2015 Spring: I began a free Family Search.org family tree. It is amazing the billions of online records that one can piece together to create a family’s history and story. The United States Census records were my favorite for a time. Now I like the 1000+ page books that list genealogies and life details for whole lines of families.

About 25 years ago I would have needed plane tickets, hotel reservations and a great sense of direction to access these huge resource books. Now I just need the internet and massive amounts of time. Many genealogy books are in the public domain @Archive.org or HathiTrust, many are on Ancestry.com.

Daunting but doable: I’m replacing Ance$try.com sources with free sources. It’s a little annoying to be an unpaid member of ancestry and not be able to view the records I’ve studied, renamed and saved. I understand access to records is their profit, why would they offer these records freely? but still an annoyance. So because some records are freely offered at FamilySearch.org I’m changing to FamilySearch.org’s free sources. I’ve started with census records. Slow going but I think a benefit: the record view is free.