Your Genealogy Matters

I don't need to tell anyone what Find A Grave is, or that it has a very difficult hurdle to overcome with the redesign and re-launch of its new site.  In fact, there are so many fingers pointing at people that it is difficult to know who is pointing at whom.  In the Find A Grave forums on Facebook (the Find A Grave Forums on the site are an entirely different type of matter deserving its own time), tempers are flaring and the drama of people jumping out of the basement windows over the matter is getting too much for even someone like me who has a high bullshit tolerance.  The launch of the redesigned web site was announced at last year's RootsTech , although it was long rumored as an outcome of the site's purchase by Ancestry.  Gone is the familiar Find-A-Grave-lavender pages and hello to a very white and bright world.  Having worked for a tech company, I have been through conversions, and therefore I know what I am about to speak of, although it is n...

Let us not panic.  OK? The LDS Church, through it's Family Search web site has announced that its long standing microfilm lending program is coming to an end.  The final ship out date is August 31, 2017. Requests for films and orders received after that date will not be fulfilled. Family Search estimates that the remainder of its rolls that have not been transitioned to electronic images should be complete sometime in 2020. Many genealogical web sites have reprinted the press release, so I am not going to do that here, but the links are at the bottom of this post. What I am going to do is try and explain why I think this is being done now, and why this is for the best. First of all, the most important collections to the great number of people are online, free for you to access right now.   www.familysearch.org is an amazing resource. What hasn't been put online is everything else that have.  Because getting a confident answer from anyone in...