I love researching my family tree. I have found a lot of interesting things. I’ve met cousins that knew interesting things about my family. We share things. Getting a picture of a great grandparent is so heart-warming. Finding the maiden name of a great-great-grandmother is super awesome. I do a lot of online research, simply because I cannot travel to all of these places and collect the information. There are several websites that help with finding documents. Yes, some of them you have to pay for and some are free. I use a mix of both.
Keeping organized has been a task. I started out on paper and index cards. That proved to be a daunting task once I realized I had over 2000 index cards and was running out of ways to store them. I tried notebooks with dividers in numerical order, alphabetical order, and more. Keeping my source documents and then trying to devise a way to link it to the people it pertained to was really getting on my last nerve. I had a computer, there had to be a better way.
I have a genealogy software program. For the most part I like it. But when it came to putting in sources, well that was a headache. Not all of my sources had page numbers, repositories (which you had to enter first) and many didn’t really have an author. It just didn’t fit what I was looking for. I use Onenote by Microsoft on occasion. I can keep things filed and link sources to multiple individuals. But this still didn’t put things into a finished piece that I could share with family members.
I’ve started writing a book (a couple of times). I’m still unsure of how and in what order I want to present the information, so that is still unfinished. So until I get some inspiration on how I want the finished piece to look, I’ll just keep researching.
I have decided to share my information anyway, but online. I have a genealogy site I’ve created to do this. The link is at the top of the page. This link will take you to a portion of my website where family members can join and help contribute to this project. They can even use the information to make their own Family Research Projects.
All we ask is that you try to connect with someone already on the site. Everyone in this database is linked, somehow. It may be a bloodline or simply by marriage. We ask that you note this in your comments when you sign up for a member account. This is free, we don’t charge anything for this. We also ask that you provide sources when you add someone new. Some things we can mark as private and no one else can see that info, or we can just list them as living. Once you become a member we can give you more details. We just want to ensure that everyone is linked.
Come on and visit our Family Research Site. Simply click the Genealogy link at the top of the page or CLICK HERE