This site is developing gradually. I have been working for some time on building a record of our family and tracing ancestors as far back as I can. I am also trying to make sure that the information that I have is consistent and documented. Should you discover errors or think that I have misrepresented the family, please contact me or comment here.

The actual family records can be fund in a number of places on-line. Over the years I have put family trees up on

• Ancestry.com
• RootsWeb
• World Connect and
• Genealogy.com

Each of these sites has a bit different information as they vary considerably in the ease of changing or updating the information. Ancestry.com is accessible only by a subscription. For example, this is a link to my grandfather’s record at Ancestry.com. When I am logged in to Ancestry, I am taken to his record. If the reader is not a subscriber you will not be able to see that record.

On the other hand you can easily visit the genealogical records at the other three sites. This is a link to grandfather Anderson’s record at RootsWeb. I designed this page from scratch, though the information has been generated from one of the genealogy programs that I use to build the family trees.

At World Connect you can also access grandfather Anderson’s record. The page to which I have linked shows Dr. Anderson’s descendants. You could also chose to see his ancestry by selecting “Ahnentafel” above the Descendant Register, Generation 1.

Finally you can explore a different way of presenting the record for Grandfather Anderson at Genealogy.com. On this page you see Dr Anderson and his children. You will note numbers to the left of the individual names of the children, clicking on one of these numbers will take to the record for the individual and their children.

You may have noticed that even though these are different web sites that they appear to be part of the same underlying  business, in fact three of them are owned by Ancestry.com: obviously Ancestry.com, World Connect, and RootsWeb.  Although Genealogy.com and records I have there are a separate company, these pages were made with Family Tree Maker, now owned by Ancestry.com.

When I began working on our family history, Family Tree Maker and a myriad of contributed family trees were put online by Broderbund. The CDs that listed these contributed family trees were available for purchase and could be used to locate ancestors. However, as genealogy and the pursuit of family history has become more popular, there has been a consolidation in this arena much as there has been in other businesses. Ancestry.com has swallowed up many of the diverse genealogical services.

When RootsWeb was independent one could find nearly all of the county and state historical sites hosted free on their site. These societies were clustered under the GenWeb rubric and provided free access to the information these societies. The societies did charge for compilations of genealogical records relevant to their home area. However, when Ancestry purchased RootsWeb, many of these societies left and formed their own associations independent of Ancestry.com. The feeling seemed to be that too much control would be exercised from the central business offices.

In fact USGenWeb is now totally independent of Ancestry and provides a very different service to the genealogical and family history community.  The title to their web page (Free Genealogy and Family History Online – The USGenWeb Project) quite clearly reflects this original philosophy.