Issue 13.14
I have been serving as a part-time service missionary for FamilySearch Worldwide Support Services for about four years now. Lately one of my assignments has been to help write and edit the help center documents that you see when you go to https://familysearch.org and click on Get Help. One of the greatest challenges that face any organization uses technology is providing easy to use and useful help about how to use the products. FamilySearch.org deals with this challenge every day. In their efforts to continually provide a better research experience for everyone who uses FamilySearch, they are continually adding more useful features, databases and upgrades. That creates a big challenge to keep the training and the help center articles up to date.
One solution that FamilySearch has chosen to use to address this problem is to add online training that can be updated quickly and easily. This means that they no longer create large expensive paper manuals and instruction booklets, which quickly become outdated with each new improvement.
Some of the most useful and popular training has been put online for you to use quickly and easily. I will include links to this training below. Sometimes pop-up blockers and anti-virus software do not allow FamilySearch windows to open correctly. Avast anti-virus is one that isn’t playing nicely with FamilySearch right now. If you do have popup errors, go into popup options and allow FamilySearch popups to appear.
The Training Manual is online at https://familysearch.org/tree-training this is a menu of the training options. Click on the link you want to use and you can start learning.
Family Tree Curriculum is found at http://broadcast.lds.org/elearning/fhd/Community/en/FamilyTreeCurriculum/index.html which includes a whole selection of training content. It even provides training on how to use a computer mouse, basic beginner training, intermediate and advanced training and the option to view training in Spanish!
The Family Tree quick start guide is found at http://broadcast.lds.org/eLearning/fhd/Community/en/FamilySearch/FamilyTree/pdf/FT-QSG_LDS.pdf It is about the basic and most popular features of Family Tree.
http://broadcast.lds.org/eLearning/fhd/Community/en/FamilySearch/FamilyTree/pdf/familyTreeUserGuidelds.pdf is the reference guide to Family Tree and even though it was updated in October 2013, that is six months and about 5% of this manual is already out of date. The manual is being redesigned and posted in smaller sections to allow for faster and easier updates. See also familysearch.org/learningcenter and familysearch.org/learn/wiki.
For more information, contact Shanna S. Jones shannasjones@msn.com (435) 628-4900