Lisa Louise Cooke
Kenny Freestone
Episode 12: Online Family Trees
In this episode we focus on posting your family tree online. There’s no use in re-inventing the research wheel, and by posting what you know about your family tree online you can easily connect with others who are researching people in your family tree, share information, collaborate and even connect with distant relatives.
Then in the second segment my guest is Kenny Freestone, Senior Product Manager at Ancestry.com whose primary responsibility is Ancestry’s Family Tree Feature. Kenny’s not only going to walk us through the process of setting up and using our family tree on Ancestry but this tree expert will be giving us his Top 5 Tips making the most of them.
Whether you’re currently working with your family tree online, or have just thought about doing so, this episode is for you!
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Transcript
Online Family Trees
The Internet has certainly unleashed genealogy research. And that’s pretty natural considering that genealogy is all about connecting with others in your family and your ancestors. And with the huge emphasis on Web 2.0, which is really all about creating websites and tools that help people connect, we family historians are having a field day.
But even before Web 2.0 became a buzz phrase, the Internet made it much easier to follow one of the main principles in genealogy research – and that is before you get too deep in locating records, you should first try and see what research has already been done on your family.
Online family tree are even more powerful and more specifically geared to the task of locating other researchers and coordinating trees and you can do so by using one of several online family tree tools:
GeneTree
Geni.com
And MyHeritage
Ancestry.com
The beauty of posting your tree online is that you can retain control over it – I mean no one can come in and start editing it or anything – and yet you can get it out there for others to find. They may just be getting started, or they may be a seasoned researcher; they may have only a couple of shared ancestors, or thousands. But it’s more than just sharing the birth and death dates of your shared ancestors.
I have had researchers contact me who had boxes of photos of ancestors that I only had one or two photographs of. Or who had other family heirlooms, stories, journals, you name it. And genealogists are generally a really nice group of people, and by nature are willing to share.
It’s hard to grasp all the benefits that connecting with other researchers and distant cousins through posted family trees can bring. All I can really say is that you just have to do and see for yourself what happens.
In this episode we talk to the man an Ancestry who is at the heart of their Family Tree tool, and he covers everything we need to know to get going and make of the most of this exciting innovation.
Interview: Kenny Freestone, Senior Product Manager at Ancestry.com
Be sure and listen to my other family history podcast called The Genealogy Gems Podcast, which is packed with family history research strategies as well as creative ideas for sharing and displaying your family tree. You can find The Genealogy Gems Podcast at http://www.GenealogyGems.com and you can also subscribe to it for free in iTunes.
And speaking of iTunes, it really is the best way to follow and listen to podcasts! Subscribing to this show is free, you just simply click the iTunes button on this page and click the SUBSCRIBE link in iTunes. It will download the show to your iTunes library and you will then receive each new show as it’s published so you won’t miss a thing. Be sure to click the GET ALL button on your Library listing for the show to download all the previous episodes.
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