If family history isn't fun, you're doing it wrong. And if you're not having fun adding fun
facts to FamilySearch, then you're doing it wrong. Today I'm going to show you a number of places
where you can add fun facts about your ancestors to your family tree on FamilySearch. So, howdy,
I'm Devon Noel Lee with Family History Fanatics. And I want to help you climb your family tree and
enjoy their journey. Fun Thing Number One is to write a brief Life Sketch. Life Sketches are great
because you can give people a quick overview of your ancestor. And these Life Sketches can help
people quickly know that people are researching this individual and what they know about them.
It's a whole lot easier to encapsulate a little bit of a person's life in a Life Sketch. So,
here is an example William Townsend. Now, he is related to me. There is a View Related to
Me button right here. Just go up the Browns, up the Townsends, and come right back down,
and then William is Milby's brother. So, Milby is a great uncle. And it tells you up here, my second
great grandfather. You can't really see that all that much. You can zoom in here, but I can't make
that bigger. Back to the Life Sketch, you can see "Milby served in Company K Regiment 133
with his brother William. In the 1860 census, Milby and Perry are living with Catherine Helsel.
And, um, she is the sister all of the siblings. They were from different in different homes 1860.
The mother died in 1857, and the siblings were dispersed to different family members."
So, yeah, it's not the best biographical sketch. But it's enough that when you come
to Milby's profile, you're like, "Oh, okay! I am in here. I know
he's a Civil War veteran. I know why his family is all over the place. And so, on. And so, forth. So,
make sure you take advantage of the Life Sketch. One thing I would not recommend is if somebody
has written a biography and put it in a county history or a daughters of some pioneer in some
location book. You get the idea. Don't copy and paste that whole biography and put it here.
I'll show you another place where you can put that biography but just give a brief like the sketch
that. So, when somebody lands on the FamilySearch page, they can quickly pick up where others have
left off and know who they are, uh, reading about. Researching about. The next thing to add are Life
Events. You're probably saying, "Yeah, of course." But I mean more than just birth,
marriage, and death. So, come down to this profile and scroll a little bit further down. I mean,
if you have birth, add christening. If you have in christening, try to add birth.
There's not always an answer for us to find but let's scroll down a little bit further. Do you see
this Other Information Section? Most people just have it look like this. Expand it out and then
utilize this to create lots of information. The more information you have tied to a date,
it ties to another Fun Thing. I'm going to go ahead and insert that here. And that is this
Timeline Feature. There's a Timeline of all the facts. So, we have birth of the person,
death of a parent, and that residence that I had over here in this other information.
So, anything that I have that has a date for those facts will start showing up. And look
what we have going on! he starts out in Ohio, and then he moves to Indianapolis. And he moves
to Illinois. We can see all the different events that happen in those locations.
Birth of child, we've got a marriage. There's lots of things that will highlight in the Timeline. And
we can also customize what we show. Maybe we want other hints or not other events. They're always
going to show you the vital events but residence, occupation, custom events, historical events. Ooh
that, that's a neat, neat one! But sometimes not really great because Battle of Little Bighorn
didn't really affect my relative. But okay, um. Ut we can also have the facts about the couple
(Milby and his spouse), Milby and his children, Milby and his parents. We can also put in the
siblings and see how they disperse on this chart. So, let's zoom out a little bit.
And even the records of, let's see, death of sibling that happens over here in 1833. So,
things are kind of clustered over where he first started. It's kind of neat, but you can only get
that if you add these additional facts. Let's go over a few more fun facts that I don't necessarily
have after we look at the ones we do. So, I have the Military Service. I have his residence.
I have a custom event that's pension. Um. Another custom event was he showed up in a newspaper
article. More Military Service. It's probably needed to be changed to something else. But
really, what I'm trying to highlight this he was, um, entered a disabled veterans home. More
residence, probate file, obituary, will. Now, how do you go about adding those fun facts?
We can click "Add Information." And notice all of our options. Alternative names- many people have,
um, they have a name-changing ancestor for whatever reason. My grandmother's
birth name is Marie Anderson. And everybody knows her as Louise Long because she was adopted
a few days after her birth. So, I need to keep track of the alternate names. We have other videos
about which names should be the alternate name, but if you have alternate names, keep it here.
But don't use alternate names as a just different spelling of the same name unless it's
like from the Cyrillic alphabet to English or its Anglicized names,
and it's not clear. You can go ahead and do the alternate name. But if it is Elizabeth and Betty.
Well, you can all figure that out. You don't need to necessarily use that. Religious affiliation-
you can add that if you have some Jewish ceremonies. If your ancestor was cremated,
put the information here so that other people could stop looking for gravestones. Um. If
you know when they emigrated, military service, naturalization. Some of us do have nobility in our
ancestry, like legitimate, legitimate lineage. You can put their title, their occupation,
their religious affiliation. There are lots of different, uh, facts that you had.
I like some of these other ones, um, no couple relationships. Now, that's going to be a new one.
Some of us are finding out with DNA evidence that, uh, some people made some babies,
and they never were really a couple. So, there's that right there. I really wish that was down
here in the marriage facts. But, hey, utilize it if you ever want to add a custom facts.
Click "Custom Facts," and then you can walk through the steps of doing that.
Type in the description of the event, the title of it, the date, the place (if you know it), and then
give us a little reason why you know that that is correct. If you ever need to change something,
click "Edit," and then you can give more details. Maybe somebody put a fact, particularly from a
census residence. But you have a street address and a couple other things. You can put it here,
but recognize a lot of times, people will change things. I haven't found people changing these, uh,
reason statements as much as the ones up here. But make sure you're adding these fun facts.
