Family Tree Updates

Today on his Genealogy's Star blog, James Tanner provides us with a very good update on FamilySearch Family Tree.

Family Tree Instructions

My genealogy friend Larry Cragun has written a good post on his blog that gives links to current training by Family Search for the Family Tree. You can find it here. 

Power Searching with Google

In his Online Genealogy Newsletter today, Genealogist Dick Eastman reviewed the recent learning opportunity offered by Google called "Power Searching with Google". I registered for the classes and attended the lessons as they were offered in July. They were Excellent!
Here follows Dick Eastman's recap of the classes:

Want to become an Google Expert? There is one organization that will show you how: Google.

Google used to conduct occasional live "webinars" that taught the finer points of using the search engine. In the past, you had to be seated at your computer at a designated time to participate in the live seminars. The company has now "canned" those lessons and made them available at any time of the day or night. There are six 50-minute classes, free for anybody to try.

The lessons include:

• Class 1 - Introduction
• Class 2 - Interpreting results
• Class 3 - Advanced techniques
• Class 4 - Find facts faster
• Class 5 - Checking your facts
• Class 6 - Putting it all together
• Power Searching with Search Experts Video
• Hang Out with Search Experts Video

The lessons are available as a video, in text, or as a slide show (in Google Docs, of course).

I'd suggest you take a look at the lessons. You’ll be pleased at how much easier it is to find what you’re looking for once you learn a few tricks.

"Power Searching with Google" is available at http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/course.

An Inside Look at the Future of FamilySearch Indexing

Please click HERE to read a very informative article about the new features that will soon become available from FamilySearch to aid us in our research.

From Sea to Shining Sea

Take a look at the new page at FamilySearch for our next Indexing Community Project: 

Join the Community Project to Index Immigration and Naturalization Records

RootsMagic Free Classes Online

Tip of the Month: Free Online Classes

While this month's tip isn't exactly a tip on how to use a specific feature in RootsMagic, it is a tip on where to find tips on using RootsMagic.

Many of our users have taken advantage of our free online classes (webinars), but there are a lot of people we talk to that say they didn't know about these recorded webinars, or haven't gotten around to watching any of them.  That's a shame, because not only are all of these recorded classes free, they are also available 24-7, 365 days a year.

Have you wanted to know more about:

• RootsMagic To-Go (running RM from a flash drive)?
• How to publish a book with multiple chapters, index, table of contents, and more?
• What all the different reports offer?
• How to enter sources better, including census records?
• Techniques to search for information more easily?
• Creating a CD with your data and pictures that you can share with family?

Those are just a few of the 40 free online classes available.  There are even classes on how to get started using RootsMagic (creating a new file, entering a new person, etc).

And not only are these classes free to watch online, you can even download classes to watch when you aren't online, or to take and show in your RootsMagic user group, society meeting, or Family History Center.

To watch or download any of these free online classes, just go to:

http://www.rootsmagic.com/webinars