Margaret O'Brien

If you know some basic SQL and you have a family tree, this tutorial will show you how to: All you need is some free software and a Windows or Mac computer. Don’t worry if you’re a SQL beginner. We’ll show you how to create and combine simple queries to make a complex list. And … Read more

When you’re building your family tree, the rarer surnames are often the easiest to research. My grandmother was a Smith which makes that ancestral line a challenge to explore. My early research focused on marriages in the Smith line to people with less common last names. This tutorial shows you how to use a spreadsheet … Read more

If your family tree is on Ancestry.com or another online website, there’s no simple way to export a list of surnames. This article shows you several different methods to get a full list of people from your family tree into a spreadsheet. We then show you how to turn that into a distinct list of … Read more

There are several different ways to get a list of names from your family tree. Some methods use desktop software or require a little technical knowledge. But if your tree is online on Ancestry, there is one simple way to get a list of people into a spreadsheet. It’s time-consuming with larger trees but it … Read more

Have you got a long list of people’s names in Excel and you’re not sure how to sort or filter them by surname? The challenge occurs when the first and last name are in a single cell. You may also have middle names jammed in there. And worse, there may be a prefix (Mrs.) or … Read more

This tutorial takes you step-by-step through creating a four-generation family tree in Google Sheets. A four-generation tree goes back to eight great-grandparents. This tutorial builds a tree that prints on a single landscape page. If you’re too busy for the twelve steps in this tutorial, jump down to the end to grab our “done for you” Google Sheets template bundle. … Read more

A word cloud is a visual representation of text. The size of each word in the cloud is proportional to its frequency. When we use word clouds to represent our family tree, we are usually making one from either: In this tutorial, I show two ways to make a word cloud based on last names … Read more

Do you want to convert a GEDCOM file into a spreadsheet with every person nicely formatted in rows? This tutorial walks through how to do this for free. You’ll be working with a script or piece of code, but don’t worry if you’re not familiar with programming. I’ll provide the script in a way that … Read more

This article explains the basics of the GEDCOM file format that is used copy family trees between different platforms and software. I answer all the basic questions, with a gentle introduction to some of the more complex topics. What Is GEDCOM And How Does It Work? Suppose that you download your family tree from Ancestry.com … Read more