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 to learn about and share our family history. It was designed with a few major goals in mind:

• Easy to read. It should be easy to learn about our ancestors' lives. The site's focus is on telling families' stories. Each ancestor family has a page that presents a complete picture of family members' lives. Photos, stories, and landmarks are featured prominently, encouraging a personal connection.
• Edited. Like a book, information on the site is written by a person, not automatically generated or aggregated. There is room to provide context and explain uncertainty.
• Unstructured. 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-purpose pages.
• Collaborative. 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.
• Private. Access is restricted to family members. 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 collection 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.
• Family 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.
• Place 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).
• File pages store uploaded files. These can be images, videos, PDF documents, ZIP archives, etc. The name of a File page always begins with the prefix "File:...". Files can be categorized by their content: Photos, Documents, or Data Files.
• Category pages are indexes for groups of related pages. The above links (for example, to Family or Photo) all point to Category pages. The name of a Category page always begins with the prefix "Category:...". Categories can be groups of other categories (for example, Place contains the different place category pages).
• Help pages, including this page, provide instructions for using the wiki. The name of a Help page always begins with the prefix "Help:...".
• A Discussion page is associated with every other page. This provides a space for editors to talk about the contents of the page. The name of a Discussion page aways begins with the prefix "Talk:...".
• Other, miscellaneous pages can be created for specific needs.

Pages can have alternate names, called redirects. Searching for any alternate name will send you to the page. Family pages typically have redirects from the names of every parent couple, as well as for the full names of each parent. Place pages typically have redirects from the names of major cities.