Genealogy?

[Joel]

Are any of you into genealogy research?


I've spent far too much time on Ancestry.com and Findagrave.com researching my ancestors in the last 2 years. However, I started at my grandpa's request (during the last 6 months he was alive), as he had a photo album from his mother and didn't know his father's family really at all and knew very little about his mother's family. In short time, I discovered he had 3 half-sisters he was unaware of (all of which had passed but I was able to get in touch with my second cousins. I also discovered who many of the people in his mother's photo album were and that his parents each had around 10-12 siblings. His ancestors all go back to the early revolutionary US days. He was pleased to know that. I had discovered all of this before he passed. Since then I've continued to document matches based on confirmed DNA matches, while documenting as many ancestors (and their descendants) as possible.

[Billy_McSkintos]

Not so much these days. I made a concerted effort about 15 years ago but that involved spending a lot of time at the British library plowing through microfilm.


I can't really justify spending the $ for membership at Ancestry.com

[Bruce]

My dad was really into it about 10 years ago. He did the old fashion way; combing through library and old court records, etc. He actually made a couple of books worth of records that he sent to various members of the family. He had our family traced back to the late 1700's when our family first settled in the Savannah, GA area. However he basically hit some dead ends and put it aside. None of us ever picked it up. Very interesting stuff though.

[Doomspark]

I've poked around on ancestry.com too, but I find their rates usurious and refuse to pay them.  Instead, I do web-searches on family names and dates and have got pretty good at finding things.  Last week, for instance, I found my dad's senior high-school yearbook online.  Got a picture of him from when he was 18, and got to read an essay he wrote that year.

[Joel]

I had a six month member from them initially. After that expired, I've been using their free resources (1880 Census and 1940 Census are free), Find a grave, DNA matches, and other member's family trees to document what I can in the mean time. I'm trying to work on everything I can that is free, and then switch to the paid version in one-month increments if I get stuck in a certain area. So far, my tree is very traceable and I've been able to work without a subscription for over a year.