I have been tied up with other projects recently so haven’t added much here. I should be able to get back to working on this site soon though.
In the last couple of days pages on the Wiki have been edited to display Spam. Unfortunately this means I have had to disable page editing for anonymous users. From now on if you wish to edit the Wiki you need to register an account and confirm an email address. Fortunately the whole process is quick and easy.
Family Tree Connections is a rapidly growing site that is great for filling in the gaps of historical context when tracing families in the United States. There are a lot of unique records on their site that are not available anywhere else on the internet. Some of their records include club membership lists, school listings and church records.
The familyancestor.info Wiki is now online and accessible by anyone who wishes to use or add to it. It can be accessed by either clicking on this link or by clicking on the header at the top of this page and following the relevant link.
Once you have written down everything you know yourself and spoken to all members of your family you should have at least a small list of distant relatives that you either didn’t know about or haven’t seen for some time. The next obvious step in your Family research is to write to these relatives.
This is a process that once started will probably never end. As your tree grows so will your list of more and more distant relations. Many will never bother writing back to you, but often you will stir their curiosity and they will write back with what they know and ask for you to forward more information. Occasionally you may come across a distant relation who has been researching their branch of the family for some years and proves to be a true gold mine of information.
A great way to add some spice to your Family History website is to add some videos. It can be anything from a collection of photos set to music to a walk around your ancestral farm or town. Here are some good examples from YouTube.
One great resource on the internet for finding information on a family member is Google search. Try it. Type in an ancestors name, you might be surprised at what you find.
Another perhaps more useful way to use Google is as a way to search a particular site. You can use the format Smith site:rootsweb.com to search the entire rootsweb website to search for any reference to the name Smith.
Another handy Google service is Google Alerts which you can set up so that Google will email you any new references to a family name that might newly appear on the internet.
For anyone tracking family members in the United States the National Archives website is a great free resource. You might have to do a bit of good old record searching to find what you are after but they have a wide variety of records from army enlistment records to Native American census records. You can also easily order hard copy records from their site.
