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Thanks to the Ancestry Insider for cluing me into a new feature on FamilySearch.org and the Family Tree program. I don't want to take away any of his thunder, but this feature should be heavily advertised. I hope he gives us all more insight soon.
The relatively new Family Tree program is quickly becoming outstanding. Family Search has done a first rate job so far of repenting of all the shortcomings of New.FamilySearch.org and producing an extremely useful and easy-to-use program. Granted, some of the new features are copies of features on Ancestry.com and other programs, but that is how software programs progress.
The new feature is the Source Box. I have been demonstrating this feature for the past few weeks as a way to organize your sources in Family Tree. The key here is that now this way of organizing sources becomes a powerful tool for adding sources to your Family Tree individuals. In short, when you find a source in the FamilySearch Historical Record Collections, you can use a link to save the source to your Source Box and then in Family Tree, attach the record to the appropriate individuals. This is similar to the Ancestry.com Shoe Box, but much simpler and easier to use. In addition, it saves huge amounts of time in adding sources to Family Tree. Good job FamilySearch!
Thanks for pointing to this resource. One cannot "save the source" (as in attaching the actual document to the tree), only a link to the extract or index or whatever. Unfortunately the quickie source-descriptions provided are not full source citations. Where a particular record is extracted from a database (say, a particular church's records) that is combined in a collection (say, "Maryland, Births and Christenings, 1650-1995"), the quickie reference cites the collection rather than the particular record within the particular database. This is quite irritating when the extract does actually give a FHL microfilm number that allows the user to retrieve the particular source of the actual record.
ReplyDeleteThis is certainly better than nothing, but lack of fields for full citation data needs also to be fixed.
I have been using the FamilySearch Family Tree for several months now. Last week I discovered that I could save sources I found at FamilySearch.org to my Source Box and when going to the Source Box from someone on my tree I can indeed attach the appropriate sources to that person's name. I am fortunate to have many ancestors in Massachusetts, where FamilySearch has images associated with the indexes of vital records. I can also create my own sources from websites other than FamilySearch (such as FindaGrave or Canadian Census records or Ancestry) or even from sources in my paper files that are not online that I know of. Any deficiencies in the automatic creation of FamilySearch sources can be added in the notes. I, for one, am thrilled with this Family Tree. It is very easy to use and it is exciting to see the new features being added to it almost each month.
ReplyDelete