A brief look at Ancestry’s new navigational controls and displays for their online trees…

Post below if you have any questions or comments…

This week I’ve made a video explaining how to add a fact to the timeline of your family tree in the Ancestry online tree, including how to add associated media.

If you have any questions, post them below!

I promised to take a look back at how Google Maps can help you with your research. Here’s the video:

There are many digital map tools online that can offer benefits to those researching their genealogy. One thing Google Maps – rather annoying – lacks is county borders (and river names!), however, if you download Google Earth you can get an overlay of the ceremonial counties of England from The Historic County Borders Project.

There are other projects online such as David Rumsey’s Map Collection which comprises over 120 historical maps (among others) which can be zoomed and panned with Google Maps, Google Earth and other tools.

Hopefully, these, together with the England Jurisdictions 1851 tool, can help you track down where your ancestors lived. Searching around on the Internet you’ll find similar tools for other countries too.

Until next week – when hopefully we’ll get to the actual online tree!

It’s been one of those weeks where technical problems have beset me. One of the casualties is the screen-capture video recorder, so you will have to make do with plain old text this week! I have made an audio should you prefer that form.

I had hoped to look at the actual Ancestry tree this week, but without video that would be a little difficult. Instead I am going to mention some more sites for you to get clued up on!

You’ll see that I have added more links in the right-hand menu, and divided them up into two categories – subscription and free sites. We’ve already looked at the subscription sites and, of course, will be looking at them more – especially Ancestry. So let’s take a look at the free ones…

The England Jurisidictions 1851 link we spoke about in the last tutorial. The only thing to add here is that I forgot to say that it links in with Google so you can get street and satellite views too. Google in and of itself can be very useful – I will probably do a video on that in the near future.

Family History Centers – these originate in America (hence the spelling!) but can be found in many places outside of America. In fact, if you live in England there is probably one within a 30-minute drive! These FHC are owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They are free to use, though you might want to telephone first to check opening times. The link gives you a searchable database to see which FHC is nearest to you. Some of them offer free access to the 1911 Census. They will have a number of computers, Internet enabled, and fiche/film readers. They should also have fiches of births, marriages and deaths. Although you can search these online, the FHC records should be more complete in most cases. Click the link now to see if there’s one near you!

The Family Search Wiki is a large source of growing community information aimed at helping genealogists worldwide. Look up the resources of your country, and help out if you want to. This resource is not doubt set to become the “Bible” for genealogists.

FamilySearch we’ve mentioned before, and shall no doubt revisit. They have a growing list of records which you can search, and of course also publish the free videos and class outlines which I mentioned in the last video tutorial. The videos are aimed at complete beginners, so do please check them out.

FreeBMD, FreeCEN and FreeREG are volunteer projects aiming to make the Birth/Marriage/Death, Census and parish registers all fully indexed/transcribed and free online. Ancestry actually taps into FreeBMD on its own searches. I shall probably cover these three free sites in a video tutorial too.

Genuki we have already mentioned. It’s a huge and valuable resource, if a little confusing. It is probably one of the most-used genealogy sites for the UK and Ireland.

So, take a look through these sites, old and new, and become familiar with what they have to offer. This will enable you to build your tree all the faster – and all the more solidly.

See you next week!

This week I want to take a quick look at something you will need to understand before you can obtain the information needed to build your family tree.

Although this video only briefly touches upon the subject, please note that I am going to assume that you will watch some of the videos (and try some of the sites/pdfs/tools) I mention! Here are the links:

http://www.familysearch.org (click Research Helps / Online Classes)

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk (type in the name of a place)

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/

http://labs.familysearch.org (click on the England Jurisdictions 1851 image or link)