Familypedia is great for genealogy

The genealogy wiki "Familypedia" can help you to:

Record in black and white (or technicolor) your family's reminiscences and hard facts about your ancestors and your famous or infamous or ordinary distant cousins;

Link to their times and places so that you can appreciate how they lived and maybe why they travelled or worked or played the way they did;

Talk to fellow-researchers about the best ways of displaying your data;

Find where to look for more old records;

And maybe find that someone else has already written about your relatives, making it even easier for you to get a complete picture.

(Talking of pictures - the above image is in the public domain and is housed on that wonderful repository Wikimedia Commons.)

(1) Computer
Connected to the World-wide Web - if you are reading this, you probably have that! Dial-up is OK. Er - you've forgotten what dial-up is? Not a problem.

(2) Papers
About your relatives, such as letters, newspaper clippings, marriage certificates, photos, school reports.

You can manage without any of that paper at first; but the more the better.

(Public domain picture of ships at Seattle in 1900 - somebody's ancestors were on them and probably had their names recorded!)

Find Familypedia, the Genealogy Wikia, one of these ways:
(1) Click here
(2) Paste or type the following into your address bar: http://familypedia.wikia.com (and with Firefox you may get it without the http://)
(3) Google "Genealogy Wikia"

Create an account for yourself by clicking on the "Create an account" link (near the top right corner of most pages) and filling the required boxes.

Not compulsory, but highly recommended because it:
- is free
- takes only a minute
- will make other contributors more likely to help you.
- actually gives you MORE CHANCE TO BE ANONYMOUS if you wish
- screens out the obtrusive ads leaving just a few polite messages via Gooooooogle

Choose your user name with some care. Some of us are happy to use our real names, some use short or disguised versions, and some pick a name from history, such as "Thurstan" or "Zephyrinus". Best not to make it too long, because you and others will want to type it occasionally.

If your user name gives no clue who you really are, no ordinary user of the site will know unless you tell them, and only the managers (who haven't time to check anyone except obvious troublemakers) will have the power to dig into the system to find where in the world your computer is sitting and how to collar you.

The managers hate spam more than you do, so they will not tell anyone else your email address, nor your date of birth (which they need only because U.S. law doesn't let such sites have members aged under 13).

Then, or later, find your "Preferences" link. You can set:
* language interface (to one of several dozen options)
* timezone
* display "skin"
* size of edit box
and several other things.

You have your very own public "User page" (as on many modern sites such as Squidoo). It's good for displaying your ancestry tree as far as it goes, with easy links to individuals' pages and other web pages you have found helpful. A good example is Kborland's user page

There is a matching "User talk page", where other contributors will write messages addressed to you. And once you start editing you will be able to see a record of every edit under "Contributions".

As I said, that video wasn't mine. BUT it illustrates some good points about the Genealogy Wikia:

Wikipedia won't accept all of your family history even if your name is Barack Obama, but the Genealogy Wikia will! You can't have even a little Wikipedia article about yourself unless you're more famous than CapnOAwesome, but on Familypedia, the Genealogy Wikia, you can have many pages about yourself. Familypedia shows far more of the Obama ancestry than Wikipedia shows.

If you can type and click, you can create a wiki page. Type or paste whatever data you have so that the software can put it together. However, it may start life rather prosaic. Maybe not a very exciting page, and it probably won't have links to where you want it to.

Image of an article in progress ---->

Invest a couple of minutes extra, though, by following the "info page" process, to create a "person" page with an infobox and maybe other automatically-generated features such as categories, tables of children and siblings, even an Ahnentafel.

An info page is a subpage of the article, created just by entering the article name in the first input-box on the "Instructions" page. It has a preloaded set of lines ending in "equals" signs; for example:
Surname =
Given name =
Sex =
Father =
Mother =
Birth month =
Birth day =
Birth year =
Birth place =
Spouse =
Marriage =
Child1 =
Child2 =
Spouse2 =
Marriage2 =
Child1-S2 =

You type or paste what you know after each appropriate "=" sign.

Then click "Save". The page won't look meaningful yet, but that's a software trick. Ignore what it looks like. (You want a technical answer? - the page display "calls" some aspects of itself, which it can't do before it's saved.)

Copy the page name (without the "/info" ending). Go back (with a couple of clicks on your "Back" button, maybe) to the "Instructions" page, paste the name into the second box on that page, and hit the "Create article" button.

Preview the resulting page to see if it will do for now. Usually it's fine. If something seems amiss but you can't see how to fix it, never mind: you or a helper will be able to change it easily later.

Then click "Save".

Done. (Though, like a Squidoo lens, it may invite more work later.)

NOW - TRY IT! Yes, you can try it right now...

...

Right-click for a new window and go to the "Instructions" page.

Type a real person's name in the first "create" box.

Make it your own name if you like. (I have one for myself.) Or a deceased parent or grandparent, maybe. Just the full name (preferably "birth" name though some women are listed under married name), with or without without birth year. Add birth year in round brackets, like "Barack Obama (1961)". Dates are not encouraged for living persons (except famous people) but reduce the chance of ambiguity.

Click the "Create" button, and you get taken to a page ready for editing;
Scroll down to the edit box where you see lots of lines ending with "equals" signs;
Add some data (such as surname and parents' names) on relevant lines after the "=";
Click the "Save" button.

Feel the flush of pleasure at creating a Familypedia page? Now you can very quickly create the matching article from the instructions page.

But maybe you can first go up this page to what I called "Step 3", and register. See you there!