Build a Family Website!

Submitted by: HostGFSLoni@aol.com

The best tip I can offer if you are stuck is to start your own family website. AOL offers every member free web space and a way to create a simple site with step-by-step instructions. (Keyword: Hometown). 

I have been working on my husband's genealogy for many years now, and the biggest brick wall was his Aunt Essie Mae. No one seemed to know much about this lady who had married 4 times and had 9 children before the age of 30. She and her descendants had disappeared off the face of the earth in 1941 after the death of her parents. 

For years I queried living relatives, (my husband's parents had both died when he was young, so no help there) and none of his cousins seemed to know much, not even the names of all her children. (By the way, I found the cousins through the website, too!)

I found only one "outside" reference to this lady in the Genealogy of a related family which mentioned the marriage of one of her daughters. That yielded no further information, though I contacted all the people in the area of the wedding with the last name mentioned.

Fortunately, I had put up a website for my husband's family, and through that web site I have "been located" by many relatives and many brick walls have been crashed through. Well, just about Christmas time I got an email out of the blue from an Essie Mae descendant... one of her granddaughters who had just purchased a computer. Through the granddaughter, I have since had contact with almost all of Essie Mae's children and grandchildren and learned facts and stories and shared photos that would never have been possible through just normal records. I've even reunited them with other cousins that they had "lost".

The final kicker was that Essie Mae changed her name to Dorothy before she died, and had married a 5th time, so I would never had found her without finding her descendants first!

So, my very best suggestion, when all records fail, is put up a family website. Once you do, it will show up eventually on search engines, and when someone visits a site like "google.com" and types in your family's last name, up will come a link to your web site. You may find relatives you didn't know existed and information you thought you'd never have! :)

 

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