Dead relly digging

Yeah, yeah, I know it's not week 2 already (apart from in some parallel universe where Shakespeare runs the local dairy and Daniel Vettori is prime minister), but I couldn't resist ploughing on with the next task.

You see, I will have to confess - I am a dead relly digger, a granny hunter, an ardent genealogist. I like wandering around cemeteries. I know how to use every microfilm reader between here and Waipukurau. When my doctor asks if there is a history of heart disease/madness/diabetes/etc in my family, I can tell him what my great-great-great-great-grandfather died from (and by the way ... it was none of the above)

So I was really keen to see what new Web 2.0 stuff is out there for family historians and genealogists. I recently printed off a family tree of just three generations which took over 20 A4 pages and thought there must be an easier way. Unfortunately web2.0 ain't it.

Hmmm ... can't say I was overly impressed with either myheritage or geni. Fine for doing a basic tree with cute photos to send to your rellies. But majorly lacking in many features that are standard in other genealogy programs. Neither program had places to add sources which are vital in family history/genealogy research. If you can't locate where you got the information, it becomes a bit useless. Hard to find (and had to trawl through too many windows) places to stick additional information like christening, burial, occupation. Also very little space for notes or other longer information such as cemetery transcriptions, immigration records, education information etc etc.

I added "my tree" (pretending to be Henry VIII - figured if it could cope with 6 wives, it could cope with anything) - and stuck in a couple of photos and embedded in my blog. That all worked fine - it wasn't easy to find out how to sort the wives into the proper order. It was also tricky getting the thing into some viewable format where you could be more than two people at a time. All up, neither was particularly user friendly unless you were somewhat of a cyber-geek to start with and were not afraid of breaking the internet by trawling around through multitudinous windows and pop-ups.

I eventually found the two (or three or four) places needed to enter basic information about a person - but couldn't find a place to add random comments (likes tennis, wrote Greensleeves, had strange taste in codpieces) and notes. Maybe it is there somewhere but I left my speleology equipment behind.

I don't think I'd recommend these sites to customers - they're both pretty 'genealogy lite'. Plus I don't think many people would get far with being only able to add 500 people without paying - mind you my family are Catholic and we can easily get up to 500 in one generation! There are free programs out there like PAF and Legacy which offer far more features. There are also many sites where you can share your tree on the net for free - Rootsweb, World Connect, FTM World Tree, Ancestry, Lost Cousins etc.

These established sites also adhere more strongly to standard genealogy protocol of not including information about living people on internet trees. Even though, these programs are invite only, I would be loath to stick too much personal information about living relatives on an internet based tree.

Maybe sites like these will give people a taste of that mad, bad and dangerous to begin pastime of dead relly hunting.