One Last Reminder: Monthly and Quarterly Subscription Available Only Until September 6th

After September 6th, OneGreatFamily will only be offering the Annual Subscriptions ($74.95), with a 7-day Free Trial.

If you have been thinking about signing up for OneGreatFamily, but prefer the flexibility or the smaller regular payments of a monthly or quarterly billing plan, act now before its too late. Users who just want to try out the service enjoy the "no commitment" aspect of monthly subscriptions. Alternately, some users on a fixed income value smaller, regular monthly billings. Whatever your reasons, if you want a monthly or quarterly billing cycle with a 7-day free trial, we urge you to sign up now.

Up to September 6th, you can choose the following three subscription lengths, each including a 7-day free trial:

Fixing your own errors is another feature that makes OneGreatFamily a unique genealogy service.

OneGreatFamily often receives requests from our members to fix the errors they find within the OneGreatFamily database. While we love accommodating such requests, we feel that many people don't fully understand "the beauty of OneGreatFamily."

Please let me take a moment to provide some explanation. OneGreatFamily is a single, shared family tree and database, which means that everyone has access to the same information. It also means that everyone in the world is collaborating on the same family tree.

The collaborative nature of OneGreatFamily has two major implications when it comes to fixing errors:

1. When you fix an error in one place within OneGreatFamily, everyone else benefits from your effort
2. Fixing errors in OneGreatFamily doesn't affect how other people view their family tree

With these two facts in mind, you can more fully understand the beauty of OneGreatFamily. You can also gain comfort and confidence as you find and correct errors that have been perpetuated within OneGreatFamily. Your corrections will then be available to everyone else within OneGreatFamily. You can also let others know more specifically about the corrections you make by using the collaboration feature within OneGreatFamily.

Someone recently found an error in OneGreatFamily that showed an ancestor who lived in the 1500s had been given a father who lived in the 1700s. Of course, this was an error. They submitted the error to us to correct, not understanding perhaps that they could have easily made the correction themselves.

They could have simply deleted the incorrect information from their view of OneGreatFamily. In this case, that would mean deleting the father and mother of the individual in question. This would not affect the displayed information for the person who originally submitted the data. Rather, it would create a conflict for that person to now accept or reject. Upon seeing the correction, the conflict would likely be resolved quite quickly.

Upon making the correction, the person who made the correction could also contact the other groups who were linked to the erroneous information to explain to them why the correction was made.

By someone taking the time to fix an error in one place, everyone else who is interested in that piece of information can now see the correction. This demonstrates how the quality of the information found at OneGreatFamily improves with each passing day. This is part of the beauty of OneGreatFamily as a genealogy service.

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Using Tax Records

Even though most of us complain about taxes, as genealogists we are certainly glad our ancestors had to pay them! Many early tax records have been used to replace lost census records and are a valuable tool for locating where our ancestor lived. Information contained in real property tax records normally included the amount of land, its location, the person in whose name it was originally entered (this sometimes gives clues to relationships) and it's value.

There are many types of tax records but most of these can be divided into three groups:

1. Real property
2. Personal property (usually livestock and, it hurts me to say it, slaves)
3. A combination of both of the above

Both personal and real property tax lists should be checked because the personal property lists can pick up people who did not own land. People who did not own much, however, may not be found in either of these records.

Tax records are usually available at the county courthouse. Many of them are on microfilm and are available through inter-library loan at Family History Centers of the LDS Church.

Tax records do not answer a lot of genealogical questions but help to lead the researcher into other records such as deeds, probate, marriage etc. When we find all these available records, we can usually learn quite a bit about an individual.

Even if our ancestors couldn't pass down the money they paid as taxes, at least we can benefit richly from finding out more about them and their lives.

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• Visit the OneGreatFamily Learning Center for more helpful genealogy articles by Lisa South
  
  

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