Kindo Family Blog

It’s back to school time, and maybe you’re thinking you need to know more about genealogy techniques and methods. One way to learn about genealogy is to take an online  course. Here are a few suggestions to get you started: Introduction to Genealogy from National Genealogical Society (U.S.) Most genealogists take this course first. It is very American-centric, but the techniques can be applied to any country’s vital statistics. There are more advance courses for specific regions and resources (e.g. wills). Introduction to Genealogy is an online course for those who have done little, if any, research on their families. It is open to anyone who wishes to enroll. Members of the National Genealogical Society (NGS) receive a tuition discount. Family History Personal Enrichment Classes Learn from Brigham Young University about research in the United States, France and Germany. These are non-credit courses, so there are no exams! Certificate in Genealogical Studies The National Institute for Genealogical Studies has joined forces with the Professional Learning Centre, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto to provide web-based courses for both family historians and professional genealogists. Canadian-based. GenClass Online classes in a variety of genealogical topics are conducted online by qualified, experienced instructors. Each four-week class includes a detailed course curriculum and online class meetings for $29.95. A more comprehensive listing, along with seminars, workshops and classes, can be found in my book.

Eight years ago I was touring France  with a group of 30 students (including my two children), three teachers and about 5 other adults. We learned so much about records and history in France! If you have some French genealogy, you might want to check out these sites:

• Footnote has some documents related to the Bastille
• This site has a list of all those executed by the guillotine. It’s in French, so you may need to translate it.
• Alliance Genealogie is another French site
• Notre Temps.com is a French portal aimed at seniors, with a Genealogy Beginners Guide. It has searches of several French databases and articles highlighting genealogy. This site is exclusively in French.
• The French president’s site has a page (in English) on the history of 14 July.
• Cyndi’s List has a whole page of links related to France.
• This clip from Casablanca c’est formidable!
• And this site has the French National Anthem’s history and lyrics.

Scams in genealogy are as old as the hobby itself. Many of the time honored ones (which I’ll cover in a minute) have moved from junk mail and classified ads to online. Others are brand new, taking advantage of the fact that on the Internet, no one knows if you’re a skunk. Here are a few of the more common ones.

The complete family history of [your surname here]! These scammers have been operating by regular mail, classified ads and online all my lifetime. For an exorbitant amount of money, you get a hard-bound book that is a mass-produced, glorified phone directory of randomly selected names, accompanied by a brief generic history unrelated to your actual family. This particular scam was run by Halberts of Ohio for years, by bulk surface and email, until they finally were run out of business by widespread reports of what they were really selling. However, it may reappear at any time; be forewarned.

A closely related scam promised you various junk with “your family crest” or “[Your Surname] coat of arms” and a “history of your family name.” Unless your genealogy can prove you are related to a family enrolled by the College of Arms, you don’t have a family coat of arms. The history of a given surname is often available for free on the Internet; don’t pay for it.

“Guides” and “programs” that only point you to free sites. Some software products and online services claim to be genealogical gold mines, but they really only point you to readily available phone books, compiled surnames and GEDCOMs.

In most cases this information available for free, but the scammer charges you for simply pointing you toward Cyndi’s List, RootsWeb, and Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter. Or worse, simply to the many different white pages available online.

The old phony inheritance ploy. This scam is designed to separate alleged rightful heirs from their money by charging them fees for “processing”. In fact a surface mail version of this was popular with scammers in the last century. The victim is informed that unclaimed inheritance connected to his family must be settled, and details on how to claim the inheritance will be sent to him—after paying for various service fees to the informer to handle the lost estate, which never existed to begin with.

A modern variation is the foreign widow who wants help transferring her money to your country. Any time you are asked to send personal and financial information, delete it. Check out this page: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/scams/scams.asp#inherit for more on these scams.

Falsified credentials as professional genealogists. Genealogists are unregulated and do not require an official license. Anyone can legally claim to be one. Genealogical data is easy to just make up, and con artists often do. However, certain bodies do issue legitimate credentials to persons who have passed education and skills tests. If you want to hire a professional, look for certification from a third party such as the Association of Professional Genealogists, The International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists, and the Board for the Certification of Genealogists.

BTW,  I have an appendix in my book about how to choose a professional genealogist!

The contact importer on Kindo is now online and fully tested. It makes it much easier for you to invite your relatives to your tree as you can now automatically draw their emailaddresses from your existing address books at webmail services like GMail, Hotmail or Yahoo or even from your email clients like Outlook Express or Thunderbird.

Our software developpers have really done an amazing job here. It’s a great improvement, as you do not have to type in all the email addresses manually anymore, and the system will even try to match the names from your address book to the relatives in your Kindo tree. But lets go through the simple three-step-process in detail:

Let’s imagine you are William and have built a small tree of your close family, like this one.

You have invited your brother Harry already, but don’t want to type all the others’ emails again. And actually you are emailing them regularly anyway, so the addresses are all there in your webmail account!

Step 1: Select webmail service and enter login details

Well, now you just go to the yellow invite - tab and click on “import from your favourite webmail service”. You select which webmail service you want to import from; we offer a long list with services from all over the world, so William’s : The three big ones Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, followed by this long list in alphabetical order: AOL, Fastmail, Freenet, GMX, ICQmail, Indiatimes, Interia, Libero, LinkedIn, Lycos, .mac, mail.com, mail.ru, mynet, O2, Rambler, Rediffmail, Sapo, T-Online, web.de, WPPL, yahoo.jp and Yandex.

You just enter your login details for your webmail and select with the small box, if you want to keep your address book details in Kindo, so it’s available once you have added more relatives to the tree. All the data is transmitted securely and we will NOT store the login details for your webmail service at all! So neither Charles nor you have to worry about data protection issues; by the way you can find our detailed privacy policy here. Just hit next and…

Kindo will import your relatives’ email addresses automatically (Step 2)

Nothing much you need to do here, except maybe waiting for a couple of seconds in case you have a really huge address book. You will then be dropped to step 3, where you confirm that the matched persons are your relatives and can send the invites.

Step 3: Confirm the matched relatives and send invites

Kindo will mark people in red, if there are exact matches with people in your tree. You just need to click on “select family member” and Kindo will show you the matched person’s name (that you can alter, in case it shouldn’t be correct). Do the same for people that have not been recognized and select their identity manually, like Williams did for Charles in this case

You find the suggested text for the invitations below the list of names and can make some changes to title or text. Just hit “send invitations” when you like the text and you are done. Like for manual invitations you should see the green box on the profiles that you have invited on the bright blue our tree - tab. And you can see the status of your invites on the invitation history page, below the yellow invite tab. But once your relatives join that news will appear in the family news feed on the dark-greenish our family - tab

So invite your relatives to join Kindo and you can share the fun of a common place for sharing thoughts and memories!

Latest news from the development desk is that we have been able to re-introduce the ability to delete partners from family trees. This feature request has been quite common over the last few months and I know that a number of our users will be happy.

It is still not possible to delete parents, but this small improvement will definitely improve the overall user experience.

Here is a movie which shows how to delete profiles:

Deleting profiles is limited to people who don’t have any dependencies ie. No direct relationships. So if there is an ‘x’ in the top right hand corner of a profile box then you will be able to delete them.

View our new help section at: http://kindo.com/help

kindo, family, family, tree

Here is a short demonstration on how to start a family tree on kindo and a preview of some of the features the application offers: