The Busy Life of a Single Mom

Undocumented Genealogy is Mythology.

I stumbed upon this quote a few days ago, and it really stuck with me. So much in fact that I’ve almost been bothered. My grandparents are now in their 70s, and I know that with them so much of our family history and knowledge resides. My generation (and my parents) just do not have the memories or the records to keep our roots firmly intact. 

So in one way, I hate to admit this, but I accomplished NOTHING on my to do list tonight because I got so engrossed in another project that I’ve worked on it for almost 6 solid hours . The postive aspect is that it turned out great, and I wanted to share as I think it’s something we should all take the time to do.

I began right after school looking for a website to record our family tree. I found a great one right off the bat, but I wanted a free one. I narrowed it down to three choices and began entering data into each of them simultaneously to decide which was the path I wanted to invest my energy in. I decided on http://www.geni.com.

It has been incredibly user friendly (though I see room for improvement). I was able to enter 90 members of my family into this chart (pretty much everything I knew for sure). It handles multiple marriages with ease and creates a nice chart. It allows for group participation so that multiple members of the family can input any information they know.  I think though what I like best about it is that it allows you to actually create profiles for each person and then the members of your family can go in and add memories of this person, upload photos, etc. This is so much more personal than plain family trees. I’ve gone through and began recording my memories of my grandparents and great-grandparents.

On the downside, it did not have a way to handle adoption (that I could find). I also would like more printable options as I intend to print all of this and put together books this summer for the different members of my family. Sometimes it seemed I had to click a few too many times to enter information also. For example, I could only enter first and last names when I first entered a person. Then I had to click and edit them to add middle names.

Overall though, I was impressed enough to pull out old folders and files and enter a lot of my family’s information. I encourage you to do the same - with this site, by hand, or anywhere so that your family’s history can be passed down to future generations.

If you’d like to see an example of the tree it creates, feel free to check mine out here.