I always tell people that “FREE” is my favorite price to
pay. This week your task has multiple
steps to it, and the first one is to find a place that offers you free access
to Ancestry.com. You might try your
public library. Many of them have access
to various memberships for the public’s use.
But sadly, many are slashing budgets just to keep the building open and
have cut out their accounts to these places.
Another place to try is your local Family History
Center. The one closest to you can be
found by going to https://www.familysearch.org/locations and
typing in your zip code. Most Family
History Centers are located within the building of a local congregation of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
These good people welcome anyone who is researching their family, free
of charge, no need to be a member of their faith. Simply walk in, sign in, take a tour if they
offer one, and then settle down at a computer.
Oh, and in case you are wondering, I am affiliate with
neither public libraries nor the LDS church.
Like I said to start, “FREE” is my favorite price to pay, and a
membership to Ancestry.com is nearly $300 per year for access to all of their
documents world-wide.
Wherever you find access to Ancestry.com, be sure to
bring a flash drive and your Pedigree Charts with you. You might want to print out and bring this
along with you, because I am going to walk you through the step-by-step process
of setting up your family tree since your task this week is to use
Ancestry.com’s family tree builder to start tracking and researching your
family tree online.
WARNING: Taking
this step could prove to be disastrous – you, too may become a genealogy and
family history addict!
Once you get signed in (you won’t be setting up your own
account, but logging in as the place where you are using the program – don’t
worry, someone there can tell you the name and password if you need it) you
want to click on the FAMILY TREES tab and then in the drop-down menu click on
START A NEW TREE. You will see something
that looks like this:
I recommend that you check the box “I AM STARTING WITH
MYSELF” and then do just that. Start
with you. Enter your first and middle
name in the first box and your last name in the second box. Use the names you were born with, not married
names or nicknames. Married names will
be added in later. Nicknames can be
added like this: William Albert “Will”
or William “Will” Albert. Choose the way
that makes the most sense to you and stick with that. You are starting to create your own “style
sheet” – the preferred way of entering and storing information for your family
history research.
Click the appropriate box for gender and then enter your
birthdate. This is another opportunity
to continue working on your style sheet.
How will you enter the dates from here on in? April 29, 1963 or 29 April 1963 or 4/29/1963
or 04291963? There is no right or wrong
way. But there are ways that work
better. The 29 April 1963 format is my
personal choice because it is simply how I have been writing dates for years
and years. You decide what style you
want to use. There is no right or wrong
way as long as the information is clear.
You WILL want to use all four digits of the year, because quickly you
will be moving to the 1800s, and then you start having multiple people with the
same name, so keeping the dates accurate is very important!
While we are talking dates, let’s discuss situations when
you don’t know the whole date or are unsure of the exact date or only know it
was before or after this time. My advice
to you is to include what you do know. “May
1778” is better than “1778”, but “1778” is a lot better than “before
1780”. However, “before 1780” still
gives us more information than a big fat blank space. So as you work your way back in time and you
find a grandparent or great grandparent with an iffy date, include what you
know and see what turns up. You may need
to change it in the future, but it’s the best you have for now.
Now move on to place of birth. Again, more stylistic choices for you – do
you want to simply include states? City
and state? Counties? Countries?
I prefer the city, county, state format, so mine would look like
this: Somerset, Somerset, PA. You will note that I don’t write “city” or
“county” and I abbreviate the state.
Mostly that’s because I am also lazy and with so many of my family from
PA, I would be writing PENNSYLVANIA too many times! When it comes to countries other than the US
I include the country name thus:
Ballintoy, Connor, Antrim, Ireland.
This tells me the parish, the diocese, the county, and the country. Or I might have a simpler location such as
Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany or Fife, Scotland.
And just as I mentioned regarding dates, SOME information
on place is better than none. If you
know she was born in Russia, add “Russia” for the place. You can home in on the exact part of Russia
later. You might even discover that what
was “Russia” then is “Moldova” now. Same
is true here for Virginia and West Virginia.
Then you decide if you are writing the name of the place as THEY knew it
or as YOU know it. I go with both – I
write “Keyser, Virginia (present day West Virginia)”.
Click “CONTINUE” and you get this screen:
You will notice that your information is on the far right
box and now you are adding your father’s information. Fill in the blanks and move on to do the same
thing for your mother. Again, enter as
much information as you have and use your mother’s maiden name.
Next you get this screen which asks you to name your
family tree – your maiden name is always a good choice as in “The James Family
Tree” but you can go with your name “Kate’s Family Tree” or whatever you want
to call it!
You are also asked if you want to make your tree
public. This is completely up to
you. The advantages of making it public
are that others can see what you are doing and contact you to ask questions,
offer help, or introduce themselves as long-lost relatives. The downside is the same – people can see it
and contact you. HOWEVER, information on
living people is suppressed, so no worries about stalkers finding you or your
kids. I think making the tress available
to others is a good idea – sharing information and knowledge is helpful. And I discovered some McConahy cousins who
have a quarterly newsletter by sharing my tree on Ancestry.com.
Once you make that decision you’ll get something like
this:
TRY to ignore the shaking leaves in the corner of the
boxes (assuming you get any) and move on to adding your parents’ parents. We will talk about those leaves next week and
what to do with them (they are very useful) but for now, let’s focus on
entering the information we have.
To add someone to the tree from here, click on the “ADD
FATHER” or “ADD MOTHER” box. You’ll get
this screen and you know what to do from here.
Leave the “EMAIL” and “SHARE TREE WITH THIS PERSON” boxes blank for now. Again, we will talk about this topic another
week.
Be sure to hit “SAVE” and then move on.
If you select the “+ADD RELATIVE” button (like the one
under my name) you get this screen, which allows you to add your siblings,
spouses, and children.
Continue from there until you have entered all of the
family members you have on your Pedigree Charts. You might end up with something relatively
small when you are finished, but fear not.
We will keep on working until your family tree looks like this:
(Currently my family tree has 848 people in it – I tend
to be very picky and only add people who I am 100% certain are related to me,
so I don’t have a tree that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. It is more important to me to be right than
to have the biggest and baddest tree out there!)
So enjoy putting your tree together. Be sure to save it to your flash drive before
you leave, and remember, you can only access the information via the
Ancestry.com program. So you’ll be
making a lot of trips to the library or the Family History Center the next few
weeks!
Next week we will talk about how to actually use the
plethora of documents and records available to you on Ancestry.com.
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