Originally posted by Robert Givens on: February 25, 2008, 10:52:24 PM

Your first visit to newFamilySearch can be daunting to say the least. Those of you who are younger will probably pick it up quickly. Those of us who are a little more mature might need a few visits to get a hang of it.

On your first visit please do take advantage of the introduction program they offer you. The web site also has a good data base of help articles.

When you go to Me and My Ancestors you should expect to NOT find much ancestry connected to you, if anything. Living people – even your parents if living – don’t show up for privacy sake. Trust me – the Carters are all in there, you just need to connect them in.

Do not, do not, do not add in a GEDCOM of all your data. This will just cause more duplications to clean up. Once you can tap into the family already in the nfs database, it will all be connected.

Your first job would be to add the names of your parents – if living, don’t even bother with their birth date. The name is all you need. If your grandparents are deceased and were members or have had temple work done for them – try adding them from the data base rather than adding them in as new people. Once they are connected the rest of the family going back should be there. If not try finding the next generation back until you get the family to come up.

If this information isn’t clear just email me or add a comment here.
Bob Givens

Originally posted by Robert Givens on: February 15, 2008, 09:13:12 PM

The newFamilySearch website was mainly created to simplify temple submissions and to eliminate duplications in temple submissions. Essentially they took the IGI, Ancestral File, Pedigree Resource File, and all church membership records and combined them into one data base. The program did some combining but it will be up to us to bring all this duplicate data together so that each person who is in the data base has a single folder where everything about them is placed. (Like all the duplicates.)

There is a steep learning curve to learn it but it really is outstanding and getting better all the time. In fact a new upgrade with several good improvements is due out in by the end of the month.

Just to give you an idea of the problem of combining. When I first went on I checked on William Furlsbury Carter – my direct ancestor. In real life he was married 5 times and had 47 children. When I first started working on him – he was in the system some 40+ times, had 70 or so spouses, and children in the hundreds. Obviously a lot of combining was needed. We have him down to one person and after a month of working on it, I have his first wife’s family (Sarah York) cleaned up. I go through that one. I will let cousins clean up the other families.

I do a lot of research and have some PA German lines of my mother’s that no one is working on. Since this program has rolled out to our temple district (Fresno California) I have submitted about 100 families of data. It is so much easier than the TempleReady program.

Questions? I will be happy to accomodate you.
Bob