I spent most of today piecing bits and pieces of information together to form my own family tree. Recently an aunt of mine found me from my father’s side of the family. I haven’t heard from anyone on that side of the family in 17 years and I realized how little I actually know about my family.
Researching your genealogy can be expensive, time consuming and frustrating for those who have an interest in knowing where they came from. Also, just because you have no interest in your heritage doesn’t mean your children or their children wont!
Everyone should make up a family tree, it’s entertaining and it will help your relatives, besides there is nothing worse than feeling like you don’t know anything about your family!
I found a very good/ free family tree building program called Family Tree Builder that I downloaded and put all my bits of information into. When I was finished I exported my family tree file and then uploaded it to a pretty cool site called myheritage.com that allows you to upload your partial family tree to the database, search the already uploaded data, connect with other users and much more. I was drawn to this site over more popular sites like ancestry.com and others because it was easier and free to use.
Myheritage.com is free as long as you don’t have:
- more than 1000 entries on your family tree
- more than 15 people you want to invite to the site
- more than 250 MB of data to store.
Another genealogy option is GenCircles. This site is a little less user friendly but it is 100% free and only will return search info based on user submitted data (so you wont be baited with search results that you need to pay for). I like GenCircles also because it’s accessible to everyone on the web so long lost family members (who have some sort of info on our family already) will be able to fill in the blanks if they want to.
With GenCircles you will need to download the above mentioned free family tree software, plug in what info you have, save it and then upload it to the GenCircles site. Don’t worry your personal data is safe, using the recommended privacy option will keep all living relatives info hidden! Only birth dates and death dates are shown for deceased relatives!
If you don’t have a family tree you need to get started on one! If you already have one keep up with it and consider uploading it to one of the mentioned websites! Happy researching!
WOW cool!
kaylee’s last blog post..My worst valentine’s Day
This information is WAY cool! I can’t wait to have some free time to play around with this. … I am sure I will be bugging you with, “How do you do this?” and “How do you do that?”
Janelle’s last blog post..Can we have a march in Washington for this?
I’ve been bugging my parents to document as much as they can so that my kids and I aren’t left in the dark about everything before 1950. My husband’s family needs to do the same. This is great info! Thanks for sharing it.
Hyphen Mama’s last blog post..Just Doing My Part
I did my tree about as far as I can take it using Ancestry.com. Once I got to the 1920’s, I started hitting the census records and took my John line back to 1850 and captured all the Aunt’s and Uncles along the way.
I would keep in mind that every bit of info you find should be scrutinized. After all, it’s people that make these connections, and people can sometimes be quite wrong.
Cheers!