While You're Relaxing This Summer, OneGreatFamily is Working Hard on Your Family Tree

Many of you are spending your free time this summer relaxing and enjoying the nice weather. As much as you enjoy genealogy, on those beautiful summer days, who wants to be stuck indoors on a computer? OneGreatFamily can help you out! While you are having fun in the sun, OneGreatFamily is matching and merging the data you have entered and adding new ancestors to your family tree. Your genealogy is being done for you!

We do this in three ways:

1. OneGreatFamily does all the searching for you, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Our search system is constantly comparing your entire family tree against any existing or newly entered data. Think of all the time you save by not having to enter each name of interest into a search engine, then adjusting the search criteria to try to get to a manageable number of results.

2. OneGreatFamily focuses your attention on both obvious and probable matches. Instead of forcing you to wade through mountains of useless records, OneGreatFamily automatically discards the obvious mismatches. In the case of clear matches, our system automatically accepts them and marks them for your review by putting a yellow exclamation mark beside them on your individual family tree! The probable matches are separately identified and highlighted for you with a "light bulb" icon. The system calls these "hints."

3. OneGreatFamily allows you to leverage the efforts of thousands of other genealogy enthusiasts. Many individuals spend needless hours, days, and weeks searching for names that others have already found, documented, and recorded into the OneGreatFamily tree. When you use OneGreatFamily, you will be provided with those names without any work by you! The only step that you need to take is to get started by submitting all the information you already have. Then, check back every once in a while to see what we've found. Many users see their family trees grow faster than they ever expected!

Subscribe to OneGreatFamily, submit your family tree, then sit back and enjoy your summer. The next time you log in at OneGreatFamily, you will see if new ancestors have been added to your family tree. The power of OneGreatFamily lies in the fact that the OneGreatFamily Tree isn't just another collection of family trees, but instead is a single, unified, global family tree that everyone is working on.

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How to export and import a Gedcom into OneGreatFamily

GEDCOM is an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication. It is a common file format for exchanging data between genealogical record managers such as Family Tree Maker, Personal Ancestral File (PAF), Legacy Family Tree, Family Origins®, and others. If you use one of these (or a similar product), you can create a GEDCOM file containing your information.

A GEDCOM file can be uploaded and the records it contains can be inserted into the OneGreatFamily tree. Visit " How Do I Enter Data" for instructions on how to import GEDCOM into OneGreatFamily. The function of creating the GEDCOM file is usually called “exporting” data. The result of exporting is a file such as “myged.ged”. You can export your information from Genealogy Browser by selecting “Export from Current Individual to GEDCOM file” from the file menu.

You can import a GEDCOM into your group by selecting “Import GEDCOM file to View” on the File Menu or by selecting the third option on the Organize Anchors page (On the Anchors pull-down menu, select “Organize Anchors”). If you upload the same GEDCOM more than once, you may find some hints and conflicts from your own information. This is because some mergers did not automatically take place.

You can export data from your group by selecting “Export from Current Individual to GEDCOM file” on the File menu. This will create a GEDCOM file around the record currently in the individual box; therefore, all of the information in your group might not be exported.

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Land Records

by Lisa South, Certified Genealogist

The following article was written in the July 14, 2005 OneGreatFamily newsletter. Since Lisa is no longer writing for us, we are featuring some of our favorite articles written by her.

Orphanage records have been kept for at least 200 years. Orphanages were operated by civil authorities, religious groups, and priority benefactors.

Unfortunately, the records they kept vary in type and are often hard to locate.

In early America, local courts elected or appointed someone to deal with the orphans. If property was involved, the court would appoint guardians. The orphan might have been bound out to learn a trade. These records would be at the county court house. Some are indexed under orphans, apprentices, or paupers.

Orphanages maintained by the government kept better records than church or private agencies. These records should be available if the orphanage is still operating. If the orphanage does not still exist, state archives, county court houses, and historical libraries should be consulted.

If the orphanage was run by a church, you should check with that church to try and locate records.

Some orphan records have been copied and can be searched at your nearest Family History Center of the LDS church on microfilm or microfiche.

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A Very Grave Matter

The heart of the history of any New England town can be found in it's cemeteries. GraveMatter.com is a collection of photographs and historical information of colonial cemeteries and gravestones of New England in southern Maine, southern New Hampshire and northeast Massachusetts.

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