The software that I use to run the genealogy portion of this website (the excellent TNG), is fairly intuitive, but sometimes it helps to have instructions.  All the genealogy data can be found by on the “Family Tree” tab and these instructions apply only to that section of the website.

The most common question people have is “how do I find the person I’m looking for?  There are several ways to find people in the genealogy database.

Browsing surnames is one of the easiest ways to see individuals who are included in the database.  The main “Family Tree” page offers several ways to browse through surnames.  The bottom right portion of the screen (see the highlighted portion of the image below) displays the 30 most-common surnames in the database. (Tip:  Click on the  images to see larger versions.)

Click on any surname to see a list of all people with that surname.

If you would like see all surnames starting with a specific letter, you can click two places.  Then, click on any surname in the resulting list to see all people with that surname.

If you would like to see more than 30 of the most common surnames, you can choose how many surnames to display here, then click go.  The default is 100, but you can change that to any number.  You can also click on “Show all surnames” to get an alphabetical list of all surnames in the database.

You can get back to the Surname page from anywhere within the “Family Tree” tab by clicking on Surnames from the Genealogy Menu in the sidebar, by clicking “Home”, or simply by clicking on the “Family Tree” tab at the top of the page.

This post is part of an ongoing series about navigating and using the Tonia’s Roots website.  To see all posts in the series, click here.

The “Family Tree” tab (above) contains a database of all my genealogy research.  I thought it would be helpful to provide a navigational overview.

The Genealogy Menu is visible in the sidebar whenever you are in the “Family Tree” section.  It contains links to:

• Surnames includes a list of the top 30 surnames in the database, ordered by number of people, as well as links to all surnames alphabetically.
• What’s New includes recent additions and changes.
• Documents includes census images, military records, book excerpts, and more.
• Cemeteries shows where relatives are buried.  Drill down by location to see each cemetery and the people buried there.
• Headstones contains all the headstone photos I have, with links to cemetery and person pages.
• Places is a high-level overview of the locations where people lived, including the top 30 localities, ordered by number of places within that locality.  Click on the magnifying glass icon next to any location to see the people who lived there.
• Notes contains all my research notes.  Click on the link to see the complete family or person page to which the note refers.
• Dates and Anniversaries defaults to events that happened on today’s date in history.  You can search for any event on any day using the search fields at the top of the page.
• Statistics contains a summary of the database; see the number individuals, families, unique surnames, documents, sources, and more.
• Contact Us – click here to send me an email.

This post is #1 of an ongoing series about navigating and using the Tonia’s Roots website.  To see all posts in the series, click here.