Eight Ways To Grow our SweAme Family
Trees
Submitted
by: Jeanne Rollberg
The web provides
us with so many options that it is easy to forget aspects of it that will
help our family trees grow and blossom.
In addition to
already existing databases like SweAme, FamilySearch, Ancestry, and Arkivdigital, we should
not forget:
1) That once we
have done our genealogical research, we have a great chance of finding living
family members (and their entire family’s pictures and
relationships sometimes) on Facebook. To narrow down a list of
“Jane Smiths” to ours, we can use place designations. It’s the “Jane Smith” who
lives in Jacksonville. We can then message that Jane Smith to see if we have
found the right one, and proceed with process of elimination. Search obituaries
for living family members, in particular, for use with Facebook. Sites such as Genealogybank
(paid) provide several extensive obituary listings. (Conversely, this also
reminds us to re-check our own Facebook pages regarding privacy issues and our
own family members and settings.)
2) Anecdotally,
it is said that women tend to use Facebook more, and men tend to use LinkedIn
more. Again, once our research has discovered who the living family members
might be, we can often find them at LinkedIn. Use a city or other known
information such as occupation to narrow down the persons with correct names.
Contact them. Many people are very receptive to such contact and can put you in
touch with other family members.
3) When
searching for a relative, be sure to include the “Images” search tool at the top of the web page after putting in a
name. If you can find an image of your person on a linked site, that gets you
one step closer to locating the person. Photos from genealogy sites (and
professional web sites) often appear once the Images search tool is used.
4) If you know
where a person lives, try searching with
a name in quotation marks and parenthesized area code for any people whom
you anticipate still have landline phones. Ex: “James Norton” and (904) will
often bring up White Pages listings very quickly.
5) More and more
newspaper archives in varying
languages are being published online. Put in your person’s name and a country as
a search string and see if it automatically brings up articles or other
information. Use Google Translate for
translation, if necessary, even though it may only provide an approximation.
6) Don’t forget
Facebook “groups” that relate to
your Swedish research. Facebook has “Swedish-American Genealogy Group” that includes more than 1,300 researchers
from Sweden and America, and who often live in the exact locations you are
researching.
7) Use the genealogy apps on tablets to populate
your tree. This is often easier than actually doing it via desktop or laptop,
depending on what you are doing. Example: If you receive a photo of a relative
in an e-mail, on iPad, you can save that photo, edit it right there, and then
upload it to your genealogy tree app such as those available at
Ancestry.com. Likewise, when Hints come
up, they can be viewed and the information may be saved less cumbersomely than
by using a desktop or laptop computer.
For some types of information, though, it is better and clearer to use
the desktop or laptop if the tablet display is too small to include what you
want.
8) Sign up for
as a Twitter follower for
appropriate Swedish/Scandinavian-related information. The Tweets you receive
can sometimes give you ideas/contacts about genealogy in various places and
keep you updated on what is happening in various cities (especially in areas
like Boston, New York, and L.A. that have Swedish American Chambers of
Commerce), generally speaking. In a
short period of time, you can discover if you need to drop any
of these entities that are not providing information you find useful. “Sweden & America”
magazine, published in Swedish and English, is another highly useful tool in
this area. The
Swedish American Genealogist is a major journal in the genealogy field. It is published quarterly by the Swenson
Swedish Immigration Research Center in Rock Island, Illinois.
Jeannie Rollberg
Thanks for the shout-out to the Technology for Genealogy group!
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