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:

• Approachable. It should be easy to learn about our ancestors' lives. The site's focus is on telling families' stories. Photos and landmarks are featured prominently.
• 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 comprehensive. 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. It's not useful to keep 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.

In other words, this site is complementary to other Family History resources. 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 pages of a few different 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. Individual people do not have dedicated pages—instead, details of their lives are covered by Family pages.
• 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—some places contain other places. The wiki works at three levels of granularity: Locales (counties, municipalities) are part of Territories (states, provinces, small countries), which are part of Regions (subcontinental divisions). Individual cities or buildings do not have dedicated pages—instead, those landmarks are described on a Locale page.
• 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 are 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 contain 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 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. Place pages typically have redirects from the names of major cities.

Relationships between pages are described with properties. Most notably:

• Families have one or more residences, which are places—usually counties—in which a family lived for a significant amount of time (typically, at least two years). Following the link will take you to the corresponding Place page, and there you'll find a list of all families who resided in the Place. Residences are also used to generate regional highlight colors for families in charts.
• Families have child families, which represent the family that a child eventually had, after growing up. These relationships form the basis for ancestral and descendancy relationships, and each Family page has a header with links up and down the chain.
• Files can be associated with a Family and/or a Place, depending on what is pictured or documented. Each Family and Place page includes a collection of all Files associated with that page.

Contributing

This is a work in progress, and you can contribute! Anyone with access to the wiki can edit or add pages. See Help:Editing for detailed instructions.

How can you help? Some suggestions:

• Research a family and write a life sketch. (Many family pages are "stubs" with only minimal information.)
• Fill in some missing details on an existing family sketch.
• Add a story or memory to a family page.
• Scan and upload old photos.
• Improve the information associated with already-uploaded photos (year taken, people pictured, etc.)
• Visit cemeteries and gravestones, take pictures, and add information to a place page—including details on how to find the site.
• Research, visit, and take pictures of other landmarks; add this to a place page.
• Upload notable documents.