Online Family Trees

I recently did an online search of my name and discovered that I was listed in an online family tree on my father’s side. Leo Bensman is my great-grandmother’s twin brother (I never knew we had twins in the family) and the tree does not extend past my father and uncle (they also have me incorrectly listed as my father’s sister). The website also links to various family pages with old pictures of relatives in the US that I never knew I had.

I’m really quite inspired by the concept of online family trees. We talk about the Internet as a tool of building communities but for some reason I never considered that it could also be a useful tool for connecting a single family as well. Almost my entire extended family is made up of immigrants from Belarus to either the US or Israel and the older generation is mainly responsible for keeping everyone in touch overseas. They trade printed photographs and letters with various important and mundane updates. But with the possibility of online family trees, even my family’s younger generation who hardly know one another could participate in maintaining a living database through which to mark significant life events, deaths, memorials, post photographs, tell stories, share recipes, and effectively build a family archive forever preserved in cyberspace. Maybe a project for after graduation?

The site for the Bensman line doesn’t seem to use a program of any sort, but these websites and software can help you find ancestors and build family trees as well:

http://www.familytree.com
http://www.ancestry.com
http://www.onegreatfamily.com
http://tribalpages.com
http://www.livingmemory.com
http://www.familytreesearcher.com
http://genealogy.com

Polina