I’m stepping away from family stories this time to rave about two great genealogy tools that work together brilliantly to help you find more cousins researching your family…and by extension helping you FIND more family stories! These two tools are FTAnalyzer and Lost Cousins.
Family Tree Analyzer – Great Genealogy Tool 1
I know many people are familiar with FTAnalyzer. It’s a fantastic family history resource, most commonly used to analyse your family tree GEDCOM file looking for errors…and it’s free.
However, it has a number of other uses, including:
- reporting on where you are missing data such as censuses
- showing you who your ‘treetop’ (furthest back) ancestors are for each branch
- viewing your ancestors on maps, current and historic
- creating lists for occupations so you can see how many blacksmiths for example are in your tree
- the surname list will show you if there is a project for any of your surnames at The Guild of
One-Name Studies, with a clickable link to take you there - …and so on…did I mention it’s free?
Lost Cousins – Great Genealogy Tool 2
I also know many people are familiar with Lost Cousins. This one is used to find other people researching the same families as you. It matches census entries that you have found and entered onto the site. It’s a brilliant way of connecting with distant cousins with ancestors in the UK, Ireland, US and Canada. You just need to enter each family and the census reference details onto the site. When you get a match, you know you are researching the same family because you’re not just matching names, but specific households! Lost Cousins is also free to use.
As a free member, you also get access to a very handy newsletter that comes out twice a month, packed with useful information. You are able to see that you have matches to the people you have entered census information for, and they can see that they have a matching ancestor with you. Connecting requires that one or other of you is a subscriber (£10/year), which allows you to discover who the descendant is, and communicate with them directly.
Bringing Them Together For Powerful Results
But did you know these two great genealogy tools can work together? The biggest thing that has held me back from taking full advantage of the Lost Cousins site is the thought of manually entering all the census record references. I tend to build my trees both across and down to maximise my DNA hits with cousins, so there are tons of census records I have gathered over the years. I’d entered a few hundred and basically stopped.
FTAnalyzer can automate the process. I’d heard about that a while ago and it was one of those things I was ‘getting around to’. I’ve finally done it. With the click of a button, it found almost 6000 census records to add from England, Wales, Scotland and the US. It went on its merry way chugging through adding them to the Lost Cousins site with no further input from me. It took only a couple of hours, during which I was still able to use my computer for other things. I now have a whole lot of new leads to chase up as a result!
One click! 6000 automatic uploads of census details! I was so happy, I just had to write a blog about it! Genealogy is a never-ending project by definition. Every time you proceed back a generation, there are twice as many ancestors to find on that line as before. Any tools that help make the job easier are great to find. And when two great genealogy tools collide to save hundreds of hours of data input, it’s worth talking about.