Family Groups on this Site
Special Family Groups
For completeness, we have special system
User Groups that are defined like
Family Groups with Forums and home pages to foster their communication as well:
Family Group
A
Family Group is a collaborative group of descendants that exchange information about what is going on among surviving family members and research or capture stories on their ancestors. We define a
Family Group as being the first cousins (and their parents and offspring). That is, all descendants of some original family and set of parents. See the
Family Defined page for more information on what constitutes a family.
A
Family Group may be mostly second cousins if the first cousins are all (or mostly) deceased. For relatives more distant than third cousin, the membership should likely be opt-in instead of opt-out. That is, based on expressed interest and registration. The general
User Groups communication mechanism to talk with other researchers may be more useful initially until you find more than one of you interested in exchanging ideas on a more ancient family. View the
How To Contribute page for more information. Not everyone is interested in the discovery of details of distant relatives they never knew.
Family Group Naming
Using tradition, we name a family group by listing the husbands last name (i.e. common surname) followed by the wife's maiden name. If a non-traditional family, it is the choice of the family as how to list it. Often, just the two last names are enough to uniquely identify a family. We additionally give the first names in the list chart to aid in discovering who may be a related family. Larger, extended or joint families may be cross linked or both linked to a common, neutral page of interest.
Note that some names are very common. Please verify birth years and other information before asking to join a family group if you are not sure. Sometimes, people with the exact same name (middle name included) lived at very similar addresses in the same town at the same time. So match as much data as you can or contact the moderator to explore further before asking to join if you are not known to them already.
Eventually, the list will be automated and simply the structure table of contents once the software is integrated together. For now, we have a hand-crafted table that includes the links directly back to the genealogical database and photo repository.
Note: living family groups will require a login to access most features.
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