Social networking features added to Familyrelatives.com

The team behind Familyrelatives.com have added a bundle of new innovations to the site, with the aim of encouraging family historians to work together. These “social networking” features help users to communicate with other researchers to share findings, ask for assistance or discuss particular records.

They’re all available free of charge, whether you’re a subscriber to the site or not. “It has always been our aim to provide free features and content alongside the subscription” said spokesman Robert Woods. “For the very first time you can leave your mark on history and leave comments on official records for instance where they lived, their occupation, when and where they married, did they move and what were they like – this really begins to build a picture of the individuals you are researching for everyone to share”.

Anyone who visits http://www.familyrelatives.com/ can now choose to create a profile. As well as basic data like your name and age, this lets you specify detailed information including your areas of interest and whether you’re willing to do research or perform lookups for others - ideal if the records you need to research are far from home. If you choose to make your profile public, fellow researchers can read this information, and search for people researching similar areas, and then send you messages through the site.

Familyrelatives’ developers have also added the ability to attach comments to individual records, which other users can then read. This means that if you find a birth record, for example, that relates to your great-grandfather, you can note this fact. If someone is researching the same person, they’ll see your note, and they can choose to get in touch with you. The plan is that it could lead to people finding relatives they never knew they had.

Familyrelatives.com adds 200 million USA records

To tie in with the new features, Familyrelatives.com has added over 200 million US records to its site. These collections, which are available for free, include birth, marriage, death and divorce records covering some of the largest states in the USA and Irish immigration records. Alongside these are the Social Security Death Indexes, World War II enlistment and POW records and military records for the Korean War – see http://www.familyrelatives.com/ for more information.