This is a place where you can create articles about your ancestors, and easily link them to other articles about where and when they lived. You can work wholly within this wiki, or you can link your articles to sites on the world wide web. And because this is a wiki format, you can work collaboratively with others to create a network of articles about your ancestors and about those they lived and worked with — or simply about people you find interesting. It is our hope that, as this site grows, we will gradually be able to link our ancestors into a network that goes far beyond the simple nuts and bolts of who lived where and when.

The focus of this site is on capturing the details of the lives of our ancestors, both those historically significant people and the everyday people usually not listed in encyclopaedias, histories, or even "people's histories". Along the way, the site will also provide information about the historical and social context in which our ancestors found themselves.

This site aspires to be truly global, with active contributors and information from several cultures and languages, and all four Hemispheres.

We have some of the latest wiki software to make page display easy and minimize duplication of work. Semantic MediaWiki is being developed to make data entry as easy as on a commercial program and to make data retrieval and presentation easier still. That has now progressed well enough to be the best method of creating pages for people, replacing the info page system that may be familiar to users from 2007-2009.

Sign in and join us. Plenty of friendly genealogists here to help if you get stuck!

• Help desk - ask other contributors for help regarding this Wiki or genealogy in general. Check recent changes for the help desk
• Getting Started - More guidance on getting started.
• Tutorial - A step-by-step process of help.
• Naming conventions - for those who want to jump right in, please first read the naming guidelines (unless you are dead keen to get onto starting pages and don't care what they look like or how anyone will find them!!!). Before adding a page for an individual, please note that there are several naming conventions in place here to prevent duplication of work.
• Surnames - there is (or is intended to be) for each surname a separate category, which is a subcategory of the category for surnames in general. Each can have a detailed matching article.
• Watercooler - discuss activities on this Wiki.
• Shortcuts - look at recent clever inventions to save time and/or show more info.
• Advanced searching using SMW - design your own queries.
• Community Portal - Things useful to know about Familypedia.
• Special Project Areas - Collections of articles built around themes.
• Administrivia - A place to present things you should know, but may not want to!!
• User page - Suggestions for improving your user page.
• Sandbox - A place to play with formatting articles.
• Guided Tour - A quick tour of Familypedia, with a link to tours of other wikis in the Wikia community.