Planting Your Family Tree Online

Book excerpt: A beginner’s guide to building a website that traces your family’s lineage as a resource for present and future generations, or for finding new relatives. Planting Your Family Tree Online is designed to take you step-by-step through the process of creating a genealogy Web site. When people begin their genealogical adventure, they usually interview elderly members of the family and contact other family members. The next step is usually one of organization of the information collected. The third step is usually to share this information with other family members, traditionally by publishing research in a book. However, a family Web site has numerous advantages: It is interactive so others can contribute their stories and pictures. It will help you find long-lost relatives. It is an ideal way to preserve research for the entire family. It will break down the walls that have stumped you in your research. It recognizes that family research is an ongoing process This book is written by Cyndi Howells, owner and webmaster of Cyndi’s List, a Web site of more than 130,000 online genealogical resources. Cyndi points out, “This book is loaded with URLs to Web sites that will give you everything you need to create a beautiful family tree online.” However, Web site URLs change daily and some may no longer work. She has created web pages as part of Cyndi’s List that correspond to the features of the book so that the URLs will be kept up-to-date.