Uploading your FamilySearch Family Tree onto your FREE Ancestry, Find my Past, and My Heritage accounts

It's official. All members of the Church can have free personal accounts at ancestry.com, findmypast.com, and myheritage.com. You'll need a parent's permission if you are ages 13-17, but don't worry - I'm sure they'll say yes.

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This is an amazing opportunity. Each of these sites are great resources for finding more about your family. They will even find the records for you. All you have to do is put your family tree onto their sites and they will start e-mailing you with links to records that might be about your ancestors. It's so easy.

But how do you get your tree onto these other sites? There's no button to just download your tree from FamilySearch. There is a way, though. BYU's free online family history class taught me how. Here's a quick summary:

1. Download RootsMagic Essentials (free). This software is like the family tree part of FamilySearch except it saves files to your computer instead of the cloud. It is specially designed to work with FamilySearch and it can access your online tree and turn it into a file you can save on your computer.

2. Open RootsMagic and create a new file. You must check the LDS support and FamilySearch Family Tree support buttons. It will not be able to access your online tree if you don't. What do you want to do after you create the file? Add names manually. (You won't really add them manually, but your import is from the internet, so it's different.)

3. Go to "File", then "FamilySearch Central", then "Import". It will prompt you to log in to FamilySearch.

4. Choose how many generations of ancestors and descendants you want to import. The more generations you choose to import, the longer it will take.

5. When it's done importing go to "File", then "Export", "Okay", and "Save".

6.  Go to one of the partner sites and mouse over Family Tree. Create a new tree by importing a Gedcom and then wait for records to come to you!

7. Let me know if this works for you. I'm eager to improve these instructions.