Do you Twitter? I don’t yet, but I probably will. Eventually.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Twitter is another of those ubiquitous social networking tools that have swept over cyberspace. It’s kind of a mashup of e-mail, text messaging and instant messaging.
Although I have a natural aversion to anything that has a fairly steep learning curve in relation to its potential life expectancy, social media are too powerful to simply ignore. Thus, I blog, am a casual LinkedIn and Facebook participant and am an enthusiastic reader of RSS feeds via my Google Reader.
And, just as the Internet has created unprecedented easy access to millions upon millions of genealogical records, the proliferation of social media sites has made it easier than ever to manage and share your own family history online.
I’ve spent some time checking out many of these sites myself recently, finally settling on the free We Relate wiki site sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc. in partnership with the Allen County Public Library. As my blogging friend Randy Seaver points out, there are plenty of these types of sites that you can check out yourself.
I picked We Relate because it includes many of the features I was looking for, most importantly, the ability for others to add stories and pictures from their home computers. My father and brother did a great job of tracking down my father’s family line a while back and someone did some similar work on my mother’s line. Now I can put all this information into the wiki and share it with relatives in the hopes that they will be able to build onto the family legacy with more stories, research and photos. It’s free and very easy to use.
Even if you’re a bit wary of all this social media stuff, these genealogical sites offer a nifty way to expand and share your research. They’re worth a peek.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
Flickr photo courtesy of blogefl.
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