Saturday, March 31, 2012

Ozias Strong Harward Family Council on Facebook

We have established a facebook group for the Ozias Strong Harward Family Council in order to have a more effective communications tool. It will help us coordinate our research and share family stories. If you have people in your family who have a facebook account (no cost) and would like to keep current on what the council is doing, please e-mail me with their name and e-mail address so that I can invite them to be part of this closed group. That means they can only be part of it if they are invited to join. The reason I have initiated this effort is because it was suggest in the new service that will be made available soon in the newfamily search called "family tree". This is explained in this quote from that source:

"What Is the Family Tree? The Family Tree is a new service found at FamilySearch.org that enables you to enjoy family history in new ways. Once all of the features are in place, the Family Tree will replace new.FamilySearch and will be freely and publicly available to people around the world. The Family Tree will let you:Connect and collaborate with others who share an interest in a common ancestral line.Add, edit, and delete relationships between individuals in the Family Tree.—Coming Soon!Edit vital and other information for all of your ancestors.Discuss and source family tree information to improve conclusions over time.View the history of changes to your ancestors, providing increased understanding and control over changes and revisions.Add specific ancestors to a personal “Watch List” to receive notifications whenever information about those ancestors is added or changed.Try out new features and functionality as they are added over the coming months."

"Facebook has long since moved into first place as the social networking site of choice for millions upon millions of people. This is in part due to being in the right place at the right time with the right product. No matter what you think about Facebook as a social phenomena, you have to recognize the great potential the program has to connect families doing genealogical research. My own experience with the program only goes back a few years, but I have seen several very helpful connections with relatives as a result. There are several ways to enhance your chances of finding genealogy-minded relatives through Facebook Pages. Two of those ways are setting up a Facebook Page or starting a family organization.Facebook has three different levels of involvement; personal pages, group pages and Facebook Pages. First, the basics. You sign up with Facebook by creating an account. You must be 13 years of age or older. Registration requires your name, birthday, gender and an email address. You then pick a password. Once you fill out and submit the form, Facebook sends you a confirmation email. That is all there is to it.The whole idea with Facebook is to connect with your “friends” and relatives. On Facebook a friend is someone you connect with and share information with. If you are going to participate on Facebook, you will need to enter some personal information into a profile, including a photograph. Once you are signed in and have a profile, you can start sharing things on your Facebook “wall,” that is, a virtual space where you can post online messages, graphics and videos.One concern shared by many is the problem of privacy. If you read posts on Facebook by the younger users, you might come to the conclusion that they no longer have a sense of privacy. They share things that would have violated social taboos only a few years ago. But Facebook is concerned about the privacy issues and has privacy settings. To quote from Facebook’s Help Center, “Your privacy settings let you manage basic privacy preferences, such as who can send you friend requests and messages. For everything else that you share on Facebook, you can choose your audience right when you post.” Part of this ability to set privacy settings allows you to form special interest groups, such as your relatives, to share information only with other group members.Once you have a Facebook account, you can begin right away to share information, including genealogical information, by typing a message. Anyone who is your friend will then see the message shortly after you publish it. You can carry on two-way conversations by either commenting on others’ posts or sending messages directly to an individual. Sending messages through Facebook is very similar to sending an email message, but depending on your privacy settings, what you send may be read by others. In any event, there is nothing stopping someone from forwarding your message to the rest of the Facebook community.Facebook Pages are different than your own personal page or your membership in a group. Pages allow businesses, brands, and celebrities to connect with people on Facebook. These entities are represented on Facebook by an administrator. If you think about it for a moment, you will realize that there is no reason that a family genealogical organization or genealogical society cannot have its own Facebook Page. As a matter of fact, many genealogical organizations and companies are already very active on Facebook. Here is a list of several genealogical organizations and companies already represented:FamilySearchFamilySearch IndexingFamilySearch WikiRootsMagicLegacy Family TreeUtah Genealogical AssociationNational Genealogical SocietyThe list could go on and on. You might try searching on the surnames in your pedigree to see if someone has already put up a Page or started a group concerning your family.To start a Facebook Page, you need to decide who in the organization or other entity will be responsible for the content. Anyone who joins the Page can make posts, but someone needs to guide the online presence and post the initial information. This is similar to starting an organization newsletter. Whatever you do, you need to make sure the Page has an identity. It doesn’t do much good to post a Page such as “The Descendants of So and So” if you do not intend to add content and make an effort to reach out to those descendants. You can’t assume that simply by posting your ancestor’s name on a Facebook Page that someone or anyone will come to read it or join it as a friend. As with everything on the Internet, content rules. You have to have valuable or interesting, at least, content before you will attract any followers.There is a rule about Facebook Pages however, as stated by Facebook, “Profiles (timelines) represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook. You may only create Facebook Pages to represent real organizations of which you are an authorized representative.” This explanation goes on to say:In addition, Pages are managed by admins who have personal Facebook profiles (timelines). Pages are not separate Facebook accounts and do not have separate login information from your profile (timeline). They are merely different entities on our site, similar to how Groups and Events function. Once you have set up a Page within your profile (timeline), you may add other admins to help you manage this Page. People who choose to connect to your Page won’t be able to see that you are the Page admin or have any access to your personal account.There are significant differences between Facebook Pages and Groups. You may wish to spend some time reading from the Facebook Help Center before you decide whether to have a Group or a Page for your Family Organization. It is not possible to switch a Group to a Page. You basically have to start over again if you find you need a Page after you have an active Group. You would create the Page and then notify the Group members to become friends with the Page and follow your activities and posts.Creating a Facebook page is almost as simple as obtaining a personal account. The difference is not in starting the page, but in the content. You may wish to do some searching on Facebook to get an idea of the types of Pages that can be designed and the content."

So if you don't have a facebook account, it costs nothing to set one up, set one up or have one of your teenagers do it for you and let's get connected. If you have any questions about getting an invitation to join the Ozias Harward Family Counil, just send me your e-mail address to me at russharward@msn.com and I will see that you get an invitation to join because it is a closed group and you must be invited to join.

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