22 June 2015

Who are the members of your family? 52 Questions W3

This week I will focus on the following question -

Who are the members of your family?

Good follow-up questions that easily go with this question are:
Are you married? [Where? When? And to Whom?]
Did you have any children? [What are their names? Why did you choose your children's names?]

Who is your oldest living relative?
What is the most enjoyable memory of time spent with your family?
What traditions are still practiced in your family?


This question is where you begin building your tree. The first two questions were about you. The rest of the 50 questions focus on your relations and links to other members of your family tree.

Your immediate family includes the father, mother, and children. Your extended family includes the grandparents and their children, the aunts and uncles, and their children, the cousins. Direct ancestors are your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents, etc. Direct ancestors are not aunts, uncles, or cousins. This weeks question pertains to your immediate and extended family which includes your direct ancestors.

Printed Pedigree Charts come in all shapes and sizes. They are handy for tracking your direct ancestors.



Some are offer places to enter more details and pictures.



Some can look intimidating but are very functional.


They all serve to show you in a visual way what direct ancestors you have information about and who you do not. Most of the genealogy websites have similar Pedigree Charts. However they also allow you to easily view your extended family members.

FamilySearch offers three different tree views starting with the landscape tree.


FamilySearch later released their popular fan chart.


The newest FamilySearch chart is the decendency tree. This tree shows not only direct ancestors but also their descendants.


Ancestry also offers a landscape pedigree chart.



There is also the ancestry decendency chart. Both ancestry trees allow you to upload images as well as link people to Facebook and display their current profile pictures.


There are so many different websites that offer tree views of your family. It would be impossible to show them all. The above are the pages I see and use the most.

I use Legacy as a personal database where I am the only on who enters data. There is a pedigree view.


As well as an immediate family view.


It also go beyond a pedigree view so you can add sources and other information about each individual.


It is important that as you gather information about your relatives that you not only record the information but also record where you got the information. We will discuss this at a later date. Make sure to at least write down the information that you gather and a note as to how you got the information. You can also try out a database like legacy for free if you want.

Feedback - 

My second week of family Facebook posts produced much more responses than I imagined. I did go back and answer the first weeks question for myself. I received 15 total responses between the two questions. That is over 375% growth over last week. I think I will follow this pattern and see if the responses continue to build.

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