One of the first lessons young children have to learn is sharing: Don't hog all the blocks, do share the cookies. Sharing turns out to be a useful lesson for genealogists, too: Don't hog all the records resources, do share your finds, and some hitherto unknown distant cousin may return the favor. These days, the Internet makes sharing your family tree easy. Of course, you can upload pedigree files to online databases such as WorldConnect <worldconnect.rootsweb.com> and GenCircles <gencircles.com>, where other researchers can search them along with zillions of other family trees. But you don't have to limit your sharing to such sites — or give up control over your data. Creating your own Web site — once limited to techno-geeks and those who'd mastered arcane HTML coding — is now almost as easy as sending an e-mail.

If you've already invested in a genealogy software program and spent time entering what you know about your ancestors, you're more than halfway to your own home page. All leading programs let you export GEDCOM files (the universal format for family trees), which you can then use as the basis of your own Web site on a service such as MyFamily.com or My Great Big Family (see box, opposite page). Going that route skirts the question of where to host your Web site. While you can enter your data manually online — handy for beginners — if you have hundreds or thousands of relatives, exporting and uploading a GEDCOM file is the way to go.