This project has been many years in the making. I started family history research when I was 16 years old. In my grade 10 history course, we had a unit on multiculturalism in Canada. One of the projects that students could do in the course was a family tree. Since all four of my grandparents were alive and well, I thought that it would be a perfect project for me, and that my grandparents would do all the hard work of remembering the stories!
It took very little time talking with my grandparents about them, their families and what they remembered about their own grandparents before I was hooked! It turned out to be a defining moment in my life, as I have been passionate about genealogy and family history ever since.
It is now more than 30 years later, and I am more hooked than ever. My time for research has waxed and waned over the years as I have gone through the rest of high school, university, a career in Engineering, marriage and raising a family of my own. There were times when I spent countless hours every week at the local Family History Centre, or organizing my data in one genealogy program or another, and other times when I went for months without having any time to even review my notes, let alone do additional research.
But, the passion remained, regardless. So, now that I do have more time I have decided to get my research "out there" and more accessible. This has partly been as a result of finally joining Ancestry.ca. I delayed joining that site for quite some time, partly because I had many other less expensive resources available to me, and partly because I had read about many peoples' frustrations with poor indexes. After having joined I do understand some of the frustration, but I have found Ancestry to be quite beneficial in my research.
Ancestry.ca has a section called Member Trees where users can enter their family tree and link to the resources they used as evidence. This is all good, and I started to do this for a while, but I soon realized that I would be duplicating all of the effort I spent entering the same information into my genealogy software. So, I decided that it would be far easier if I just published all of that information on my own.
How to accomplish publishing my data was the next question. I use The Master Genealogist (or TMG) by WhollyGenes software and have been for several years now. I think it is definitely the best software I have used for genealogy by far. There is a companion product for TMG, written by a third party, called SecondSite. I downloaded a trial version, tried it for a day and then immediately bought it. Very impressive software! And, equal in quality to TMG.
I will be publishing my family tree in phases. The first phase, which I hope to launch in the next month or two, will contain my direct ancestors where I feel confident in my conclusions and have been able to spend a good deal of time in various records gathering a good weight of evidence. I will also include all of the children of these couples, my great-uncles and great-aunts, and any information about them that I am confident is reliable.
As time goes on I will continue to move forward to more generations, and of course add more ancestors as I gain confidence in those conclusions.
I will also expand more on why I love to use TMG, and now SecondSite, for my research. My background is in engineering and in software development, so I have a real appreciation for what it takes to build products of this quality.
Of course software is only one of the many tools that genealogists and family historians use. We also rely on books, web pages, genealogical and historical societies, libraries and archives. Education is also key, and I have been fortunate to take many courses that have been beneficial in honing my research skills. I will also include information about those resources.
And finally, I plan to have a blog for other postings as they come to me. I doubt I will be the most prolific blogger on the web, but I hope to post enough to keep it interesting.