What's Hot In Genealogy!

Blogging about anything that you're interested has been a trend for several years and that includes genealogy.  What I have found is that my own desire to blog ebbs and flows.  Some of my posts have a lot of meat to them while others are anecdotal with a bit of fun.  Overall, my blog posts form my family tree diary.  I keep on writing and doing research as I have time.

I recently looked up the "10 Genealogy Blogs Worth Reading".  Now, the article is not dated online so who really knows when it was written.  About half of the blogs listed are truly interesting and up-to-date.  I find it disappointing that the search engine did produce this article as a top result but several of these blogs have not been posted to in quite a while including one that has not been touched since 2009.  I guess that how's it goes with genealogy and blogging, in general.

Ancestry.com has also been a big trend in genealogy for the past couple of years.  I jumped on that bandwagon in 2010 and produced several lines of my family tree on this site.  Did I finish and have I edited all of the people added to the tree with source documents?  The answer is "no" to that question.  While you can fly through developing an family tree on Ancestry.com and accept hints like crazy, it may not be real accurate.  In our day and age, people do want things to be done quickly.  Forming a family tree really shouldn't be done that quickly.  It is a process.  "It's a marathon, not a sprint!"

"It's a marathon, not a sprint!"

I was sad to see "Who Do You Think You Are?" on the NBC's cancelled list.  However, TLC may pick up this series and continue to produce it.  This will be a "wait and see".  Another show about genealogy that I tired watching was called "Finding Your Roots" on PBS.  I must admit this is a bit of a "snoozer".  The enticing point of "Who Do You Think You Are?" is the storytelling part of the program with the elation of the discovery process.  "Finding Your Roots" misses the storytelling arc that peeks people's interest with some suspense and elation of finding their family origins.  A little drama can go a long way to inspiring people to seek out their own family history.

DNA gives me mixed emotions and results.  I think the jury is still out on whether it was worth submitting my husband's DNA to Ancestry.com.  They are still building their database of DNA samples.  The best that my husband's matches have produced are 4th to 6th cousins.  They may as well be my next door neighbor because that gets to be pretty distant and hard to nail down.  Heck, none of those people even have a common surname indicated for my husband.  I think we will need to wait awhile on more submissions.

Last Spring, I spent some time trying to locate the graves of my ancestors.  I even visited a few cemeteries myself with my children tagging along.  I did find a large number of my ancestors at one cemetery in Napa, CA.  I posted my information at Find A Grave.  You can almost build your family tree right on that site based on cemetery plots.  It is public information and somewhat interesting.  Lately, I've given up posting anything else on that site.  At least the information is out there for future reference.

My own hot topic is finding photos of my ancestors.  I love, love photos!  They are an amazing find and a window into the past.  A picture does say a thousand words and it helps if you know who is in the photo.

Circa early 1930s
 Leonard Gruenhagen, Dorothy Borchers, Louise "Bruns" Gruenhagen,
 Ruth Gruenhagen, and  "A Living" Borchers

If anyone is reading this, do share what you consider your "hot topic" in genealogy these days!