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MyFamily.com, Inc. - Press Releases: "Forget shopping and blogging, the latest online craze is genealogy. The family history market has exploded, last month accounting for over one in ten internet users according to new figures from comScore Europe. The entire family history category received over 4 million visitors last month, almost double the 2.2 million visitors recorded in July 2005. This represents a rapid 84% surge in interest in genealogy websites in just six months." back to top
was posted 5/24/2006 11:06:10 AM AEST |
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Hi Kylie,
Good luck with your research. I found your site through Cyndi's list. The possibilities for genealogy created by the internet are fascinating and deserve serious attention.
I had virtually no interest in genealogy until about three years ago when I started finding bits of information posted online that pertained to my family. It's a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Figuring out how one piece fits leads to making sense of other pieces.
My mother's family is part of a family tree with twenty thousand names, most of which are derived from a genealogy published in 1909. But I knew almost nothing about my father's family except that my grandfather was a minister who died when my father was five years old.
My blog is about my grandfather's grandfather, a German immigrant who died in the American Civil War. The things I've learned about my great great grandfather are quite interesting, but even more interesting to me is why I learned these things on the internet, things that weren't passed down from one generation to the next.
Genealogy is a matter of observing principles, adhering to accepted methods and sifting through massive amounts of information. But that alone isn't enough. Knowing where to look requires having a sense of who the person was that you are trying to find in all of these records. And that requires understanding the forces of history and how they affect the people who write things down for future reference.
I'm convinced that blogging can be a very useful tool for genealogical research. But I also think that the principles, methods and mindset of blogging are quite different and sometimes at odds with the approach recommended for beginners by serious genealogists.
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