1/1/2004
By Nancy Hendrickson
Genealogy.com has grown into a must-visit destination for family research. Get the most out of this revered resource by following these tips.
From the late 18th century on, enumerators crisscrossed the country to track down our ancestors. They followed well-marked highways as well as backwoods trails — all in search of countable Americans. We 21st-century Internet genealogists are a lot like those enumerators. Sometimes, we stumble through hundreds of sites and never find a familiar name. At other times, one site may shelter a whole neighborhood of family members. For many of us Internet explorers, Genealogy.com <
www.genealogy.com> may just be that site.
Genealogy.com's roots go back to the mid-1990s, when Banner Blue Software created FamilyTreeMaker.com, a companion site for its popular genealogy software. At first, the majority of the site's content was dedicated to Family Tree Maker (FTM) users and purchasers of the company's extensive line of genealogy-related CD-ROMs.
Over time, though, the site expanded to include Genealogy.com, a major stop for anyone in search of ancestors — not just FTM users. In April 2003, the company underwent yet another metamorphosis when it was acquired by MyFamily.com — the same folks who own Ancestry.com.