Navigating around on the huge FamilySearch.org website is like a trip over an endless ocean. Navigating the website includes learning how to avoid being distracted with a proliferation of "helpful" features. A recent news article highlighted even more new features. See "3 FamilySearch features to help new and beginning users search and find their ancestors."
The three features highlighted by the story are a Discovery Search Experience, Ancestor Pages, and the updated way to search the Historical Record Collections. Sometimes, if you don't want to use these new beginning features, you are stuck with several additional clicks to work with some of the basic functions of the website. What are those basic functions? I would suggest the following:
- Adding and editing information in the FamilySearch Family Tree
- Searching the digital images of historical records on the website
- Adding Memories to supplement and support entries in the Family Tree
There is also a section of the website that connects to the Indexing web-based program. For members of
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the program is the only way to reserve and share temple ordinances. The website also has a mobile counterpart. There are some other features of the program such as a recently redesigned Help Center, an online Community,
Over the years, FamilySearch has repeatedly tried to involve new users to the website in a variety of ways. For the past seven or so years, I have also been involved in the same effort to educate new users of the FamilySearch.org website and additionally help people how to do genealogical research. I decided to become involved in supporting and contributing to a structured, sequenced, free website called
The Family History Guide.
Since both
The Family History Guide and
FamilySearch.org are non-profit, charitable organizations, they are not in competition. The Family History Guide directly supports not only FamilySearch but also Ancestry.com, Findmypast.com, MyHeritage.com, and many other websites. Working with The Family History Guide has reinforced my basic belief that in order to understand and use the FamilySearch.org website or become involved in any research-based family history activity, you need to learn quite a lot of essential information. There is no easy or fast way to search historical records for specific information about an ancestor or relative. The Family History Guide provides specific helpful information about each step of the research process and adds instructions for using FamilySearch as well as the other websites.
So, how do the new features on the FamilySearch website help people get started with learning how to search and record information from historical records? The first problem is that since I have been using the program for a while, I cannot find any links to any of the newly implemented features. In the Help drop-down menu, you may see a selection entitled, "
Getting Started, How to Do Family History." If you click on this link you will see the following page.
All of these screens may change if you are not a member of
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you will see a different screen or some of the feature may be missing. All of the options are useful and helpful to those who have no idea about genealogical research. At the bottom of this page, there is a link that will take you to your personalized startup page.
Here are the previous posts in this ongoing series.
James, I like how you whittled it down to three basics of the Family Search website. It's a huge site, but the basics are my focus
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