Thing #6

After last night's torrent of words you'd think I wouldn't have anything left to say. :) I don't think that's ever been a problem for me - at a loss for words. I usually come up with something to say.

I chose MyHeritage to explore. As I looked down the short list "genealogy" jumped out at me. Since it's one of my greatest passions I chose it for my assignment. There were others listed but this one was #1 and I didn't care for the others just from a cursory look.

I was curious about Amiglia and took the tour of the site. I really liked the mapping section much better than MyHeritage, but to use the site required registering for a free year and I was afraid I'd forget to cancel it! :)

Back to MyHeritage- It's very user friendly: simple and easy to use. The funny thing is that when I signed on to experiment with it, I was informed I was already registered! Apparently I had tried it out some time ago and forgot all about it. Oh well, senility hits us all eventually.

I did go ahead and input information to see how the program operates. It has a lot of good features, easy to navigate and even offers several languages with which to work. Reports can be generated for ancestors of a specific person or descendants of a single person. Relationships between family members can be determined. I don't like the map feature since it wouldn't zero in on a specific town, just the state. Amiglia showed the actual place and an aerial shot of the area. That was pretty neat.

While I think MyHeritage is a great beginner's tool, for the more experienced genealogist it's too simple. I guess I'm spoiled to the program I use that has so many more features and options. It's like using an outline instead of the whole document. But for those just starting, it's great.

I'm not sure I can see its use in the school library; possibly in the classroom as part of a unit of study in history or sociology. When I was in college one of my history professors was excited about her ancestor who was the subject of a poem about a Revolutionary War-time hero. She encouraged us to do some research on our family. The next year an English professor chose a photo journal of our family as one of our required assignments. I was hooked after those two assignments. I can see students using research tools [a TEKS objective] to discover information about their family and using the website to store the information. Using information from their family tree they could produce written documents for English, history, etc. It would definitely be a fun way for them to learn.