Get Started with a Brand New Tree

Welcome to RootsFinder! In the next few videos, we’ll show you how to use RootsFinder to make family history easy to research and easy to share. After you start your tree, it will look something like this. These little green circles will show you how many hints we’ve found for your tree so far. We’ll talk about those in a minute, but if you ever have questions, this question mark icon up here at the top will take you to the help center where you’ll find our webinars and other useful information.

Down here in the tree, click someone’s name to see more information.

Any time you see a plus button, it means you can add something right there. So on this card, you could add more spouses and children, parents, or siblings to continue growing your tree.

You can view their pedigree by clicking “View Tree,” go to their profile page by clicking “View Profile,” or edit their vital information by clicking “Edit Profile.”

When you view the profile page, you’ll see all the information about them. This area at the top is their profile header. You can set the profile picture, a cover photo, and the preferred vital information you want to see here at the top by clicking the different sections.

Under the profile header is a little toolbar with different actions you can take for this person.

Here in the timeline, click any title to expand the card. Use the plus button to add new sources and events to the timeline. When we find hints to help you grow your tree, they’ll be over here on the right. We’ll go over hints in another video.

The easiest way to enter data is to use the RootsFinder web clipper. It will automatically extract as much information as it can from major genealogy websites, so all you have to do is tag or create new people in your tree. The clipper will add the data for you. Let’s talk about that next.