Written by Karen Zach
I know everyone in the world doing a genealogical blog has probably thought of this as a topic, but I’m writing about it, anyway! Having done genealogy for over 50 years, I began when people walked the cemeteries, sometimes for hours to find an ancestor. Now, with a click of a hand, there’s the ancestor and often with a pic of the gravestone right there on Find a Grave or Billion Graves in a matter of seconds. Personally, I spent hours in the courthouse looking for wills, probates, marriages and the like. Now, the original images are many times right on Ancestry. Granted, Ancestry’s indexing is atrocious, and a subscription is expensive but if one does genealogy as many hours a week as I do it is well worth the money.
Ancestry and Find a Grave, however, aren’t new. Well, neither is my topic: Facebook. But FB as a genealogical tool is a fairly fresh one. I love it. A whole new aspect of the genealogical world.
I am the Administrator of the Indiana Genealogy Facebook page (well there are two by that name, but ours is the active one). These people are amazing. Someone will ask a question and in a matter of a half-hour have the answer, and sometimes a matter of minutes. Of course, this is Indiana related but we often get general questions, too. Just today not long before I wrote this I had refound my favorite family picture from when I was young.
As you note with 50 years’ experience in the genealogical world, I’m not a spring chicken. I know nothing about coloring photos and just a bit about fixing ‘em. However, I just noted on the Indiana FB page that I wondered what it would look like if it was colored. You can see the results. Plus, not only did I get one rendition that was fairly close (the boys did have on light blue shirts but my dress was really a pale pink) but two others besides.
Poor Putnam County, Indiana. I have had the GenWeb site for it three times. I don’t really want it but the state coordinators at the time know I’d take good care of it and add things as I could. So, hubs and I decided just to keep it this time and we’ve added over 1,000 obituaries in that year; 52 biographies; 10 photos; 24 towns totaling 97 and know there are more; 129 news items; 17 military-related things; 178 marriage announcements; 30 divorces; almost 100 school and church articles and information. Nothing compared to my Montgomery GenWeb page, one of the best in the state (not bragging, it’s true; well, okay maybe a little proud) and up there in the nation, but the point is that I began a Putnam County Facebook page and wow, there are only 50 on the page but they are so interested and have had some super discussions and appreciate the little I do for the site and the FB page. Well worth the effort even for so few. Do the same for my Fountain and Montgomery ones only I just add things to the Crawfordsville and Montgomery County history FB page I don’t administrate it. They both have many users.
Family pages on Facebook have been a God-send to me in regards to genealogy, especially three of ‘em. The Sevier family is my son-in-law’s thus three of my grandchildren’s family. I had the names of the Seviers but nothing about them and ended up getting a picture of the home in Tennessee where they lived and a photo of his direct ancestors. Wow! The McCracken family I was totally stuck on and discovered through a family FB page where my connection was and have found the greatest cousins to share finds with and the last FB Family page I’ll discuss although I am on several more, these are just my three favorites – active, fun, helpful – is the Darst page. For years I had one of my three direct Mary Darsts (certainly the most common name of all the Darst women) connected to the wrong father. A young pup just starting out told me I was wrong and I didn’t believe her (after all I have 3,000 pages of research done by a professor from Texas as well as myself and several other amazing researchers) – she had to be wrong, but then she proved it and boy did I have to eat crow – lots of crow!
There are many more types of Facebook pages one can use for genealogy. The Old School, If You Grew Up In… or other town ones; Library FB pages; church pages of where your ancestor attended; specific ones for a program you use (I belong to a Legacy user one that has helped me immensely); and just seriously on and on. Why we even had a gal that just started a FB page for the restaurant we owned years ago (in hub’s family over 40 years). It has been much fun the last few days and all types of relationships are discussed, even found a new cousin on it.
I know, I know, most of you have already thought of doing genealogy this way but IF you haven’t, get busy, get busy, get busy. It’s a whole new world out there for you to explore. Get busy, get busy, get busy — NOW!