The next thing I invite you to do is to identify relationships, particularly if a relationship is
not biological. And this allows us to keep track of step-parents, foster parents, guardians, and
the like. So, if we go over to FamilySearch, we're going to see my grandmother Louise. Now,
my grandmother, um, is the adopted daughter of Harry Howard and Lura Maude Smith. Notice it says
adopted. Well, Marguerite was also adopted by Harry and Lura, but it doesn't have that
designation. So, I can click on "Edit." Now, if you look and see, it said last change May 2012,
and it said biological. Now, I never said that Harry and Lura were the biological parents
of Marguerite. So, whenever I see a date from 2012, I know that is around the time that this
version of FamilySearch was launched to the world. And so, whenever I see a date, whether it's funny
or by anybody else, then I know, okay, this is the original information that was in the database. So,
there will be a pop-up screen here, and there will be an email address and for contacting the user.
And you can ask them, "Hey, I noticed that you made a change from biological to something else.
Can you tell me a little bit more about that?" So, I invite you. If it's after 2012 and there
is a name, click and then send them an email. But let's go ahead and actually make the correction.
So, I am going to change this relationship edit to adopted. Um. I forgot when she was-
go figure. I know my grandmother was born in 20, uh, 1920. This all right, 1916.
Might help if we know that beforehand. Edit- Adoptive. I'm just going to put 1916 because
I don't have her actual papers. Um. And then I'm going to write a reason why I know that
to be true. Not the best reason statement in the world, but it's enough. And now, when I zoom in,
you will see that both Marguerite and, uh, Louise have adopted next to their name. Now,
the question becomes, who do you want to have show up on the family tree? I really and truly hope
your family doesn't battle it out. Pick the one that you want to have show up on the fan chart.
Quite often, when I am trying to just share my family tree with others, this is a family tree
that everybody wants to see. They want to see, uh, Harry and Lura Maude. These are the people that
raised her. And so, my aunts, my cousins, this is everybody that's on the tree that everybody's
familiar with. That's the story, and although it, um, these are her adopted family. These
are the ones she claims. However, my grandmother did grant me approval to seek after her, um,
her biological parents when she was deceased. And I've gone through and looked to that. So, when I
want to build the biological fan chart, then I just switch to preferred. I go back to the tree.
And now, we have Agnes, William (my Swedish guy who I wish I could resolve), as well as
the Sparks and the Weekly. The next Fun Thing you should be adding to your family tree is Notes.
And some of you might be thinking, uh, that's not fun! it is fun, especially when somebody
new is starting to research her family tree and they don't know all the things that you know.
So, this is Emily Huldah Sprague. She's on a Utah family that I've just been validating
for the fun of it. Testing my research muscles, um, not related to her. But it's it's fun to,
uh, peer review other people's, uh, creations. What I really liked when I came here is that um,
there was. It actually looked like this. So, Collaborate. Right I went from Details.
Normally we're in Details. I clicked on the Collaborate button, and there's a Note. And
there's Biographical Detail. This researcher went through and wrote a lot of notes. Her mother died
when she was 14 years old. And this is the name of the mother she and her sister Barbara lived
with. Grandparents and until her father remarried there's the name. She was baptized by her father,
Festus. Her father was a lawman. He was killed by a bandit when Emily was 12 in 1870. She's
with her stepmother Mary and one month after her mother died, look at all of these notes. Now, you
would could say, "Hey, this should go in the Life Sketch." But it's not really written in a nice
narrative way. So, I think it would be better over here in Collaborate. So, my final Fun Thing is
memories, memories, memories. Memories! you need to be sharing memories. Don't hoard the memories.
Share the memories so that we can be like, "Thanks for the Memories!" Okay, enough with the
puns. So, I really like this profile for Emery Barrus. And he has 123 sources. He had a lot of
children! So, that's no surprise. But the memory section is incredible. Um. There are photos from,
um, family reunions, and everybody's labeled. And you can look at these pictures. And look!
As you zoom in the names, hover over there and Henry Tanner. I think he's related to Ron
and James Tanner. Ron Tanner from FamilySearch and James Tanner that, uh, works on the BYU Library
Channel. Anyway um. So, there's pictures. I really like these. The property that they had and
these documents- oh my goodness! I'm so grateful for people who share these documents. Um.
They are sharing some records that are hard to access. Some of them are from the Daughters of
the American Revolution group. Some are from the Daughters of the Utah Pioneer group. And people
have shared what they found there. There are biographical sketches. This is from a newspaper.
Um. There are the history of Emery Barrus as written by this person. All of these home sources!
all of these biographies that people have written, and they're all just right here for you to access.
Um. So, I've had a viewer say, "So, I have this biography from a county history. What
should I do with this?" Well, if it is a county history that you can access online,
then what I want you to do is I want you to do. Instead of copying and pasting and uploading the
book, I want you to go to Sources. Go in to "Add a Source" and add a new source. And go through. Put
the URL to that book and then put in the citation. So, if the URL ever changes, we know what book you
looked at. And we're able to get it there. If it is from a family history book and there's no
other source to it online. And it is in your home collection, or you have permission from the person
who's the curator, then go ahead and upload it to FamilySearch. And share it with others. So,
in the comments section below, I want you to drop a URL to profiles on FamilySearch where either
you have added, or you have discovered fun facts about the relatives in your family tree.
By sharing these URLs, we'll all be able to learn some great things that we can do to our profiles.
Laugh together. Cry together and so on. If you are ready to learn more about how to use FamilySearch,
better be sure to check out this FamilySearch playlist up at the top there. And if you are
ready for our latest video, click the one right here. Why? why isn't it working?