Saturday, August 2, 2014

Fold3 Class at Largo Public Library on 4 August

At 10 am on Monday, 4 August, PGS will present a class on using three valuable tools in pursuit of your genealogy.

The first is the Fold3 databases. Fold3 is a subscription site that is free to holders of a Pinellas County library card. It is accessible from computers at the Largo Library or from home if you go through the Largo Library website. The focus of the site is military records, from the American Revolution to the present. This class will demonstrate how to get to the site and then how to effectively search for and use the records.

The second is Dropbox, a cloud storage, file synchronization, and file sharing service. It is free to use and very beneficial if you have more than one computing device (desktop, laptop, smart phone, tablet, etc.). Even is you have only one device, it can be used as a handy backup location. This is not an authoring tool, instead it is meant to help manage files after they have been created with other programs such as a word processor or a genealogy computer program.

The third and last tool is Evernote. This is also a free cloud service, but its focus is on synchronizing and sharing notes and web clippings rather than files. Unlike Dropbox, it is an authoring tool, and great for quickly capturing ideas, web locations, cut-and-paste snippets, etc.


Each of the tools listed is easy to use and requires only a few minutes of explanation. That is why they are grouped together in one class. There are other services similar to Dropbox and Evernote, and some of them will be briefly addressed also.

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