I think Tumblr is a great platform for a blog. You can share enormous photos, links and news, and the format is large and easy to read. It's perfect for a family historian who doesn't want to do a lot of writing, or only occasionally. Here is an example of a Tumblr blog (mine): If you click on the picture you will go to my Tumblr blog. What does this have to do with family history? Now this is a personal blog and it's not just about genealogy, so I need you to use your imagination a … [Read more...]
Top 10 Social Media Sites for Family Historians
22 October 2010 by 2 Comments
I think that social media was made for family historians. We are different from other people - we actually enjoy finding distant relatives and keeping in touch with them! Social media helps us to find relatives and old friends in ways that were not possible in the days of mailing lists and message boards. Here are 10 social media sites that are not directly related to family history (except one) but are nevertheless important for communicating, sharing and collaborating with other family … [Read more...]
Find-a-Grave
29 May 2010 by 2 Comments
Have you tried searching Find-a-Grave? I thought it was an American site, with only American graves, but I was wrong. I had a look around to see for myself. I searched the FAQ for 'international' to see if it covered countries other than USA, as I couldn't easily find this information on the homepage, and found that some fixes had been done to clean up the list of countries, including Australia. Woohoo! So I did a search for my usual test surname - Eason - and restricted the country to … [Read more...]
Web-based family trees
16 September 2008 by Leave a Comment
I've recently been contacted by the people responsible for a new family tree website called It's Our Tree. It's free and just requires you to enter your name and email address. I've just registered and now it wants me to enter my parents and grandparent and so on, and to invite my relatives to join as well. There are more and more of these sites around; some are free and some are not. Ancestry lets you create your family tree for free and let's you know whether it has any "hints" for these … [Read more...]
My genealogy library
8 September 2008 by 1 Comment
My first thought whenever I need to learn something new is to buy a book, and there are many to choose from. I like to have them on my shelves at home so I buy them, but there is nothing wrong with using the resources of your local library. I have to admit to being a bit of a book collector from way back. I learned to cook, to grow pot plants, to make curtains, to program a computer, and a great many other things, from books. (Yes, as my Mum will tell you, she was never interested in cooking … [Read more...]
