Friday, August 11, 2006

Family Tree Magazine

Family Tree Magazine's website is a wealth of information. They have some of the best free genealogy forms I've seen. I found this site when I was looking for free genealogy forms online. At the Homepage you can Subscribe, Renew your subscription, give the magazine as a Gift, access the Tool Kit, Article Archive, Marketplace, Current Issue, Back Issues, Special Issues, and the Bookstore. There is even a pop-up offering a free copy of the Family Tree Magazine.

The Tool Kit Page

This page includes links to:

Ethnic Tools
Includes web sites, books, organizations, other resources, and essential tips to help you explore your ethnic heritage. Presently there are 42 ethnic toolkits ranging from African-American to Welsh. There are more being added all the time.

Web Exclusive
This information isn't available in their Family Tree Magazine. You can submit your unidentified photographs to a noted genealogist specializing in photograph identification. Browse photographs already examined. Index of questions others have asked with the answers. Don't find the answer you're looking for, send in your question to receive and answer. Nancy Hendrickson of AncestorNews.com supplies new and helpful ways to do your online genealogy research. Included is access to her prior columns. You can check to see if Family History Tree Experts are coming to your area, and when they will arrive. They have a Site of the Day featuring a site their experts pick as an informative and well-designed site with archives.

Download Forms
Family Tree Magazine's free genealogical forms will help you organize and access your research, and are available in PDF format as well as text format. They have forms for general research, people or families, census, tombstones and artifacts, books, and articles.

The Bookstore
Carries Betterway Books. Subjects are, Start your research right, Computer-based genealogy, Create a written legacy, Keeping in touch with the family, Fascinating details from every era, Discovering your Ancestors series, and Scrapbooking. A different book is featured each week.

Soundex Generator
The Soundex Generator converts surnames into the soundex code. The soundex is a way to find your ancestors even if they are spelled differently from what you're looking for. Lets take 3 variations of Growel, the way my maternal grandfather spelled the name; Growel, Growell, and Growl. Growel comes out G-640, Growell is also G-640, and Growl also comes out as G-640. I can just hear you asking yourselves, why on earth would I want to do that? Well, this code is used in the later census indexes to help find our ancestors. As another example, lets say Janzen is recorded as Johnson because the town clerk doesn't speak German, and the German father doesn't speak, read, or understand English. So, we're looking for Johnson, because that is now our family's legal name. Do you think we'll find the family? This is where the soundex comes in because Janzen and Johnson both have a code of J-525. Try it for yourself.

Resource Guide
The Resource Guide Supersearch is designed to help you find the answers to genealogy questions.

Writing Workshops
Fundamentals of Lifestories Writing and Focus on the Personal/Family Memoir are workshops presented online to work on whenever you have the time.

Family Tree News
The Family Tree News Service is a wire service that sends free e-mails with genealogy news.

Newsletter
Free e-mail newsletter.

Not everything on Family Tree Magazine website is free, but there is loads of free stuff here. You can spend many hours mining this site for all its nuggets. They are also continually adding content, so we won't be done with this site any time soon.

Dale L. Edwards

1 comment:

Karin W. said...

Here I found some interesting information about Rootsweb Resources. I´ve been trying for some time to find a woman who emigrated from Sweden, trying to locate her somewhere in Canada or USA. I found her marriage in Winnipeg but can't find her after that.