For my birthday in 2014 my husband decided to get me a laptop. I could have my choice of a MacBook or a Windows computer. The choice for me was easy. I wanted a genealogy software program and it was only available in the Mac / Apple format. So once I had my MacBook all set up, the first program I installed was Family Tree. I started immediately to enter all the family data that I had.

After I had played with the software and had entered a large amount of people, I realized that the reports and information I could generate through this platform needed to be shared. History classes were always my favorite. And it wasn’t until I had completed my US History class as a Sophomore in High School that I found out about the Revolutionary and Civil War veterans in my family tree. I vowed then that if I was blessed with children that they would grow up knowing who their ancestors were. Family Tree gave me the desire to not just share this information with my children, but with all my relatives. The question soon became how do I go about doing this?

After much research I decided to utilize a free blog platform and my first blog was launched in January of 2014. This blog was for the family of my mothers parents and their relations. I learned all about blogs, scheduling, preparing post content and the struggles that come with writing. In the summer of 2015 I added a blog for the family of my fathers parents and their relations. With two blogs now things moved fast. I planned out posts for the whole year, well in advance. I scanned hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photos (2,931 to date). Then in January of 2018 I added one more blog. This one was for my husbands side of the family, his parents and their relations.

I thought it would be easy. And most of the time it is. But there are times when I struggle. The words just won’t come or I get frustrated with the photos. There are times when I work on a post and am so excited to share it with you and no one acknowledges it. Or times when I put up a photo a little bit of writing and that post gets the most traffic. I’ve learned so much bringing to you our families photographs but the best thing I’ve learned is why I do this. Because while it started out as me wanting to bring photos and information to you, it’s ended with me doing this for ME.

Last year during the Covid pandemic, I had lots of time to think. One of the things I thought about was an easier way to write each families posts; instead of having three separate blog sites to write on. And so after much research and comparison, I was lead to the WordPress site. There I learned how to have one blog, with three separate content pages. And if someday I decide to add another family or two to our growing mix, it can easily be done. My old content will still be available at the old webpages, until I can figure out how to migrate them or what I want to do. I figured getting this set up was my first priority the other stuff could happen later.

My hope is that you enjoy the content that I’ve prepared for your branch of the family tree. If you want to read some of the content that I’ve prepared for the other branches in my family tree, just click on their links and read away. Comments are welcome even if you are not part of that branch of the tree. I am blessed indeed to be a part of three great branches and look forward to sharing with you all that I have.

Michelle – Genealogy Genius and Blogist Extraordinaire