The Internet makes family history come alive. Help preserve your family’s heritage while you still can.
We set out to create a family history last week as a project for school. It was fun using the Internet to look up information about genealogy, even find some genealogy records online that we were able to use. We traced our family ancestors back a few hundred years before we ran out of data. I can’t imagine how I would have been able to do that 20 years ago.
There are some pretty good Websites that explain how to find your family history on the Internet. Without those guides we would have been lost. But doing that research got me to wondering just how much history has been uploaded to the Internet. The question lacks a definitive answer. I guess everyone who sees an opportunity to make money has decided to create a Website that pretends to be about family history but just wants to run ads.
I have nothing against ads but when you are looking for hard information you really do want to find the best sites possible. Even a small list of Websites about history is far better than an article that just talks vaguely about doing research online.
Fortunately for us we found a lot of good data. People are more willing to share what they know about their family histories than they used to. And there are public records storehouses like death indexes and immigration records. If you pay the government $200 you can download the Death Master File from the Social Security Administration.
I also liked the Find a Grave Website. We didn’t just look up relatives’ graves. We got lost looking up the graves of celebrities too.
Using the Internet to research our family history was a lot of fun. It’s something I have always wanted to do and I’m glad my son had a school project that required this kind of research. I can’t wait for my daughter to get a class assignment that requires a search of ancient records or something.
What would be really cool would be searching for public records from ancient Greece. Or maybe Rome. There are still some ancient Roman records that historians study.
History should not be just for the great people of the past. It should be for all of us. Without our family histories we lose sight of why our families came to be where they are. We don’t want to study only the histories of great families we have no connection to. I think maybe schools should have full classes about family history. Future generations would be grateful to us if we organized our knowledge of the past and made sure it was accessible to everyone who really needs it.
