Who should use The Family History Guide and why?

thefhguide.com

The Family History Guide has been around for some years now and is firmly established as a go-to genealogical and family history educational website. The entire contents of this still-growing website are free to all users. It is my experience that many of those genealogists and family historians who would use and support the website dismiss it without ever looking at its content for a variety of reasons. I thought I would write about some of the perceptions I have observed from people when I mention the website. 

First, the website really is free. It is not a freemium website that is trying to get you to pay for advanced or premium services. The Family History Guide is fully staffed by unpaid volunteers and is funded by donations. See The Family History Guide Association. We encourage donations because without them we cannot participate in conferences such as RootsTech 2022 Virtual which is coming up shortly after the date of this post. One way you can donate is to use Smile.Amazon.com when you order items on Amazon. This is exactly the same website as Amazon but a small percentage of your purchases goes to the charity of your choice. This is a painless way of donating to The Family History Guide but we also appreciate direct donations. 

Another common misconception about the website is that it is just for beginners. This is most commonly a perception among established and professional level genealogists. This belief is one of the most obvious indicators that the genealogist has not yet looked or explored the website. One of the basic research helps that aspiring genealogists are encouraged to accumulate by the professional genealogical community is a research outline of the basic resources for the geographic areas of the world where the new genealogist will be doing research. These outlines usually appear in the form of three-ring binders full of paper. Guess what? All of that work in compiling an outline is almost completely done by the Countries section of The Family History Guide. Here is a sample page. 

This section on England contains hundreds of links to information about and the location of valuable genealogical records already organized by topic and geographic location. Not only does this particular section and all the other about other countries of the world contain link to general resources, each of the English counties has its own section of links and documents. 

If you happen to be helping someone with their research, you can show them the Country section and they will then have a whole course of references with articles and videos to help them learn how to do their research. Without going into more detail, The Family History Guide website has detailed instructions and finding aids for every major country in the world where genealogical records can be found. It also has specialized section on ethnic and religious groups. 

One of the most useful functions of The Family History Guide website is to provide step-by-step instructions for each of the large online genealogical websites such as FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and Findmypast.There is an inherent tendency for many people to ignore the instructions whether it is for a recent purchase or when trying to learn a now topic. The instructions in The Family History Guide are there to show you how to get started with all of these websites. Anyone who wants to learn how to use these websites will benefit from the step-by-step instructions and videos. 

Some genealogists struggle for hours, days, weeks or even years with research problems when the resources to help them move beyond these difficulties are available on The Family History Guide website. It sometimes seems like spending time learning is time wasted from actually doing genealogy but that is simply not true. We only progress by learning and since The Family History Guide is at the core of learning, we should be using this tool to help us progress. 

There are probably a lot more misconceptions but these are sufficient for now. Please take some time to explore The Family History Guide website.