I’m a novice genealogist; but every so often I get the bug to try to dig a little more on the history of my family, and my extended family.
For the longest time I used geni.com but I finally made the decision to focus all of my work into ancestry.com. I think they have better records; but the downside is they don’t seem to have as nice of an interface in terms of sharing my work with family members.
I have a family reunion coming up and I was looking into sharing the current state of my work with the reunion people either by website or giant printout. Neither of those seem to be options that ancestry does very well; which is too bad.
What tools do you guys use? Which ones to you like/hate?
Family trees quickly become WAY too large to fit onto a screen or a few pieces of paper. You can buy a large pre-printed fan chart and fill in the primary family lines by hand, or you can print one off from Ancestry or familysearch.org and tape all the pages together, then take it to your local print shop and have them make some seamless copies for you. I wouldn’t try to go back past about six or seven generations, though, or you’ll have something that is way too big. The other option is to print out relevant lineages.
What you’ll likely find out quickly is that most people don’t give a damn and won’t bother to actually look at what you give them, so make sure your feelings aren’t easily hurt. After I went through a lot of trouble to self publish a book about our family and make a printed fan chart for my family, I would end up answering questions from my sister that were easily answered by actually reading what I had given her. Far as I know, my kids probably threw it all away. Not that I’m bitter, of course.
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I have definitely experienced almost everything you mentioned above. That’s why the family reunion is a good target for this particular project. I’m only talking about 3 to 4 generations (and only the relevant lineages); and people are usually curious enough to give it a look-see at the reunion. Regarding your kids; yep, I didn’t get interested in it until my parents died; and now I can barely trace beyond my grandparents. Likewise, my kids (late 20s to mid 30s) show zero interest. This is definitely something that I’m doing because it’s interesting to me.
Regarding my OP; I also interested in hearing about what tools and technology are usable out there. I didn’t see that Ancestry.com could print anything very user friendly. From the small amount of research I’ve done; it’s like their are to factions. The groups that do the genealogy all online; and the ones that use the local software packages. Even the big dog on the block market ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker as two unique and separate products.
I use Wikitree as my family tree tool andFamilysearch.org for the bulk of my records searching. They provide a ton of info for free that Ancestry.com charges for.
This website has blank charts you can buy, with various options for generations. I also didn’t start getting interested until my parents and grandparents were all gone. It was a tough slog just to get past my parents. While my kids seem disinterested at this point, at least the results of the work will live online after I’m gone, in case they decide it’s important to them later on. I just wish that someone in the family was interested in caretaking all the paper files. I suppose I could scan all that stuff and upload it, but that’s a lot of work.
I switched from Family Tree Maker years ago and went to Roots Magic. Easier to manage, faster, and I found the reports were much better then FTM. Roots Magic will also create a web page and has the ability to be installed on a flash drive so it can go anywhere.
I use Ancestry and Family Search, though I only just got back on Ancestry after a couple of years off due to the cost. Family Search also started using the records on Ancestry and you have to pay to view a lot of the census records.
For those that don’t know what to do with your family work, give copies to local historical societies, they will be glad to take them and they might get some real use out of them.
I donated a copy of the two small publications I did, plus an extra copy of a book one of my cousins wrote. I’m not sure they’d be happy to get the files full of emails, letters, and hard copy birth certs, etc.
You might be surprised. The historical society that I volunteer at has 5-6 filing cabinets full of such things. They separate it out by surname. They have all sorts of items in there, letters, obits, memory cards, questions asking about the family, copies of bibles.
You should ask and see if any of the county or city societies would be interested in what you have.
I did a vanity search of my name on Google (I was hoping to prove that my very common first and last names mad be impossible to find on Google) I came across my entry on thepeerage.com, which I have because my name is listed in Burkes and Debretts (from being sufficiently related to some titled person). From there I was able to trace ancestors back to before the Norman conquest. I was a bit skeptical of some of the connections, but even the most dubious one I was actually able to cross-reference from an orginal document on the National Archive site. I did not put a lot of effort in to this only an hour or so’s idle browsing the web.
On the other hand I tried looking up my working class heritage too , I found I couldn’t even trace my own great-grandfather who lived long enough for me to remember him.
So basically if you can find a relation with a title, tracing their lineage will be considerably easier than tracing the lineage of working class Londoners.
I haven’t used it very extensively, and not recently either, but I was able to get some good printouts/views/etc. by exporting my ancestry dot com GEDCOM file and importing it into GRAMPS.
Ditto kopek’s recommendation of DNA testing. You can do several different services for less cost than the typical overnight genealogy trip, and the numbers of users are growing fast.
Ancestry DNA found me a cousin who shares something like 5th great grandparents, and highlighted the common ancestor in both our trees. Pretty amazing. Plus, at least along those two lines, apparently nobody was lying.
Yes, I’ve looked at some of the user data at Ancestry, which is surely stored in Gedcom format, and not found a way to extract ancestor tables, or any other text format. Am I missing something? (Or, as I suspect, is it a way to “lock” users in as disabled Ancestry.com consumers?)
After I went through a lot of trouble to self publish a book about our family and make a printed fan chart for my family, I would end up answering questions from my sister that were easily answered by actually reading what I had given her. Far as I know, my kids probably threw it all away. Not that I’m bitter, of course.