Mark Fearer

A guide to non-digital educational resources.

In the genealogy world, we use the term “brick wall” when we seem to go as far as we can in finding a particular ancestor or branch. I hope this isn’t too controversial a statement, but most of the brick walls we hit are ones that we inadvertently create.

FamilySearch has many features, but this column will only deal with the database, since it’s the most popular one.

The major genealogy databases are Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage and FindMyPast. All have international record sets and are overlapping, but all have some unique collections.

An important part of finding your ancestors (and not someone else’s with the same name) is developing your genealogical skills.