Edgewood New Mexico Family History Center/2022 Class Recaps

How to Navigate RootsTech (February 23rd)
Marjorie Kraus spoke to a group of nine attendees including three participating via Zoom about RootsTech 2022, an online conference hosted by FamilySearch that is a collection of over 1000 presentations/sessions about genealogy-related topics, all available online and on demand.

Kraus displayed the RootsTech 2022 website and explained what the different sections were and how to access them. For example, the Heritage group included sessions organized by country or religion. The Expo Hall section had products related to genealogy research, such as specialized photo cameras. RootsTech Relatives let you see how many people were currently registered that were linked to your tree in FamilySearch. Kraus said many of these people may be distant cousins, but some could be useful in helping you fill out your tree.

Since there are so many presentations available, Kraus demonstrated a feature called Playlist that lets you save links to the sessions you are interested in watching. Then you can refer back later to your Playlist to watch sessions whenever you want.

Even though there is a range of days that RootsTech is "live," the classes are available for up to three years. For example, to see the presentations still available from RootsTech 2021, do an Internet search on "2021 RootsTech".

If I Had Known: Wrong Assumptions About Your Family History (March 23rd)
FHC Director Craig Noorlander spoke to a group of twelve attendees including six virtual participants about wrong assumptions that people have about family history. The two most common wrong assumptions are


 * 1) “I’ve located all my ancestors and have no more work to do,” and
 * 2) “Why do we need the FHC? I can do everything on my home computer.”

Noorlander demonstrated many things that can be added to existing ancestors such as adding events to an individual’s timeline and searching through newspaper articles on newspapers.com (available for free only at the FHC). In the course of searching through these sources, clues to more ancestors will inevitably show up, so one’s family tree is always sprouting new leaves. A class handout showing all of the premium family history websites that can be accessed for free only at the FHC is posted on the FHC website.

Using Censuses to Your Advantage (April 27th)
Fred Turner presented an interesting class on U.S. Censuses to a group of ten attendees including five participating via Zoom.

An important point about censuses is that each one had different questions, so it is important to look at every census to get all the possible information about a family. Before the 1800 census, there was no standard format—only a list of fields. Beginning with the 1800 census, Turner recommended that you print out the blank forms for every census which you can get from www.archives.gov. This will let you see the different questions that were asked as well as help you keep track of what a particular column is if you have scrolled down the page too far to see the column headings. He gave an overview of how the questions have changed over the years. For example, censuses from around the time of the Civil War had questions about slaves owned. From 1790 to 1840, only the name of the head of household was listed. In 1850, names of all people present were recorded. By 1880 the family’s physical address was listed. Regarding the 1890 census, www.census.gov states “Most of the 1890 census’ population schedules were badly damaged by a fire in the Commerce Department Building in January 1921.” In 1940, two random individuals per page were asked a lot of supplementary questions. Also, there used to be separate schedules for veterans with an incredible amount of information on them.

Some general tips: look at the person completing the census, known as the enumerator, because they could be a relative; enumerators originally from Britain labeled all people in school as scholars without differentiating college students from primary or secondary school students; some people from Britain “barred” the letter “T,” causing transcribers to record it is an “F.”

Turner also demonstrated how to add census records to an individual on FamilySearch. You select the individual, then click on “Search.” This pulls up all the resources available for that individual. Then you click on the census record you want and click “Attach.” Other methods for doing this as well as more details about the class will be on a handout that will be posted to the FHC website.