Bill's Genealogy Blog

Bill Buchanan is a long-time genealogy enthusiast, living in Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada. This blog will describe my experiences as I research my family history and help others.

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Location: Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada

I am a retired online school teacher. I love family history. Since 2007, I have spent much of my time providing part-time support for the world's largest free family history site https://familysearch.org This is very rewarding. I have helped others with the Family Tree and related FamilySearch products.
In 2010-2018 I served in the Edmonton Riverbend Family History Centre. I have a FHC blog at Bill's Family History Center Blog For information the Latter-day Saints and family history click https://www.comeuntochrist.org/

Monday, March 11, 2013

Helping Friends

Some friends called me to arrange to come over for some genealogy help.
They brought over their genealogy database on their laptop.
I helped Neil to recover a username and password he had forgotten.
I helped Judy to register on familysearch.org.

Then we had a bit more fun as we explored which of Judy's ancestors were in the FS Family Tree.
We found that FT had many more of her ancestors than she had in her personal database.
She asked "Is there was a way to download my additional ancestors?"
Fortunately there was at least two ways to do it. My first attempt was using my trusty AncestralQuest to sync to FS. In two attempts AQ quit twice. Hmm... I switched to "Plan B".
I used the free GetMyAncestors software from Ohanasoftware.com
It completed the download, but now I needed to join these new branches to Judy's Haltiner line on their computer.
I opened the download file in PAF, and exported the data in gedcom format.
Then I imported the gedcom file into a copy of Neil and Judy's database, and merged the duplicate records.

Mission accomplished! They were able to return home with additional genealogy.
They felt the 2.5 hours were well spent. So did I.

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Genealogy In Time

This is a favorite online newsletter, partly because of the new ideas it offers.
Five Great Productivity Tools for Genealogy

Check a Name
Convert Images to Text
Decipher Partial Names
Recognize Old File Extensions
Trace Old Photographs

Take a few minutes to read it, and I don't think you will be disappointed.