Tracing your roots? You’re not alone. Genealogy (or family history) is apparently one of the fastest growing hobbies. (Of course, if you Google “fastest growing hobby” you’ll see that some beg to differ. They suggest everything from scrapbooking to competitive eating to collecting beer cans!)
If you need help starting your family history, you may want to check out How to Start Your Family History. Or search for a Family History Center near you, drop in and ask the folks there for some pointers.
After talking with family members to collect whatever names and dates they may have in their heads or in family bibles, you quickly get to where you’re asking yourself, “Where do I look now?” I found a great program called GenSmarts. It’s inexpensive ($24.95 for the download version and another $5 bucks if you want it on a CD). It’s very easy to use and has helped me find information on hundreds (maybe thousands) of my ancestors.
The program is billed as “automated genealogy research” that “uses artificial intelligence to analyze your existing genealogy file and produce research recommendations.” It will help you fill in missing holes and works with many different genealogy programs (with versions tailored specifically to some programs).
This is what the program’s screen looks like when I opened it earlier today.
A – Here are the names it is looking for as well as the records it is searching. You can see some census records and the Tennessee Marriage Records.
B – After I’ve checked a particular record, I can record the results. The last couple buttons are ones the program let me create to help remind me of records I want to come back to later. (You can filter the list of recommendations by these.)
C – If a particular set of records is available online, this button is highlighted. Click on it and your web browser opens to that site. If it can (and it almost always can), GenSmarts then enters the information needed to do a search and starts the search.
Down in the text section, the program tells you why it’s looking in a particular set of records and gives you information about the person and his or her family.
Up in the left corner you’ll see some symbols (the mouse, a diamond and a star). On the other side of the screen you can see the legend. You can how you want GenSmarts to search.
You can customize how the program searches for information. In the screen below, the search was set up so it would only look for people who have missing data or sources, who are my direct ancestors (or their siblings) and who have not already been marked as found, not found, etc. In addition, I asked the program to only look at sources that are available to me online. If I had wanted, I could have limited the search geographically.
You can also limit searches to certain kinds of records.
You can even limit a search to a specific person and his or her ancestors (or descendents) and to how many generations it should search.
Once you’ve decided how to customize the searching (or you decided to just go with the defaults), GenSmarts gives you a list of recommendations to look at. Now you can decide how you want the program to sort those suggestions.
The “Research Priority” is particularly helpful – it sorts based on whether a particular is likely (in the program’s humble opinion) to lead you to more information – presumably that means rather than just confirming information you already have.
The list of libraries and websites GenSmarts is able to search is extensive. It includes everything from the ever-present ancestry.com to the Dallas Texas Public Library right on through many state historical society websites and county library websites. The number of sites, indexes and databases continues to grow.
And sometimes the offerings shrink. Recently I looked back at a name researched months ago and found this comment:
Researching the Texas Birth Records is a suggestion that GenSmarts is no longer making. This could be due to changes in your data, such as adding a tag, event, fact, or source that causes GenSmarts to realize that you have already found this suggestion. It could also be due to improvements we’ve made in GenSmarts – perhaps it wasn’t a very good suggestion and we’ve corrected our knowledge base so it’s no longer made.
GenSmarts doesn’t just help research information on people. It also helps you make sure the information you already have is accurate. Sometimes you use a place name that isn’t quite right. The program can help you identify those problems and even makes suggestions on what the “right” place might be – see the text in the red boundary.
Some sources require a paid subscription. GenSmarts lets you tell it which subscriptions you have so it can create links that work with that site. You can add your own websites to the list.
Is it worth $24.95? I think so. One of my biggest problems in researching my family history is deciding what to do next – who to research, where to look, etc. GenSmarts takes much of that burden off my poor mind and lets me focus on deciding whether the information it finds is useful (it usually is) and recording the information so that my history becomes more complete and more accurate.
Thank you GenSmarts!
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