OneGreatFamily Subscriber Newsletter
December 9, 2005

Give the Gift of Family this Holiday Season

In This Issue:

Give a OneGreatFamily Gift Subscription for the Holidays

Give the Gift of Family this Holiday Season

At prices as low as $19.99 for an annual subscription, you can give everyone of your friends and family members a unique gift that keeps on giving throughout the year—the gift of a OneGreatFamily Annual Subscription. But hurry, this offer expires December 18th.

This Christmas Season, we want to make it easy for you to give the gift of genealogy. As a subscriber to OneGreatFamily, we are offering you tremendous savings when you buy annual gift certificates to OneGreatFamily:

  • Buy 1 annual gift certificate and we will discount the price by $35 so you pay $39.95. That’s 47% off the list price of $74.95 and is a great deal.
  • Buy 2 annual gift certificates and each will cost $29.95, for a savings of $90. That's 60% off and a super deal.
  • Buy 3 or more, each annual subscription will cost only $19.95. This means you can buy five annual subscriptions for under $100; and you save $275! Buy 10 for under $200 and save $550.

The Holiday Season and genealogy go hand in hand. Why? The holidays that we celebrate this time of year embody the spirit of family and of gift giving. And genealogy is a gift to your family members today as well as for future generations. What better gift to give this Holiday season than the gift of genealogy? Nothing could be more important or more meaningful than bringing your family closer.

That's right. Through December 18th you can give as many gift subscriptions as you'd like. By getting the whole family involved you can give a OneGreatFamily Annual subscription at an incredibly low price.

A gift subscription will be rewarding long after the holidays are over. Imagine collaborating with your family members and building your family tree and preserving it for future generations in 2006.

Now is your chance to give the gift of OneGreatFamily to anyone at tremendous savings!

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Q&A: Adding Documentation to OneGreatFamily

Learn How to Add Sources at OneGreatFamily

In last week's newsletter we featured an article on the importance of documenting your family tree. The following are instructions to add documentation information to your family tree at OneGreatFamily:

To add documentation to an ancestor's record, simply open an Individual Record in Genealogy Browser. On the left side you will see buttons for the different types of documentation features:

Citations: Citations are references to the specific evidence that you have found on an individual during your research. Citations are very important for establishing the credibility of information, but they can also help others in their research. The information you save in the citations becomes part of OneGreatFamily and is available to others to help with the collaborative effort.

Citations are stored with each specific individual's information. When you click the citation button, you are presented with the citation window containing listings for Individual Sources, Birth Sources, Death Sources, Christening Sources, and Burial Sources. These five categories help to group citations for quick access. Be sure you name your citations with a title that is explanatory and easy to understand at a glance.

Biography: Open the Biography window by selecting the Biography icon. This section allows you to insert files of three different formats: text (txt), rich text format (rtf), or hyper-text markup language (html). By allowing these different file types, biographies on individuals can be simple or stylized. You are also not limited to just one file; you can make as many files as you would like to include.

Notes: The Notes section is where you store those extra bits of information that don't seem to fit anywhere else, but are important enough to keep. When editing an individual's information, click on the notes button on the right, represented here in the spot shadow. The notes window will display, and you can add information as needed.

Research Log: Research notes can be extremely helpful to you and others working on the same areas of genealogy. While doing your research, leave yourself memos on recent information you have found, where you have left off, or anything that will help in the process. These memos will be helpful for you, others in your family group, and any others in OneGreatFamily that are trying to further the collaborative effort on research for that person.

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Lisa Lights the Way

Ellis Island


by Lisa South, Certified Genealogist

I've read that four out of ten Americans have an ancestor who came through Ellis Island - that is a lot of people!! When I think of how difficult and tedious a search of these records used to be it is amazing to know that they can now be searched with a few strokes on a keyboard.

Ellis Island opened in 1892. Before then the individual states were responsible for immigration regulations and records. In most cases the immigrants disembarked right into the cities after going through customs, provided no contagious disease was found. With the opening of Ellis Island, the richer passengers (those that sailed in first or second class) were usually allowed directly into the United States after a brief inspection on board the ship. Only the poor (those passengers that had sailed in steerage) were required to go through processing on the island.

The buildings on Ellis were made of pine and on the 15th of June 1897 a fire burned the buildings to the ground, destroying most of the records - records of about one and one-half million immigrants.

Eventually more than twelve million immigrants would pass through Ellis Island. After World War I Congress passed sharp restrictions on immigration and the activity at Ellis Island began to decline. Finally, in 1954, it was closed. It is now open to tourists and has become a very popular attraction.

As stated above, searching through these millions of records used to be an almost impossible task. Thankfully volunteers at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints keyed indexes to all those records. Now, in a joint partnership with the Ellis Island Foundation, those keyed indexes can be searched electronically online by going to http://www.ellisisland.org/.

Emma Lazarus wrote:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

America has done just that, and millions of the tired and poor, yearning to breathe free came through Ellis Island!

One Great Genealogy Site Award

DistantCousin.com

DistantCousin is an online archive of genealogy records and scanned images of historical documents from a wide variety of sources, such as newspaper obituaries, city directories, census records, ship lists, school yearbooks, military records, and more. In all there are more than 6 million genealogy records from over 1,500 sources online. There are no fees or memberships required to use the records at DistantCousin.


  • Visit DistantCousin.com
  • See past award recipients
  • Recommend a Site Award recipient

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    Managing Editor: Heather Matthews
    Contributors: Heather Matthews, Lisa South and Rob Armstrong
    Editor: Tracy Armstrong

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