31Aug2008: Day 98: Family History

Today at my church, they talked about a new family history website that will be coming out in a few weeks. It sounds really exciting as it takes all these other databases that they currently had and combines them so that when you do a search, you get all the information and you can then edit it. The problem before was that the same information was gathered over and over again, that the past database systems has many duplicates. So you can build your family tree online and because it has some of the information from these databases, it will fill some of it in automatically. This may not happen for everyone unless information was previously submitted to the old databases.

You can also see other people's family tree lines so that if you end up having a common relative somewhere in the tree, you can than e-mail that person and hopefully get more information and/or tell them of corrections and this will all hopefully get rid of the myriad of duplicates. I can attest to some of the duplicates as I found a family member on my mothers side that was listed a few times and he had two wives both who had around 10 children. This just seemed strange to me and I haven't had time to really research it so now I can hopefully see a clearer picture with this new system. Not that he couldn't have had that many children but many of the children have the same name. I was told by someone else that, back then, people were really not too creative in naming their children so the same name would be seen within the family repeatedly. Especially if one of the previous children with that name died. So in this particular family line, you could see three children named Mary. The problem was that it would only give an approximate date of birth and no death date. So like I said, it was a bit strange but it could all be correct.

This new website might be like other sites out there for family history, but one thing that's very different is that it's free! But, you have to be a member of the church to access this new site. I did also hear that the website Ancestry.com was created by church members - which I didn't know. I'm hoping while I'm here to be able to fill in some missing "gaps" from those ancestors that came over from England. Unfortunately, most of them were listed farther North from where we are, but I'm hoping the records will be available in the Family History center at the church.

Makenna is feeling better, but still not eating all that great. I realize they go through eating spurts but it's a little disconcerting when she doesn't eat. Chris BBQ'd some chicken thighs and I peeled the chicken off the bone for Makenna and she wouldn't eat it. Then I offered "sauce" (A1 sauce) and she gobbled it all down. She was quite upset when we didn't have any more chicken to put into sauce. Chris was a bit hesitant about giving Makenna our precious supply of A1, as we only have the one bottle and they don't sell it over here. But I pointed out how she's now eating and that's all I cared about. It's not like we're having steak as often as we used to anyways.