Issue 43.12
FamilySearch www.familysearch.org now provides a feature called My Source Box. This Source Box serves as a place to capture a record source and preserve it. Your source box contains the sources that you want to attach to your ancestors. It is easy to add sources to your source box if you find the record in the Historical Records Collections at www.familysearch.org.
Let me give you a step by step instruction on how to do it. First you will need to sign in at www.familysearch.org and search for someone in your family, deceased is best. For example, search for Juanita Brooks, type Juanita in the First Names box and Brooks in the Last Names box and click on the green Search box. It will bring over 250,000 results, so you can narrow it down by clicking on Residence at the left and adding Utah and click search again.
Now you should see Juanita Brooks at the top in the 1940 United States Census. These are the records recently indexed at www.indexing.familysearch.org. Click her blue name and it will take you to the indexed information. Also, if you are signed in with the free account, you can click on View Image and see the actual census image. For now, look at the upper right side of the white area of the page. You will see My Source Box.
If you hover over My Source Box it will have a drop down menu that gives you two options, 1) Add to My Source Box 2) Go to My Source Box. We want to click on Add to My Source Box. This takes all of the pertinent information and adds it to our source box. It will bring up a message box that says, “Added to My Source Box.” Then click OK, this means it was successfully added. Now that source with its information and citation is in our source box. I can also go down and click on one of the children in the box, for example Karl Francis Brooks and watch as it changes the top of the page from United States Census, 1940 Juanita Brooks to United States Census, 1940, Karl Francis Brooks. You create one source for each person for each record. This is a different methodology from previous uses of sources where we would just put 1940 census. But because there are millions of people in the 1940 census, we want to be more specific and we want to attach the actual indexed information and the image to our ancestors so that anyone coming along behind us is able to find it easily.
If I wanted to add Karl or Joseph or anyone else in the family to My Source Box, I would just click on them, make sure I am seeing their name in the heading and hover over My Source Box and click Add to My Source Box. Then when I view the pedigree under Family Tree at www.familysearch.org I can find the ancestor and view the person’s page that we need to add the source to. Towards the bottom, find Sources and click on Go to source box. To link it to the ancestor, click the box in front of the source you added for this ancestor and click Attach. It will ask why you are adding it, so explain and then click Attach.
This sources the ancestors so even if all of your genealogy work has already been done, you can go back and add the sources and get to know them while you are at it.
For more information, contact Shanna Jones (435) 628-4900 or shannasjones@msn.com.