Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Tech Tuesday - Oops It Happened Again!

Yesterday it happened again. I received an e-mail from someone who may be a distant relative. Yesterday I also received a snail mail from another distant cousin. Both of these connections are probably connected through the my great grandmother Mary Hennessy Fleming.

It has happened before! Both e-mail and message boards have very rewarding experiences for me. Through message boards (both surname and locality), I have made contacts in Germany, Norway, Ireland, and various areas of the United States with previously unknown people in my various lines. When I help people who want to begin their genealogy research, I always suggest that they use message boards in addition to the familiar search engines of fsamilysearch.org and ancestry.com.

Another way that technology has helped expand my research is the use of online trees at both ancestry.com and myheritage.com. Both vehicles have yielded positive contacts that I might never have made in any other way.

I think it is awesome that people can use the computers at their local library for free to create and research their family history. The tree can be created at ancestry.com, myheritage.com or familysearch.org. It is created online and stays there. It will be private unless the owner chooses otherwise and will be available on any computer with an internet connection.

Wow! What a time to be exploring your ancestry. What does the future hold in unlocking the secrets of the past?

6 comments:

  1. I use Rootsweb WorldConnect and have had exceptionally good luck making connections with it.
    Regards,
    Theresa (Tangled Trees)

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  2. I just connected with a cousin through ancestry. Her tree is private but I saw that she'd uploaded a photo of one of my ancestors to her tree. So I contacted her, not knowing who she was, and it turns out we are cousins. Our great great grandmother was married twice and we're each descended from different husbands. She had a wealth of information about her side of the family that I knew nothing about.

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  3. Isn't it awesome to make those connections? Thanks for visiting Theresa and Debi.

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  4. My grandma's cousin's wife contacted me when she found my Ancestry tree, and while I was making my tree on WikiTree I started talking to my 8th cousin once removed when we found where our trees connected! It's so exciting when that happens. :)

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  5. Lianne, it's like a cousin magnet isn't it?

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  6. I've met so many distant cousins through Ancestry, message boards and even Facebook. It's a good time to be researching! :)

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