My daughter has been getting into family history lately and that excites me because that is about the age that I began being interested too. She’s started a project of collecting family stories and I think its going to be great fun to collaborate together and discover more about our genealogy! In this newly-found quest, my daughter found out about a local Family History Fair a few weeks ago and so we went and had a great time learning through some classes. One of the classes that I attended talked about some great family history apps from BYU, that make family history come alive for families! I’m so excited to share these with you today and I hope you will try them out with your families!
The Family History Technology Lab, sponsored by the Department of Computer Science at Brigham Young University, is the gateway to a variety of Family History Web Apps that are free and open to the public and used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to help them with their family history. To use these apps you will need a username and password from **FamilySearch.org, (so you will need to signup and bring in your genealogy through the site) and then you can dig right in!
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- RelativeFinder | an app developed by BYU professors and students that connects individuals with famous historical figures, as well as friends and neighbors. It works through the FamilySearch API to identify common ancestors and show how two people are related. It also allows you to create your own groups so you can see how you might be related to a friend or a deceased person or even with people standing next to you by allowing RelativeFinder to use your location!
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- Virtual Pedigree | an app that quickly and dynamically navigates your family tree with both expandable and collapsible ancestry as well as descendancy. It uses BYU’s patented Elastic Paper technology to expand the entire tree with a simple single click and drag, whether exploring ancestors or descendants. It works especially well on tablets and smart phones by simply touching and dragging over the tree. You can view and navigate through hundreds of names, up and down the tree in a matter of seconds.
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- One Page Genealogy | an app that allows you to construct large pedigree charts with user-defined color and other attributes. It can create a custom tree, allowing 14-16 generations to be placed on a 2-3 foot wide format, something that is not possible with standard tree-charting applications. You can make charts from a tree in FamilySearch or from a Gedcom file.
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- Pedigree Pie | an app that provides a graphical pie-shaped representation of ancestors based on countries of origin and allows a user to quickly see what percent English, German, Swedish, etc, they are.
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- Descendancy Explorer | an app that members of the LDS church can use to quickly and easily find names of their ancestors that are ready to take to the temple.
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- Geneopardy | a game app that is based on the well-known game of Jeopardy. It is great for family gatherings and a fun way for children and adults to get to know their ancestors better!
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- Wheel of Family Fortune | a game app that is based on the well-known game of Wheel of Fortune, but with hints and names drawn from your own family tree. A great way to engage family members, old and young, in family history!
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- And more to come! So check back to see what other apps are being developed!
Aren’t these so much fun! I’m so excited to explore these apps and get my family excited about learning about where they came from and why they are, who they are! So try them out and come back and tell me what you think!
** I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS or Mormon), which has created FamilySearch. But even if you aren’t a member of my church, please check it out – it is an amazing site that helps families connect with all generations!
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