Issue 34.15
Using FamilySearch Family Tree https://familysearch.org/tree/ Look in the Research Help section on the right of the person’s page. Research Suggestions with the purple icon will provide ideas of what needs to be done for the ancestor. Use possible duplicates on the person age for someone who is missing parents, a spouse, or children, to see if another person has added the ancestor with the parents.
Under Search Records, you will see FamilySearch.org. Click there and the system will automatically search all of the indexed records at FamilySearch. It uses the information on the person page. This will likely find more records of sources to attach to your ancestor. Not all of them will appear under Research Help, only the high-probability matches. FamilySearch plans to add the other partner sites to this Search Records section, so an automatic search of Ancestry.com, FindMyPast.com and MyHeritage is coming in the future.
Use the partner sites to find more information about your ancestry, and extend the lines. See https://familysearch.org/partneraccess (free for LDS Church members). Each site has different collections available, although some do overlap.
One of my favorite places to search is Google. https://www.google.com I just type in the ancestor’s names and even a place and see what it finds. For example, on Google, I typed in William Empey Margretha Loucks and pressed enter. It found results at www.geni.com, www.myheritage.com, www.genealogy.com, www.mytrees.com, www.rootsweb.com www.findagrave.com and www.ancestry.com which saves time searching for more information about the family. Be careful though, everything on the Internet is not true. Just because you find information on mytrees.com or rootsweb or any of the others that varies from the information in FamilySearch Family Tree, doesn’t make it wrong. If you find this situation, more research is needed to find out which of the opinions is correct, or if they are both invalid conclusions. You want to look for original records. A source is original if it is the first written statement, photograph, or recording of an event. Trained genealogists and historians need to make every attempt to get as close to the original as possible.
For more information, contact Shanna Jones shannasjones@msn.com