FamilySearch: Trees, Genealogies, and Memories - August 2025

Course Type: Immersive

August 21, 2025 | Live 2-Hour Course 3PM ET

Find Your Ancestors Faster

Learn your way around the FamilySearch Family Tree, the world’s biggest single (free!) resource for collective family tree knowledge. More than 1.7 billion people are represented on the Tree, and every researcher should know how to navigate it confidently.

Experience Interactive Learning with an Expert

Join Sunny Jane Morton for this 2-hour, Immersive Course: a deep dive into the world’s largest family tree, with essential tips and hands-on practice utilizing the most essential functions. 

How You'll Benefit:

• Expert Guidance: Learn directly from a renowned genealogy professional.
• Practical Handouts: Access downloadable resources to enhance your learning.
• PLUS - Registrants receive the digital FamilySearch Cheat Sheet ($9.99 value) FREE

Interactive Q&A: Get your questions answered during the session and through our exclusive online forum for two weeks. You'll have access to the instructor for two weeks after the live sessions via a dedicated discussion board, ensuring all your questions are answered and you receive personalized guidance as you apply what you've learned.

What You’ll Learn:

• Master the FamilySearch Tree: Understand its unique community format, navigate your view, and search for relatives.
• Contribute with Confidence: Learn why and how to add information, even with the possibility of others making changes.
• Optimize Person Pages: Effectively use naming conventions, standardize dates/places, evaluate contributions, and make precise edits with explanations.
• Manage Relationships & Records: Specify family connections, review/undo changes, detach errors, and efficiently attach records to multiple people.
• Improve Tree Quality: Understand and enhance the Quality Score, merge duplicate person pages, and perform data cleanup.
• Add & Protect Living Relatives: Learn to add yourself and others, understand privacy settings for living people, and mark them deceased.
• Enhance with Media: Add and differentiate between Sources and Memories, and tag relatives in images.
• Collaborate & Connect: Productively reach out to other contributors.
• Leverage New Tools: Discover how the new FamilySearch AI Research Assistant integrates with the Tree and explore options for syncing with family tree software.

…and so much more!

How You’ll Benefit

• Extend your tree: Discover new relatives and vital clues by seeing what other researchers have found in their direct and collateral lines.
• Save time: Confidently navigate the world's largest resource for shared, public family tree data, rather than searching scattered and often privacy-protected trees on other websites.
• Save frustration: Learn strategies to improve collaboration and potentially reduce the chances of others altering your accurate findings.
• Save money: Everything on FamilySearch is free! Begin your research here to leverage tree insights and historical records before paying for comparable information elsewhere.
  

Can’t attend live? No worries! All registered students receive access to the session recording for a full year, so you can revisit the material whenever it’s convenient for you.

Meet Your Instructor

Sunny Jane Morton is the incoming editor of NGS Magazine; a contributing editor for Family Tree Magazine; Content Director at Your DNA Guide; author of Story of My Life: A Workbook for Preserving Your Legacy and co-author of How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records; and a writing coach and course developer for Family Tree University. Sunny is known for her expertise in comparing major genealogy websites to each other and has contributed to the FamilySearch blog. She is an instructor for GRIP Genealogy Institute and the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. 

Join us for this transformative live session and take your family history research to the next level.