Computer and Communications Technology revealed by the Lord

Computer and Communications technology has been revealed to man by the Lord to expedite His work in the last days. The following articles taken from the new familysearch.org website explains how.


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.

Social Networking and Genealogy
January 12, 2012 By James Tanner

Not many years ago, the only way to
talk to people was either in person, by telephone, by the occasional telegram
or through letters. Pre-computer and pre-Internet genealogists were usually
prolific letter writers. Today, that has all changed. Personal contact is still
nice, but telephones to some extent and personal letters are mostly a thing of
the past. As far as genealogical research goes, these changes in communication
have been for the good. It is now much easier to identify and communicate with
distant relatives. I have had a fairly constant stream of contact from distant
relatives for quite a few years now, people who I didn’t know existed before
online communication through social networking. It is true that there are
people who spend an inordinate amount of time in social networking, but when
treated as a means to an end, the online social networking sites can be a
valuable asset.
There are hundreds, perhaps
thousands of social networking sites (see Wikipedia:List of social networking websites), but only a handful of essentially U.S. sites are
influential because of their large number of adherents. The big three for
genealogists are Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Facebook has over 800,000,000 participants. Twitter has
over 300,000,000 and Google+, the newcomer to the group, has over 50,000,000.
There are also some very large non-English speaking social networking sites
around the world such as Badoo in Europe
and Latin America and Friendster
in Southeast Asia. There are other huge social networking sites such a MySpace.com with over 100,00,000 registered users and WindowsLiveSpaces.com. You can usually tell whether or not a site is genealogy
friendly by doing a search online for social networking and genealogy.
Social networking sites generally
allow individuals to create their own page. You can then create links to other
individuals on the websites by adding contacts (often called friends) with whom
you can then share comments in the form of posts or comments on posts. On
Facebook, Twitter and Google+, as well as other sites, commercial companies can
also have pages. Subsequently, most of the larger genealogically related
companies, such as Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org and the software companies
like RootsMagic, Legacy Family Tree, Ancestral Quest and many others, have
pages on Facebook. There are also a number of genealogical societies that have
Facebook pages. Here is a brief sample of some of the hundreds of
genealogically related Facebook pages with links to their Facebook page:
Ancestry.com
FamilySearch.org
RootsMagic.com
Legacy
Family Tree
Ancestral Quest
Family
Tree Magazine
GenealogyBank.com
MyHeritage.com
National
Genealogical Society
Utah
Genealogical Association
New
England Historic Genealogical Society
All of the above companies and
societies, plus hundreds more, have genealogically related Twitter sites also. Posts, called Tweets on Twitter, are limited to
140 characters at a time. As a contrast, both Facebook and Google+ have very large posting limits, so you can communicate a
lot of information at once. Many of genealogically oriented bloggers also have
corresponding Facebook, Twitter and Google+ sites. Most of the active bloggers
post regularly on Facebook and Twitter and some post on other social networking
sites also.
With most social networking sites,
you have the option of having your page public and open to the world, or
private and available to only selected users. If you are trying to find lost
relatives, it does little good to have a private site because the very people
you hope to connect with cannot find you. On the other hand, you may wish to
limit the types of information you put online if you have a completely public
social networking page. There is really no reason to share what you are doing
each hour of the day if your main goal is to find genealogical information.
There are a few dedicated genealogy
social networking sites. Some of these sites go beyond simply having a page for
your personal information. They also provide a way to share your genealogy
information. Here is a sample list of some of the sites.
GenealogyWise.com
WeRelate.org
OurStrory
Kincafe
eFamily
Geni
MyFamily
2.0
MyHeritage.com
Once you start participating online
in social networking, privacy can become a major concern. If you watch Facebook
for a while and see what people post online, you can easily see how people will
say things that they may later regret saying or that, at the least, are
socially inappropriate. Although many of the sites have varying degrees of
privacy controls so that you can limit who can see your posts. Once you have
posted something online, there is really no guarantee that it will not be
repeated by someone without your permission, so be careful in the types of
information you put online. One rule is to never include information about
living people.
As I mentioned, being online in a
social networking site can be a valuable way to find unknown relatives and to
reconnect with friends, but there is time commitment involved and participating
online can become almost addictive.