Great things you can do at WeRelate

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Welcome

Welcome to the WeRelate virtual genealogical community. Here we can learn from each other, work together and find what we need to make our research easier, more rewarding and fun.

You can

  1. Create a free profile and home page,
  2. Use Shared research pages. Shared research pages are the next generation in message boards: they can be organized and edited. When you create a Shared research page title on your home page, the link will appear in red. Click on the red link, enter a message and save. (Creating a title for the page is not enough, your cousins can only search for pages with content.) If you type in the name of the town or county you are interested in with a comma, you will see a list of standardized names for all the places with that name, worldwide; select the one that applies to your research. These standardized names are used in "research categories" and will directly link you to research sources relevant to your research in those regions. See Help:Shared research pages.
  3. Have password protected User pages. These are blank pages you may use as you please. They can be viewed by all but only edited by you. See Help:User pages
  4. Visit Category links at the bottom of each page are password protected wiki pages: visible to the community but editable only by you.
  5. Create Person and Family pages. Take 10 minutes to see video tutorial/tour for people pages. You can view sample person and family pages (all you do is fill in the blanks)
  6. Upload and annotate photos and documents. See Help:Images.
  7. View a five-generation pedigree and pedigree map. The pedigree map show when and where your ancestors moved across the world.
  8. Check our Family Tree Explorer. With this tool you can easily navigate via a combined pedigree and descendancy view in the left window while viewing and editing your ancestor pages in the right.
  9. Research our place index. This is the largest standardized and geocoded historical and current inhabited place index. See Cheyenne County, Nebraska You will see child and parent counties, alternate names, history, localized research tips, information for when various records began. Go to Connect, select Places from the namespace drop down menu and enter the name of your place. We have over 430,000 places, but we may have missed a few. If your place doesn't come up, please create a page for it.
  10. Add a new spelling to the Name Index. Our community is creating a names standard. The names index lists alternate spellings, mispellings, nicknames, and derivations for over 100,000 names. Go to Connect select Surnames or Givennames from the namespace drop down menu and enter your name. If it isn't already in the index please create a page for it. You can include links to family sites, historical information and other spellings.
  11. Search the web and library items for new information. Select the Web and enter the name and place you are interested in. You can select include related names and the system will automatically use the names index in the search. You won't have to remember to search for each spelling and derivation separately. Thus if you are searching for "Phillips", the system will automatically include "Phelps", Phipps" and at least 100 other spellings. You can also select include alternate names and the system will automatically search with alternate place names. Thus if you enter "Fort Dearborn, Illinois" it will also search for "Fort Dearborn, IL,""Chicago, Illinois" and "Chicago, IL".
  12. If you are new to Wiki's, you may wish to check our many help and tutorial pages. Or, you can select edit on any page to see how the formatting commands are used. (You could click edit at the top of this page, for example.)
  13. Check the Recent Changes. Here you will see a list of all recent edits. Please help by deleting any spam or inappropriate material.
  14. Comment and help guide the community at the Watercooler.
  15. If you have any questions, please email me.

Thank you for participation. Enjoy! --sq