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Blogging Your Memories | |
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Blogging Your Memories
Find out how the Web log craze can facilitate your family history research.
Have you entered the blogosphere yet? A fast-growing Internet trend, Web logs ("blogs" for short) hit the mainstream during the 2004 political conventions
and have been popping up by the thousands ever since. In case you've missed them, blogs are online journals where people can post anything on their minds.
Type a subject into a search engine, and you're bound to find a blog devoted to it. Genealogy's a hot topic—we've turned up thousands of family
tree-focused blogs.
So how can this trend help your family history research? Blogs are ideal for connecting with far-off kin—and even distant cousins you haven't met yet.
Once you sign up for a blog (see below), you can post your research brick walls and break-throughs, reunion details, old photos, links to your favorite
genealogy Web sites and anything else related to your family tree. Then anyone who reads your blog will know what you're up to.
Consider setting up a blog for each of your family's surnames, or create a single "umbrella" blog with separate categories for surnames, places and pictures.
Just remember that blogs are public, so you don't want to post personal information such as your phone number or address.
Most blogs are free and easy to set up—you don't have to buy special software or know a thing about Web coding. Here's how to get started.
Blog Basics Blogs are designed to look like actual diaries, and typically comprise short daily entries arranged in chronological order. The home page will contain your
most recent entry, as well as links to the last five or 10 messages (depending on your blog host). Blogs usually archives articles by month and make them
accessible through links on the homepage.
Worried about becoming a lone voice in the blogosphere? Don't, because visitors can post via a "comments" link. This feature allows family historians to
share findings, photos and research notes. Most blogs have a setting in the control panel that lets you hid comments from public view or allow only
comments from people you designate.
Blog Benefits Don't be shy about inviting relatives to participate. After all, the more content on your blog, the great the change a distant cousin will find you
online. Genealogy Ralph Brandi connected with some Polish cousins via his blog (at www.brandi.org/geneablogy),
where he'd mentioned the town Lemierzyce, his great-aunt's home after World War II. Surf over to Brandi's blog to see how he's posted research notes as well as
photos of tombstones and vital records.
If you're one of those people who bemoan the lack of ancestral diaries, now's your chance to create a journal of your own. Involve the whole family, and
before long you'll have a diary to pass on to your descendants—it'll become a treasured memento from their 21st-century ancestors.
Bring your research up to speed! For more technology tips, pick up the February 2005
Family Tree Magazine.
By Nancy Hendrickson
First, you need to select a blog host. Some of the most popular are Blog-City (www.blog-city.com/bc), 22Blog
(22blog.com), Blogger (www.blogger.com), tBlog (www.tblog.com)
and eBloggy (www.ebloggy.com). The setup's about the same regardless of which host you choose. Simply pick a user name and
password, then a anem for your blog—for example, "Sullivan Genealogy Research" or "Ross Genealogy in Florida." Choose a name that truly reflects your
subject matter, so fellow genealogists will be able to find you. Then pick a template (most blog hosts offer attractive ones) and start posting.
Of course, one of the major advantages of posting to a genealogy blog is that other researchers can connect with you via search engines. Each article you write
will have its own Web page, and the blog software automatically will give the page the same name as the article. For example, if you post an article titled
"Coleman Surname Research in Bismarck, North Dakota," the Web page will have that title, too. So when an online genealogist searches for coleman
genealogy "north dakota," your blog probably will show up in the search results.
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