My Family Tree with Ancestry.com

Thank you to Ancestry.com for helping me learn about my family history.

It is always fun to go back into time a bit and review your family history.  I had never checked out Ancestry.com before, but last week I was able to start digging around to create my family tree and to find out more about my family’s past!

I started inputting information in Ancestry‘s Family Tree building tool for both sides of my family.  It immediately started giving me helpful information about my family members, including birth and death dates, records of marriages and divorces, census information (including siblings/children and places they lived), and even linked me to other peoples’ publicly shared family trees in which we shared relatives.  I was able to easily review the information and add specifically what I wanted to my family tree.

Without having anything to help me except a small working knowledge of our family’s geographic history and a few names, I was able to go back into the 1800s with my family!  I need to find my paper copy of my family tree so I can input more information, and hopefully get some pictures uploaded to share with my relatives and anyone else seeking more information about them or my ancestors.

Below is a four generations photo from my own “photo archives” with my daughter, myself, my mom, and my grandma.  I added this one to Ancestry.com and tagged all of us on it from my Family Tree I’ve created on there.  I really want my kids to know their heritage and more about the people that shaped their lives – most before they were even born.

I just love looking through old photos of my loved ones, like this one of my grandmother (also pictured above), and her husband, my Popop.  What a sweet keepsake!

Adding these photos was so simple.  I was able to tag the various members of my family in the photos, recall the date and place of the photo, and more.  You can even use one of these photos as the display photo for a family member.

As you can see from my progress below so far, I have been able to dig back pretty far without using any of my own research and paper family tree resources.  I love that Ancestry.com makes it so simple to check out public records and other family trees to build your own.  I also love the flexibility in adding information.  That little leaf icon in the right of that entry represents a little “hint” that they have available to potentially add to your family tree.

Does this seem like something you’d like to do?  You can grab your own Ancestry.com free trial and get your research started right away!  You can even share your findings with family members as well.

Thanks again to Ancestry.com for allowing me the opportunity to check out and build my own family tree.  I’ll definitely be back often to update and add media files!