r I have recently been introduced to four new apps which have made family history easier, fun and much more personally meaningful. These apps can add a depth of understanding of self and relatives that will greatly enrich your life and the lives of your family.
Are you having difficulty adding citations to your FamilySearch FamilyTree or your Ancestry family tree from off-site sources? Try RecordSeek. RecordSeek makes it effortless to record your source citations from the web. You can use it on your desktop or laptop and also from your mobile devices, and it will automatically create an MLA format source citation for you, so you get the benefit of an official citation, without the frustration. Portability is a great feature of this app as it can be used from any record repository!
Want something new for your family reunions or family nights? Try one of the six apps developed by BYU for family history found at https://fhtl.byu.edu/#/. There are games such as Wheel of Family Fortune and Geneopardy that promote familiarity with progenitors; a way to visualize your ethnicity through Pedigree Pie; Virtual Pedigree and One Page Genealogy are two tools to view up to 20 generations of your pedigree and relatives; and Relative Finder is an app to find out who your famous (or infamous) relatives are.
The last two apps that will be introduced will help you visualize, organize and further your research. In Puzzilla you interface with your FamilyTree account and it shows you your ancestors and their descendants for 12 generations. There is a free version and a subscription version. It is easy to visualize the end of line relatives so you can decide where to concentrate your research efforts. If you want to do descendency research, you can choose an ancestor, click on “descendants” then how many generations you want to view and the blank areas indicate opportunities for research. The premium service has many other helpful features.
Find-A-Record is completely free, syncs with FamilyTree and offers six features; Sources (looks for birth, death and marriage records and other possible records); Person (shows people with missing information and looks for that information); Relationships (lists missing parents, spouses or multiple parents); Problems (lists things such as children born before their parents, duplicate persons, etc.); Cleanup (standardizing dates and places, multiple or identical names, etc.); Ordinances (lists people who have incomplete ordinances).
