The place to start

I'm a bit late to the game with this blog, but my experience with genealogy has become an experience worth writing about. This coming Memorial Day will mark the two year anniversary of the quest that my brother John and I embarked upon.

Truth be known, he and I had been "rattling sabers" for quite some time previous to then about researching the family history, but at that point it was all talk and no action. Sadly, it was probably the passing of my mother's sister, Lois Fitch, in 2005, and my father's younger brother, Robert Lee Baetz the year before that gave us somewhat of a sense of urgency. We had already lost our grandparents by that time and I often lament that we had not started our research when they were still living. Just 30 minutes with each of them today would be golden. Sometime in 2006 I was finally able to get from my parents the files they had collected over the years on our family's history. Even with that in hand though, I didn't really know where to start and the effort stalled.

It was my brother that got the ball rolling. Ancestry.com was running some promotions the week leading up to Memorial Day 2007, and my brother registered and started our Baetz family tree. Shortly thereafter, he "invited" me into the tree as editor, and I began to expand the tree with the files I had obtained from my parents. Within a few weeks, both of us received an introductory "3 days free access" to the premium content of Ancestry.com, to which we both indulged. Too much actually, and I may address that in another blog entry.

For those of you not familiar with Ancestry.com, a few words about them. First of all, I don't want this blog to come across as an advertisement for Ancestry. There are many options for the genealogist today, both online resources as well as stand-alone software applications. I'm not here to endorse any particular one, they all have their pluses and minuses I'm sure. But as Ancestry.com is where we got started and remain as of today, it relates to our experience with genealogy.

Ancestry.com is part of the Generations Network, headquartered I believe in Provo, Utah and is in some way affiliated with LDS. It is a for profit venture that exists essentially to sell premium subscription to their service. That service includes a great many resources, including searchable databases of census records, vital records, military records, etc. etc., and also cross references family databases in the One World Tree. What they have is very extensive, but also very expensive. Every person that you enter in your tree is automatically matched to all of these records they have access to. It can be a double edged sword, more on that some other time. All in all, Ancestry is very nice, but for now we use the service as registered guests and are still deciding whether or not to purchase the premium service.

As we approach two years of research into our family history, there have been a great many wonderful experiences to share. Many twists in the road and unanticipated finds that beg to be captured in a form beyond what can be expressed by simply filling in a pedigree chart. That's what I hope to accomplish with this blog. I hope for this to be a log of current events, and as I have two years of events to draw upon, I intend to revisit some of those. I am also hopeful that the many distant relatives and genealogists I have met, both in person and online, will drop in from time to time to see what's up in my neck of the woods.