We all know that keeping up with family history and genealogy is no easy task. We have talked many times before about some of the best ways to accomplish this. The answer truthfully is that there are many good ways. No one better than the other. It depends upon your learning style, what motivates you and how much time you are able to put into the learning process.
Learning genealogy is a bit like physical exercise. A little bit of something each day works best. If you always do the exact same thing, in the exact same way it can get monotonous. I like to change it up. I do radio shows, podcasts, videos, I read various things, blog posts, etc. I love training videos as well on all the sites. I especially like them for learning about Ancestry. Crista Cowan is their guru and has many youtube videos that are very informative. Now we have all the partner sites as well. There is just a lot to learn. There is no chance for boredom.
I like to learn from others because they are great at aggregating information. Our newsletter written by Carol is a perfect example. She scours the various sources to find gems for us each week that she thinks will help us the most. That is no easy task and a lot of thought and planning goes into her choices. It can be a thankless job but she is very diligent as you know.
As we help our patrons it is so important that we have resources for them. To me one of the most important things is telling a new patron about the Family Search home page where they can get to any information they will need to help them with FS/FT. That way they can go home and continue working. It is very frustrating when you try to remember what you learned and forget one step... you're done. Showing them how and where to go to get help is essential to their success. Be aware that each of the major sites has their best and unique features. We will need to become aware of how each site works and the differences between them. All of them have a get help section that is very valuable.
This lesson below tells you where to look to find the current updates on FS/FT and even how to receive notifications when changes are made.
This is very helpful for all of us in learning FT and keeping current. And you can always google and follow James Tanner, who in the opinion of many, is the best at aggregating all the info on the major sites in a very timely manner. How about we all give this a try and report back at our next staff training?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ww5xf2bqqkpu50p/Keeping%20Current.pdf?dl=0
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