Life’s Curveballs

As you can tell, I’ve taken an extended break from blogging since my last post was on February 6th. I have thought seriously about taking all of my blogs down and off the net.  My Flyball blog also sits idle as my interest in the sport wanes.  It’s the way life is, at least for me it is.  My interests are changing all the time and I have a very hard time focusing on any one thing for an extended period of time.

Back in the mid 90s, I found an interest in genealogy and jumped in with both feet but after several years of intense interest, I lost interest.  I have since rekindled my interest in genealogy and now almost everything else has taken a back seat.  Therefore, with that said, I thought that I would use this forum to talk about genealogical topics, some general topics, and others more specific to my family.  When I first started studying my family in the mid 90s, there was very little information that could be found on the Internet but now the amount on the web has rocketed.  There is still a long way to go because there are gaps that need filling but the web has come a long way since then.

Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com is by far the Internet leader in the field of genealogy on the web.  They surely have the most databases of any genealogical web site on the Internet and I use this one site the most.  All of the U. S. Census records can be found along with many other countries.  At the latest count, there are almost 26,000 databases that can be accessed and this number is growing.  Everything from Census records, birth, marriage, and death records, military records, to newspaper and periodical records can be found on this one site.  Additionally, if you use the software program, Family Tree Maker, you can access the Ancestry.com web site and merge records right into you home database.  The software is probably not the best on the market for genealogy, but they are making improvements and service pack 3 has just been released with much need improvements.  I was one of the beta testers for service pack 3 and I would love to hear about any further improvements that you think are necessary.   All of the beta testers for service pack 3 were given an email address for suggestions or bugs that we find.

Future post on this site will mostly be about genealogy and my family.  Some of the surnames that I am researching are Buniff, Boudreaux, Dickinson, Ewing, Fromental, Harvey, Kaufmann, Littlewood, Slevin, Weir, Welsh, Worrilow, Wolverson, and Zopf (Copf) to name a few.

Larry