up and they are helping to build the tree they're making a difference so check out your contributions it's um just a cool way to see what you're working what work you're doing and to know that you're making a difference so final advice to everybody aim if you're new especially aim for consistent effort and don't feel like you have to rush when we rush is when we make mistakes for all of us being humble and seeking to learn is a great thing in family doing family history be patient with yourself as you learn don't get frustrated and say i'm never going to get this because you will and the more you do it the more you'll get you'll get it and especially as you have the spirit with you and then also just as a little warning build your skills before trying advanced functions such as merging i had some very well meaning family members who went into one of the lines that i was working on and they assumed so i have a pringle line for those of you who are anne of green gables fans you'll smile at that but um this pringle line they had a bunch of people named john not too surprising right but also a bunch of the john's married women named eleanor i don't know why it must have been a regional thing but i probably had about six john and eleanor's couples who were not the same person but some of my like one of my family members and then some other people who could have been my family members i don't know but i didn't recognize them merge these people all together and they ended up with like i don't know 20 kids from all over england which wouldn't have been logical at the time you know the kids kept rotating all around england and um and the thing is i know that they had very good intentions but things like merging merging is tricky so i would say get your skills under your belt first get the basic skills which you're going to learn in this four week series and then in the intermediate series we actually do teach about merging if you're interested in doing that kind of thing but i sometimes people say oh just get into family tree and do whatever if you see a duplicate merge it and i would say i would recommend against that i would recommend waiting to do merging until you're you've developed your advanced skill you know more advanced skills so what do you do next do the activities for this class we have a class handout which i will put in the chat and then this is maybe the most important thing prayerfully determine where the lord wants you to work and all of us will probably get different answers one woman in my steak her answer was write your husband's life history her husband had just died she was strongly prompted to do that and i bet that when she finished it it was a blessing to all their posterity another person got a prompting to do photos another person might get a prompting to do temple names and you might get different promptings at different times the point is to be very prayerful about it and then listen to the spirit and do your best to follow those promptings that you get as to where you should be focusing so i am going to pop those links in the chat so there's a link to the slide presentation if you'd like it for any reason and then a link to the handout so this brings us to the end of the class we'd love your feedback there is a short survey on the basic class links page

Channel: BYU Family History Library

Views: 695

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: BYU, Webinar, Family History, Library, Genealogy, Ancestor

Id: 0z8_hsIjRIo

Length: 66min 16sec (3976 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021