52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy - Follow Friday - Week 2

52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy

Follow Friday

Week 2

52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy 2012 prompts suggested by Amy Coffin; thanks, Amy!

    •    Week 2 – Paid Genealogy Tools: Which paid genealogy tool do you appreciate the most? What special features put it at the top of your list? How can it help others with their genealogy research?
This week’s prompt runs from Sunday, January 8 through Saturday, January 14, 2012.


My wife and I use four subscriptions. Ancestry.com is the most used - We generally start our searches there - census data is very useful, including state as well as U.S. Occasionally there will be other records that are useful. We are still frustrated by the excess search results that have nothing to do with what we requested. We do use the Family Trees, but recognize them as only clues, not expecting them to be well researched or complete - though it is nice when they are!

Footnotes/Fold3 is especially good for military records searches.

Newspaper Archives.com is useful for much narrower searches, of course. Especially if you are looking for information for the first half or so of the 20th Century, if you find anything, it can be really neat details to add to your family history, such as: obituaries; anniversary, birth, death, graduation, workplace change announcements; social news; community news, etc. This information is rarely available from any other source.

I won't comment on the other one… or the others we have had, and no longer have. Hope these thoughts and comments are useful to someone. It was interesting to have a current discussion with my wife about current usage preparing to write this. That was useful.  ;-)


Families are Forever!  ;-)