There are options available for building your family tree online that don't have to cost you anything, like My Heritage Family Tree Builder, which is one of the favorite options of many people, but, I have to praise ancestry.com for making it possible for me to link up with cousins I didn't know I had through member family trees that have people in common with my family tree. I discovered a third cousin, twice removed in Virginia who very kindly sent me some photos of my great uncle and two of my great great aunts. I really loved getting to see what they looked like. I had heard so much about that side of the family being jovial and ornery and their pictures showed some very jovial, smiling people with their arms around each other. I wish I could have known them. She had complete details on my great grandfather's parents and siblings that I didn't even have any names for.
I have linked up with several cousins this way. It is quite nice to be in touch with them, now. They have given me details on family members I knew nothing about. Combining family trees on ancestry.com has allowed me to fill in dates, spouses and children that were complete blanks before. In this way, I am able to keep building the family trees and have gone back into the 1700's without much difficulty, when, in the past, I never really got anywhere with tracking down family members before the 1900's. In a couple months of being on ancestry.com, I have pretty well filled in my family tree and several other family trees I wanted to explore for other family and friends. Before this, I just got nowhere, not realizing it could be so easy to find names, dates and events just by searching on ancestry.com. I found a few items such as obituaries other places, but, I found most of my information on ancestry.com.
Ancestry.com also has a cool feature that lets you send your whole family tree to your other family trees on the free site myheritage.com. That allows one to pay for a membership on ancestry.com as long as you can afford it, then transfer information to other sites to keep your family tree going. I have also found lots of family stories, photos and documents on ancestry.com, mainly from other member trees, but also from newspapers. This is pretty cool-I found wedding and engagement photos of my parents in newspapers, as well as, photos of my other great grandfather at his business in Iowa. Besides all the great information that is at your fingertips, being on ancestry.com is like discovering a hidden attic full of fascinating bits of history, just waiting for you to go through it anytime you feel like sitting down at the computer and wandering through the past. If you are temporarily at a standstill on your own family tree, you can search other ones like those of famous people, presidents, people you suspect are relatives but you aren't quite sure, or just spend a little more time reading through actual census and other documents to see if you can learn a little bit more about the lives of the amazing people in your family tree. After learning where relatives lived, I have then looked up the history of the cities they lived in and added them, along with photos of those areas, to those people so one can get a more complete picture of what their lives were like. I learned that the "New Suspension Bridge" that crossed the Ohio river, connecting Cincinnati and Kentucky, was the first of it's kind and designed by John A. Roebling who, later designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge in the same style, which was the longest suspension bridge in the world until 1903. My great aunt remembered her mother and grandmother and father paying a penny to cross that bridge in the 1890's and have a picnic on the other side. Her father fished and the kids played. She said it was beautiful. I love history and our relatives helped make history during rich and fascinating times in our country's development. You can see how learning about them helps you connect with history in a more meaningful way. It is a cookie jar that is always full.
