Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Essential Tools For Family History Research

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  Linda Stufflebean posted "Essential Tools For Today's Genealogical Success" recently, and Teresa Basinska Eckford followed that with her list in "Essential Tools for Genealogists." 

2)  What are your essential tools for doing your genealogy and family history work? Please list five or more of your essential tools so that readers may find tools that may help all of us do our work.

3)  Tell us about your essential tools in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook comment.

Here's mine (at the present time, used almost every day):

• Ancestry.com (searchable records, hints, trees, photos), MyHeritage.com (searchable records, hints, trees, photos),   FamilySearch.org (searchable records, trees, memories, hints, books, wiki, calalog),   Findmypast.com (searchable records, hints, trees),   AmericanAncestors.org (searchable records, trees, periodicals),   Find A Grave (searchable records), WikiTree.com (trees), Geni.com (trees), and other websites allow searching their historical record collections to find persons of interest.  
• FamilySearch Full-Text Search finds many previously unsearchable documents (especially deeds, court and other records) that were hiding in the microfilms in the FamilySearch Catalog.  
• Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank.com, OldNews.com and other historical newspaper websites provide family history material that was difficult to find before digitization.
• For DNA matches, I use Pro Tools and ThruLines for AncestryDNA, the Theory of Family Relativity and DNA match triangulation on MyHeritageDNA, FamilyTreeDNA's Family Finder, and 23andMe's DNA Relatives.  I try to determine the common ancestor of my DNA matches and add the descendants of the cdommon ancestor to my RootsMagic tree IF the line is supported by records.
• RootsMagic genealogy management software keeps all of my genealogy research in one database (names, relationships, events, dates, places, media, notes, sources, etc.).  It permits me to exchange information with my Ancestry Member Tree and the FamilySearch Family Tree.  I can create reports and charts for any person or group of persons that I want.  I also use Legacy Family Tree and Family Tree Maker on occasion for specific tasks.
• Evidence Explained and Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing & Using History Sources are on my nearby bookcase shelf to help craft source citations for RootsMagic, the online trees, and my blog posts.
• Google Blogger has been my Genea-Musings writing space partner for over 19 years now to write blog posts.  Substack recently became a writing partner and blogging platform. 
• Google Gmail has been my email friend for a long time and I have email archives back to about 2015. 
• Google Search, Images, Maps, Earth, Translate, Books, Drive (and more) provide tools to help me understand locations, translate from one language to another, find digitized out-of-copyright books, and save my work to a cloud drive. I also use Internet Archive frequently foro ut-of-copyright books.
• Feedly has been my news reader for a very long time, and enables me to keep track of 1,000 news feeds for the genealogy industry and the geneablogger world.
• Legacy Family Tree Webinars educates me weekly, and has almost 2,500 webinars now.  It's like having a really good genealogy society without having to go to meetings.
• YouTube educates me with genealogy related videos every week, and now I'm sharing some of my research on my own channel.
• Zoom to host and watch genealogical society meetings, one-to-many meetings, and create my own videos.
• LibreOffice.org provides a FREE desktop office suite for word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, and more.
• The Windows Notepad text app is used to write and save notes, to take formatted text to unformatted text, etc.
• PrintFriendly Chrome Extension can turn a web page into a PDF without ads, or print a web page without ads, in a short period of time.  
• Dan Maloney's Genealogy Assistant adds custom features for Trees and DNA Matches to Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch and other sites.
• Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, X Grok, Google Gemini, Google NotebookLM, Perplexity, Microsoft CoPilot, Meta, and other LLMs and AI tools.  I use them interchangeably to answer questions, to suggest blog topics, to help write family stories and blog posts, to create or enhancing realistic images, to create audio and video overviews of a topic, to transcribe a printed or handwritten page, etc.  They are much more knowledgeable than I am, and are much better creative writers than I am.  It's like having an Einstein sitting next to me in my genealogy cave, or having a Hemingway writing my family stories and ancestor biographies.
• iDrive backup service to backup my desktop computer files every day.

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