Busy with Genealogy

Besides life getting busy one major reason why I have not been posting much is that I have been busy organizing the family genealogy. I inherited the old family pictures when my grandparents died so I recently scanned them and posted them all on Flickr.com for family members who are computer literate. Through Flickr's association with Qoop I was able to print these pictures for each grandparent line into a nice high quality book. One can get a custom 100 page photo book for $50.00. I took these books and showed them to my relatives this past Thanksgiving with the result that my parent's are giving copies to everyone in the extended family for Christmas.

Related to this I have started putting all the genealogy information I have gathered over the years onto ancestry.com. This is the best online genealogy site in my opinion. One can post family trees, biographies, pictures, and even automatically connect ancestors to public records like census data, etc. After some crosschecking they even combine all entered family trees into what they call a One World Tree so one can connect to that as well. By connecting to the World Tree the weekend before Thanksgiving I found out I was a direct descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins who came over on the Mayflower. John was one of the leaders of the Pilgrims. So the timing could not have been better to make this announcement to the family over Thanksgiving. If one can get a line back to New England with their church christening records one line can go way back.

While at my parent's house I collected pictures of when I and my brothers were young so now I need to scan them. More to do!