Another New Year

I started experimenting with this blog in November ... and then promptly failed to add any posts at all during the month of December.  Where did the time go?  Two weeks in Colorado, a week to get ready for Christmas, two Christmas get-togethers, and a half week in Lexington, Kentucky to spend New Years with friends.  Whew!! 

So now the holidays are past and it's day no. 2 of the new year.  Time to get serious about this blog if I'm going to stick with it.  One of my biggest dilemmas has been deciding how to best share the genealogy info I already have while connecting with others who can provide updates/corrections and additional info.

For some time I've had a family site on MyFamily.com for my Church relatives.  Even though it was never as active as I had hoped, it did prove useful for sharing family photos with each other.  The folks at MyFamily.com worked on a new version of the program that provided a whole new "look and feel" and I migrated my old site over to the new version.  Unfortunately, it seems that ancestry.com is now letting the myfamily.com sites die a slow death (a long story that I won't go into here) so I've started looking into other possibilities.

I toyed with uploading a GEDCOM file to TribalPages.com but I haven't yet shared it with anyone.  I'm just not sure I want to go that route:  it requires that folks have yet another user name and password; and GEDCOM's aren't one of the strengths of my genealogy software.

In 2010, I joined facebook and created a group for my Church relatives.  A lot of my family already has facebook accounts, so it's easy to make a connection with them there.  My biggest complaint with facebook is that group pages cannot handle photo albums.  Photos, yes; albums, no.  The recent changes facebook instituted for groups still don't enable the use of albums, something that really disappoints me.  It's a feature that many folks desire, so maybe if I wait long enough it will happen.

At this point, I'm leaning toward a combination of methods to reach out to others:

• facebook to reach the social networkers with family photos
• my own website to provide the details of my research via individual histories, pedigrees, photos, etc. (more on this in the future when I'm ready to launch the site)
• this blog to discuss any number of things related to my genealogy quest

By providing links to tie all three together, I hope to begin sharing my info on a new level.  Here's to a new year!