My wife and I (and the kids too actually) have been watching NBC's Who do you think you are? that follows several celebrities as they explore their genealogical history. It's actually a well done show, mixing the stories of the stars, the aspects of genealogy research and the excitement of "the find." Not everyone who searches their roots will find out that they're related to English royalty, or a commander in the Civil War. Some might actually document their relationship to Kevin Bacon. But whatever the discovery, it's the road, not the destination, that makes it fun.
Ancestry.com sponsors the TV show, and though I've used their site in the past, it had been a while since last I really did anything there. After getting engrossed with the show, my wife decided that we should once again pick up our proverbial digital shovels and go digging for our roots again. This time, we set off in search of her relatives. Through my research in the past, I've documented connections on my side of the tree to Samuel L. Clemens (aka Mark Twain), and a General in the War of 1812, as well as a story about land sale by a relative to Abraham Lincoln's grandfather. I was curious to see where this new journey lead us.
I've used Family Tree Maker in the past for documentation and a number of on-line sources for research, but I was interested to see what, if anything, I could find that would bring me closer to Web 2.0 than the dated version of FTM I had been using. An updated FTM version might be OK, but I wanted to see if there was something that was cloud-based that I could access without the local software install.
A quick Google search yielded a few hits, but nothing really promising...except Ancestry.com. What the hey! Guess I'll give them a try again and see what's new...
Armed with only a couple of recent generations from my wife's tree that we had previously documented, I started inputting her tree. No subscription fee, no commitment. Just an email address and quick registration to track all my work against. I started with her father and then his father. By the time I had entered her grandfather and moved to continue on to her grandmother, I saw a little leaf on her grandfather's entry (literally in less than 1 second). It indicated, I would learn, that the site had already found additional information about her grandfather. Clicking through would yield birth and death records, census data, and other public docs as well as links to other family trees contributed by other members who chose to make their research public (mine is still private for now). BINGO.
Though we had only a couple of generations of her ancestry documented (thought I think I have more that had not been typed in yet), in about 5 hours total work, with great kudos to Ancestry.com we've added 962 people and gotten her lineage traced back to the 1100's! There are many interesting people mixed in there (and we're learning about them via stories others have attached to their trees), but so far, no one that you would know :-(
One interesting thing about Ancestry.com though, is that if you contribute your tree to the OneWorld Tree (and you possibly need to subscribe as well), they'll do the research for you and identify the "famous people" in your tree. What that means, I'm not sure, but once we've gone as far as we want to for this time, I might just see what it spits out.
There are certain things that the FTM client software does much better than the site (full graphic family tree navigation, maps, showing relationships between two specific person, etc), so we'll likely end up upgrading the software as well. But the Ancestry.com site is certain a boost as far as filling out the tree.
With my lineage, finding Twain has led to a stronger interest in history, and Twain himself, for my kids. We've read about William the Conqueror and other figures related to our trees too. I can't wait to see who else we find.
Happy digging!
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