Genealogy from the perspective of a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon, LDS)

Friday, November 13, 2015

Exploring the AllMyCousins App

The AllMyCousins.com app is found in the App Gallery on FamilySearch.org and is FamilySearch Certified. Here is a screenshot of the startup page:


This program is free and graphically displays information gathered from your section of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. There are currently 110 apps listed in the FamilySearch.org App Gallery and several of these have similar features. Basically, these programs, including AllMyCousins.com organize the information in the Family Tree in an alternative format and display collected categories of data such as all of the people who need Temple ordinances, or all of the people who have duplicates. Each of these programs, including AllMyCousins.com have their enthusiastic adherents.

Alternate views of the data in the Family Tree are a valuable adjunct to the main view of the Family Tree on the FamilySearch.org website because they consolidate and concentrate the data into a more manageable format.

There is an introductory video for the AllMyCousins.com app, but further Help is only available by email. It is important to watch the video to have some idea of how to use the program.

Clicking on the little hand symbols allows you to navigate up and down the Family Tree. I searched for all the people in the Family Tree related to me with the name Parkinson. I found you might be surprised at the number of people who are loaded into the program when you click. After clicking a few times to see the results, I had well over two thousand people imported. Apparently, the program was loading all of the descendants of one of my third great grandfathers. I ended up with a total of 2,259 people loaded into the program. I clicked another hand icon and the program loaded another few thousand or so relatives and after fifteen minutes or so of searching the program had loaded over 7000 individuals and I finally decided to start over. Apparently, the program was loading all of the descendants of my 3rd great-grandparents.

With all these people in the program, I did find one person who the program indicated needed ordinances and who was born before 110 years ago. (See the 110 Year Rule) By the way, I was not surprised that there was only one possibility. Green temple icons are very rapidly disappearing from the Family Tree. When the program finished importing all the descendants of my 3rd great-grandparents there were 11,111.

It might take some time to become acquainted with this program but it is another of the tools we have to analyze the data in the Family Tree.




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