Help:Overview

Welcome. This page will help you find your way around and understand what this site is all about.

What Is This?

The Ludlow Family Wiki is a place for family members to learn about and share our family history. It was created with a few major goals in mind:

• Accessibility. Most importantly, the site makes it easy to learn about our ancestors. Its focus is on telling families' stories, designating a page for each ancestor family that presents a complete picture of family members' lives. Photos, stories, and landmarks are featured prominently, encouraging a personal connection.
• Free-form structure. The software is flexible and can be used in whatever way is convenient. A certain basic structure is encouraged on each page, but within that framework, text, tables, charts, etc., can all be put to good use. Special-purpose needs can be addressed with special, nonstandard pages.
• Collaboration. Anyone with access to the wiki can make changes. This lets us share our knowledge and resources, rather than leaving each person to rediscover the same things. Logs, email notifications, and discussion areas facilitate cooperation.
• Privacy. Access is usually restricted to family members, as determined by membership in a Facebook group. A big benefit of restricted access is that we're free to document details about living people—and it's often much easier to collect this information while they're alive!

There are also a few things that the site is not. These needs are better met by FamilySearch, personal genealogy databases, published books and documents, etc.:

• Not a database. Every fact about every person of interest does not belong here. The goal is to extract the most interesting bits from existing databases and records, and use them to tell a story. So, for example, it's rarely useful to talk about the full date on which something occurred: just a year is usually sufficient.
• Not authoritative. We're not interested in keeping track of the sources documenting every geneological event here in the wiki. Instead, FamilySearch or referenced documents should contain those citations, and the wiki just summarizes what they say.
• Not public. Since the wiki is private, things posted here will not directly benefit anybody outside the small circle of users with access. Since genealogy work benefits greatly from collaboration, it's a good idea be engaged in public forums, too.

It should be clear that this is not a replacement for other Family History resources—it's complementary. For example, each family page contains links to FamilySearch; personal databases can be uploaded and shared; work in FamilySearch and elsewhere can be coordinated in discussion spaces; new sources can be uploaded, made public, and referenced from other sites; etc.

Organization

The site consists of a bunch of interlinked pages of various types:

• The Welcome page is where you initially land when visiting the site. It acts a bit like a Table of Contents, with links to other notable pages. You can always return there by clicking on the site logo at the top left of every page.
• pages describe the history of a specific family. These pages are primarily concerned with events occurring in the parents' household(s) between their marriage and their death. They may also include details of the parents' childhoods, the children's lives, and notable descendants. Where there are multiple sets of parents (due to death, divorce, etc.), the page typically includes details about all sets of parents.
• pages describe geographical areas that are significant for one or more families. These pages are concerned with relevant historical information, landmarks, and resources for research. "Place" is a generic term, and places are organized into a hierarchy: Locales (counties, municipalities) are part of Territories (states, provinces, small countries), which are part of Regions (subcontinental divisions).