Family History Center Fun

While on a recent trip Up North, in Gaylord, Michigan I was privileged to get some Genealogy Time in at the local Family History Center and got to play around with a fun website (see below).  You can find a “local” Family History Center here and get free & friendly help with your own genealogical “games”:

https://familysearch.org/locations/centerlocator

During my Gaylord FHC endeavor the lovely lady currently running this FHC introduced me to a very fun little free tool, that anyone can actually access.  This is actually RelativeFinder.org and is hosted by BYU (Brigham Young University), I believe.  Although this tool has been available for at least a year (see the below article for details) this is the first I’d ever heard of it…and it was actually quite fun to play with.

FamilySearch.org is a great Genealogical Website, it offers many free genealogy services and gives you the ability to create a family tree online, and to access many available records and link them to your family tree.  If you have a family tree at FamilySearch.org then you can sign in to the RelativeFinder tool using your FamilySearch log-in info & find relatives via your existing tree.  If you don’t have a family tree (or you want to search for relatives for a specific person in your tree) you can go to family trees in family search and see if you can locate a known ancestor of yours in someone else’s tree.  If you find the correct person you can copy their unique identifying number & paste it into the “masquerade” function of RelativeFinder here:

https://relativefinder.org/#/masquerade

I honestly don’t know if you can use RelativeFinder.org without a FamilySearch login, but you can “join” FamilySearch for free and then see what happens.  The masquerade link above explains where the identifying number can be found in a FamilySearch family tree…so hopefully anyone can have fun with this with just a bit of effort.  Obviously the further back in time you can take your personal family tree the greater the likelihood of finding “cousin” matches with this fun website…

I plan to use some of the RelativeFinder results to pique the interest of other family members who are less enthusiastic about Genealogy than I am.  Since there are a number of intriguing categories available you are likely to find some sub-set of (available) humanity to pique your own interest…and you never know, you just might get bitten by that pesky genealogy bug & join this legion of enthusiastic “infectees”…but be warned, once bitten there is no proven or lasting cure!

 

https://familysearch.org/blog/en/relative-finder-big-family-cousins/

Well I’m going to have to get back to this posting with an Edit after I can get to a computer with less pop-up blocking so that I can post a couple of examples to potentially whet your appetite…for instance, my husband is a First Cousin to William Shakespeare, though many generations removed!

Happy Hunting!

PS all images are from various Bing.com image searches