In my previous article about how to get a family history started, I recommended writing a biography about a favorite ancestor. In this article, I write about starting your family history with a family tree.
Assumptions: In these articles, I assume that the final goal is an online ancestral family history using a blog platform.
Many families have various types of family records. You might start by doing a hand-written sketch. Then you can scan it, email it to family members and ask for their comments. You will get responses and your family history is started.
A better way to start may be to do an online family tree and let friends and relatives view it and make comments and suggestions. Today, there are many Internet sites offering free online family trees. Just enter “family tree” or “free family tree” in your search engine and you will see many alternatives.
I worked my way through maybe ten to twelve free family tree websites. Many were okay, some were good and a few weren’t so good – in other words, the quality of these sites varied a great deal.
I finally decided on Ancestry.com. It certainly is one of the leading genealogy websites. The reasons I selected Ancestry.com were:
- It is clearly one of the top leaders
- It gives you 14 days free to try it out
- It was relatively easy to use
- You can invite others in your family to view your tree
- I feel comfortable recommending it
More about why I feel comfortable recommending Ancestry.com…
As a beginner, if you start with the genealogy resources available at Ancestry.com, it will save you much time. There is so much genealogy material on the Internet that it is confusing to the beginner. Try entering “genealogy” into your search engine and you see why the many results are overwhelming.
I believe most of my friends and clients are happy to pay Ancestry’s monthly fee of under $20. Otherwise, like I did, you will spend hours researching many other genealogy sites. If saving time is not an issue, then look for the free services that fit you.
Most family tree Internet sites allow you to upload photos of your ancestors. This gets you started organizing your family photos. Start organizing your photos on your computer early. My experience is that you should set up one file location on your computer (with many sub-files to come) for family photos so that you can always go back later and find the photo that you want – going back and looking for a particular photo will happen many times in writing a family history. Some of you may use photo-sharing sites like Flickr or Photobucket; they are fine, but in working with clients, I’ve found that if you having all your photos on your computer’s hard drive organized as you wish is the most practical and safest, even if they duplicate some photos on your photo-sharing site.
One suggestion is to consider whether you want one or two family trees. If you have extensive ancestor information back several generations on both your father and your mother, you may wish to build two family trees.
When you start an online family tree maker, plunge right in. That’s how you will learn. Make mistakes because you can almost always go back and correct those mistakes. And your online family tree will help get relatives involved.
© Copyright January, 2009 by Dale Garden
I am Dale Garden and I help people learn to write their own online family histories. I provide learning resources for people to learn to do family trees, to edit and manage photos and to learn blogging as the best way to write and publish online family histories. And when justified, I offer personal one-on-one assistance.Resources: http://dgaweb.com & http://dgablogginglessons.wordpress.com/ & http://familyhistoryblogging.wordpress.com/
