How do you figure out what ancestor to research next? How do you know which ones
need the work done? Well one of the tools that allows you to do this is Puzzilla.
Howdy, welcome to family history fanatics my name is Caleb lee and this
is a genealogy channel where we teach you how to understand your DNA, climb
your family tree, and write the stories of your ancestors. Today we'll be
focusing on researching your family tree specifically, we're talking about Puzzilla
and would be what it can do for you to help you figure out what you should
start researching and what ancestor you should focus on. So in order to use
Puzzilla, which you can see at least the homepage right here, you're gonna need a
family search account and you're gonna click here and you're gonna sign in with
the family search account. So this is what's gonna happen Puzzilla is gonna
load up this screen and you can use your mouse left click and drag up, drag around,
moving your mouse, in order to move around and you know
there's not much reason to move it around, but that will become
much more important. Later so one thing you can do with Puzzilla is you can go
and add more generations, but the more generations it takes the more ancestors
Puzzilla has to go and grab it from family search so it takes a bit longer.
But usually about like seven to eight generations is enough to have it be
useful for you. And already we can see one of the cool things about Puzzilla
is it shows you where there are holes in your family tree but there are ancestors
that you haven't found their parents and for instance this is on my mom's side
and there's a couple James Brown and Katherine that it looks like we don't
have much information about them. We have James's death date and we have her
birth roughly. So we don't have a lot of information about this couple and we
don't have their parents and if you'll take a look over here we have
Nancy and she has no parents. Obviously she has parents we just haven't found
them in the tree or in the records and so Nancy is over there and then look
there's Polly over there. So there are a lot of research opportunities over here.
However you all may have had some problems
seeing this and due to the large number of people
around here it's hard to notice all the people that you're missing that don't
have the stuff. For instance over here Joseph Geizler I don't think
any of y'all spotted that and I didn't until just now. So what you can do
in order to kind of shrink this tree to make you see where it is is I'm noticing
there's a lot of holes over this tree so I'm betting that this area over here
probably needs some work. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go over tonight my
father and I'm gonna click hide or show tree and now look at that there is
there's my dad and there's my mom we've cut this in half. And now you see the
holes are much bigger. But if it looks like you know maybe this side the
side on the left it looks like it's mostly filled out. We can click
hide and then boom we have ooh we missed William Anderson I completely
didn't notice him the first time around looking at it. And then there's this
Jeanette over here there's Charles James and Katherine and Nancy. A weird thing
about Puzzilla is that if you click now add eight generations so
it adds the entire generation. So if we
were to click over here and hide hide show tree there it is.
It's weird I feel like it should just load the stuff that you need when you
need it this stuff. But look at that there's there's more stuff James and
Catherine obviously they don't long didn't continue in terms of the records.
But hey, we have over here just a Townsend. There are a lot of cool things
you can find with Puzzilla. So there are other things you can do with Puzzila
and different modes that you can do one of them is you can go and take a look at
the ancestor's ancestors which are also your ancestors. So we're going to just
click ancestors and it will load up six
generations that's the standard. And look at that this is Caroline and
take a look we've seen we have all of these all these people that are part of
her family. And now another thing was the looking to is it has a descendancy view
where it shows you all the children and the grandchildren and so forth of a
particular ancestor. Family Search does have it but since this is the Puzzilla is
a more condensed more visual tree than the more information tree like the
descendancy it allows you to see what stuff you missed. So let's just take
Andrew Jackson Peak and take a look at his descendants. This is gonna open
up a new tab again load up this giant screen this is it looks like I don't
know the plans for the Death Star or something. Now what can you do with this?
Why is this so important? Well here's the thing it shows you who had kids and who
didn't. So for instance this guy Josiah Barry he had a
lot of kids this girl Mary Jackson she didn't this guy none this person had a
lot and then among say let's go over here
Silas his kids they kept going and kept going. Know one thing this will do is
it will show you who died under the age of 16. So for instance right here at Ana
Margaret Brooks she died before 16 she actually died the day yes she died
the next day. So obviously she isn't having any kids
so we should expect her line to die off and same with over here this person
William Ezra Peak. We wouldn't expect him to have kids but maybe Bertha might
have and so if we expand out a little bit more this little yellow thing it
shows you where the kids the people that we don't expect to have lines but
everybody else who kind of just stops. They might have had kids.
Okay so what is the use of all this? Why would
I care? Well why would you care about what this tool can do for you?
One of the great things about Puzzilla is you can you can see which lines you
don't have we don't know whether or not there are kids descendants in that line.
So if I was looking for a place to research somebody to look at I take a
look at John T Peak. We don't have his death date we don't have much
information about him but but I don't know whether or not we've done all the
searching so I should go and I should check out human family tree. I try to
figure out you know maybe a lot of research has been done and people
concluded yeah he never had kids or didn't anything do anything else or
maybe he did have kids and we just don't know it. So that's basically all of
Puzzilla you can use it for a lot of things for finding the holes
finding holes going up your tree finding finding holes going down your tree
basically try to figure out where haven't you research and thus where you
should put your time in to research. So hopefully I've convinced you right now
that Puzzilla is a great tool for both beginner Genealogy just handing more
experience genealogists. But if you still need more help just trying to figure out
what to do now you know where to research guy so just this video by my
mom she talks about like how to begin genealogy or maybe you're more
experienced and you want to learn how to tackle a challenging but, very rewarding
record set. In that case I check out this playlist right here where we go into
newspapers and all the ways you can find really great stories that are hidden
inside them.