Monday, January 17, 2011

Familypedia Website is Worth Checking Out

The Familypedia website may at first sound like a free-for-all, but the more you get into it the more intriguing it becomes and the more you realize its free-for-all nature is its strength.

It is actually a wiki, which means that participants can add edits to information that is posted...and you don't even need to be a registered user to participate. The core of the site is ancestral information organized into pages for each individual included. Those pages give you the information added by the originator and any comments/corrections/additions added later by the genealogical community. Pages can be linked to other pages so family structures can be developed and sources can be referenced in a really meaningful way.

There are many ways to navigate around the site, but the best is probably the surname index. Simply click on the first letter of the surname you are interested in, then click on the actual surname if it exists in the index. You will then be given a list of full names that are linked to pages on the site.

Dick Eastman in his Online Newsletter recently wrote an extensive review of Familypedia. You can read it at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2010/11/familypedia-the-biggest-genealogy-site-you-probably-never-heard-of.html

You go directly to the site to start nosing around at http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Family_History_and_Genealogy_Wiki

No comments: