How to Find Your Family History with Genealogy Gems
If you got an iPad or tablet for Christmas, you may have spent a good deal of time playing angry birds and checking your email. (Come on, be honest!)
But, if you got a copy of my new book Turn Your iPad into a Genealogy Powerhouse, then you have moved well beyond hurling squawking pudgy red birds at piles of wood, and you are now pivoting to your pad for nearly every area of your family history research.
But who knew that the iPad could do this?!!:
We’ve been exploring the connection between food and family history in the most recent episodes of the Genealogy Gems Podcast. And in episode 138 you heard a little tribute to Julia Child and her 100th birthday. Here’s another tribute from the station that brought Julia into our lives for so many years, PBS. Bon Appetit!
The folks at FamilySearch.org are constantly tweaking their already-great free data site. The latest update involves two important features:
1. There’s now a drop-down menu for logging on to FamilySearch, which makes it easier to access the settings and source boxes from anywhere on the site. (Why have a log-in on a free site? Because FamilySearch doesn’t own most of its record sets, and those who do sometimes place restrictions on use. Those who log in have access to more records than those who don’t.)
2. That “classic” data set, the International Genealogy Index (IGI), is now fully searchable. From FamilySearch’s home page, just click on “All Record Collections” toward the bottom of the page, then enter “IGI” in the search field. (Why search the IGI? It accounts for about 20% of the 3 billion or so records on FamilySearch.org. Both indexed record sets and user-submitted trees are part of the IGI. The IGI has been around for a long time–long before digitized data sets came into use. The IGI can be particularly helpful if you are reviewing or updating research that was done many years ago and/or may have been submitted by Latter-day Saint (Mormon) families.)
Here’s a new, brief video that will walk you through the updates:
Have you ever wondered if you are getting the most out of the Familysearch.org website? Now you can sit in on a video recording of the Association of PC Users Group Virtual Conference class called Using the FamilySearch.org Website for Genealogy Research
Click here to the APCUG website to download the handout