Family Tree Maker - one of my ongoing obsessions.

A couple of Christmases ago, we were sitting around the table and the discussion turned to family, and family history as it often does in that situation. Being a technology geek, I instantly found several pieces of software to address the chore of documenting the family tree and finally settled on Family Tree Maker and its online counterpart Ancestry.com You can read more about Ancestry.com and how it works, at NextAdvisor.

It started off innocently enough, with adding my family, my wife's and branching up and down a few lines. Soon I started doing some research and found a very cool tool that automatically searches public records based on likely hits from the data you provide. When you add a name to the software, along with a date of birth, if it finds a hit, you get a little green leaf on the name. you can then research the 'hit' and see if it is a match. The software looks at US Census data, public birth and death records, other peoples uploaded family trees and even some obscure items like passenger manifests. I was able to find images of the actual passenger ship manifests and Ellis Island records of both my mother and father coming over from Switzerland - Very Cool!

I usually work for a couple of weeks then loose interest then pick it back up again (probably like this blog will turn out) ...Well, its now two years later and I have 1261 people listed in my family tree. No one famous yet - but that's a feature too and the program is still 'looking'.