Recently I have been getting into researching my family tree.  My husband introduced me to a website called Geni that is part family tree,  part social network.  Geni is free!  My dad, grandfather, cousins, etc. are all using it.

Users can build their family tree through the simple colorful interface. Relatives who are added to the tree can join Geni and add other relatives. Everyone in the tree has a profile which shows more about them and enables other family members to stay in touch with them.  Families can work together to build profiles for common ancestors.  Family members can also share photos, videos, events, discussions, and more.  A family timeline shows the history of everyone in the family.  What’s kind of cool is that Geni was founded by former executives and employees of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe…so these people really know how to manage large amounts of data & keep it safe.

Just last week my grandpa emailed me (yes…my grandpa emails) to tell me that he mailed me a copy of the direct decedents of the DAEMS family which is his great grandmother’s branch.

My grandpa said that two of his cousins, in the Netherlands, researched this some years back.  The information he sent me goes all the way back to the 1670′s.  I was astounded at how far back they were able to go.  I really lucked out with this, because my father and grandparents immigrated to the US back in 1950 from the Netherlands (Holland).  The furthest back I would have been able to find, with US records, would be the immigration of my grandparents & father in 1950.  So to have relatives in Europe to do some of the digging for me was wonderful…I would not have had a clue where to start looking over there.

Since I have been hunting down info about my ancestors I decided to also do some research on Ancestry.com.  This site is great for researching vital records, as long as you don’t mind shelling out a few clams.  I decided to sign-up for just one month and to see what I can find, and to my surprise I located the manifest to the ship my father and grandparents came over from Holland on.  How awesome it that!?!  They even had a picture of the ship and a brief history of it.  Check it out…

If you have ever thought about looking into your ancestry, give Geni or Ancestry.com a try.  Invite some family members to join your tree, and watch it grow!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Daily, Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.