Blogging family history
3 Feb 2009 by Fran Jensen | Posted in FamilySearch
A lot of blogs related to family history include news items about the new and improved resources available online for family history work. Some family history blogs are used for entirely different purposes. Over a year ago I discovered a Blog that was a transcription of an English soldier’s letters he wrote during World War I. (See WWI: Experiences of an English Soldier.) The letters were being transcribed exactly 90 years after they were written and posted to the blog. I was impressed with the project and started thinking about different ways that I could use a blog for my own family history efforts. I decided to blog about the research I had done for two different ancestors:
In both blogs I’ve started to add a history of all the research that has been done for both the Curtis and West families. My hope was to take all my research notes and add them to the blog so that children and grandchildren wouldn’t have to conduct the research all over again. I’ve also added a lot of pictures to the blog that I’ve collected over the years. Three reasons for adding pictures: to preserve them, to share them, and to provide a way for others to identify the unknowns. The West blog has multiple authors because other distant cousins wanted to share the research they have done as well.
In the future I will have a book printed directly from the contents in the blog - and I won’t have to retype anything!!! There are print-on-demand publishing companies online that can automatically generate a book from your blog (cool, huh!!!). Producing a book with my research notes will be a lot better than having my children sort through six filing cabinet drawers, don’t you think?
I’ve learned a lot about Blogs during the past year. And when I think about what got me started, it was the WWI: Experiences of an English Soldier blog that I discovered one day while surfing the web.
