Friday, September 14, 2012

Using FamilySearch

In a previous post I mentioned that my FamilySearch.org skills were wanting, or at least that's how I felt. And thanks from me to those of you who kindly offered suggestions to broaden my knowledge base:)

Someone suggested the tutorial videos in the Learning Center, and that sounded good to me. My objective was to start at the beginning and make sure I had a grasp of all that was there on the site and was using features to full advantage. And I do like watching videos so that's where I began.

It's paying off. I'm watching the introductory videos from the most basic onward. Have watched about a dozen and in just the first couple have picked up some good tips and tricks, mostly that have to do with features I've overlooked. Just these two tips, below, will make the whole effort worth it.

The first tips is about using filters in my search. By using a combination of search terms that widen the search as well as filters that limit the search I think that I'm doing a bit better of searching and finding. I liked it in the video when the narrator showed that just by x-ing the term out you could eliminate it. No need to start over. Cool!

The second tip that was totally new to me showed how to reverse the image in an effort to better and more clearly see the letterforms. The example was a census page that when reversed, that is when the dark writing on a light ground became light writing on a dark ground, sometimes the features of letters can be seen more clearly. Also cool! Honestly, guess I thought that reversing an image meant that everything was backwards;) Ha! But it was a tool that could help me out.

Now I'm starting to feel that I'm not missing the good features!

Here's a link to the videos mentioned in this post in case you want to watch some. Have fun!
https://help.familysearch.org/kb/videos/en/index.html


Picture of the day from the Archive:

Aunt Louise Kelly Chaney, about 1941
My Dad's youngest sister,
And just as beautiful as this photo!

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/09/using-familysearch.html

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