A great way to keep the fire of your family history enthusiasm burning is to create a family history blog. Blogs are a great way to collaborate research not only between friends and family, as you can do with email, but with genealogists and family history enthusiasts around the world. It’s easy to set up a blog for free, and you can post entries as often or infrequently as you like.
What is a Family History Blog?
Lorelle VanFossen on her blog, camera on the road, says, “A family history blog is a chronological posting of articles, stories, news, tips, and information on the family’s history. The website is dynamic, with the front page changing with the addition of new material. It is also interactive, as comments are allowed, giving people an opportunity to comment and give feedback on the information you have to offer. A family history blog can be maintained by one person or dozens.”
So, they are basically a journal you can publish online. And you can share what you learn about your family history with your family, friends, and other researchers. Family history blogs are a great way to share research with people—by reading your blog, someone may find the missing link they needed in their family tree!
How do I set one up?
There are many sites that will allow you to create a blog for free. Blogger and WordPress seem to be the most popular hosting sites. You don’t need to know any coding languages to create a blog—you can select a template, name your blog, and start writing your first post within 30 minutes! You can also choose to make your blog private, so that you control who can read your posts, or you can make it public, so anyone who searches for your blog can find it.
What should I post on my Family History Blog?
This is entirely up to you. You can simply add stories and pictures that come to you at random, you can pick a theme for your blog, or you can do a little of both! Some ideas for themes include focusing on a surname, documenting family traditions, finding and preserving photos, interviewing relatives and posting their stories, recording the history of a particular community or area pertinent to your family history, etc. (Ideas from Personal Life Media).
It’s easy to post pictures on a blog, too—especially if you have a smartphone or tablet and download FHmedia to scan and digitize old photos.
Geneabloggers.com is a great resource to help you get started with your blog and learn from other genealogy bloggers. If you aren’t sure what to write about, they have daily prompts you can use to spark a memory or encourage research into a certain topic.
Your FHnotebook is a great resource for organizing and collecting information. You can easily turn information from your notebooks into a blog post with pictures and research information about your ancestors.
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A genealogy blog may also lead to discovering cousins you didn’t know about. I run a blog at http://www.HiddenGenealogyNuggets.com . A second cousin of mine saw a blog post I had and contacted me. Now I have another research partner and cousin I didn’t know about.
Regards, JIm