How many teenagers today actually sit down and talk with their grandparents, if they’re lucky their great-grandparents, listening to stories of another time?  Stories that will soon be forgotten if they haven’t been already.  What can we do to resurrect them?  Through genealogy you can bring many of them back to life, returning them to paper or computer, so they can be remembered, archived in the internet world, for the technical savvy generations to come.

To Genealogy, “the computer” is ingenious, and devastating at the same time, and we must adapt.

http://Ancestry.com, http://Fold3.com, http://Findagrave.com and the list goes on.  With today’s technology there are endless ways of searching for your ancestors without leaving your computer.  These three search engines above can be instrumental in finding your ancestors.  They are paid sites used by professional genealogist, and they will hasten your results.  But if you like the search, a “free” simple google.com search can get you started.  It all begins with YOU.

Birth certificate, marriage license,  census – (every ten years there is a federal census that can track re-location), property records, baptismal records, and newspapers to name a few.  The internet brings all of these records to one location, your computer.  Ingenious for Genealogy.

Why do you ask is the computer devastating to Genealogy?

No longer do families sit together passing stories down from one generation to another, stories told to them by theirs.  We have lost a whole generation of storytelling to the computer.  Computers now occupy our children’s lives.

Therefore, if you can’t beat them, join them, as long as we continue to pass down and preserve the stories of our ancestors, with the new technical tools of the future.