Week #2 – Paid Online Genealogy Tools: Which paid genealogy tool do you appreciate the most? What special features put it at the top of your list? How can it help others with their genealogy research? (Thanks to Amy Coffin and Thomas MacEntee.)
My first thought was to simply name Ancestry.com as my most appreciated paid genealogy tool. It is, after all, my first “go-to” resource as I seek new / more information about my ancestral lineage. Further reflection, however, brought about a change of direction. While Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org have provided my primary portals into online genealogical information, without Darrin Lythgoe’s “The Next Generation of Genealogical Sitebuilding” I would not likely have been introduced to the add-on of MediaWiki which houses my personal Research Wiki. Before the development of my Research Wiki I had a veritable mess instead of an organized filing system. I had files strewn throughout the various filing systems on multiple computers and external storage devices.
Thanks to the urging of my son, long conversations with him about digital organizing and collaborating, and a few ‘fits ans starts’ while learning MediaWiki markup language, I now have
a comprehensive management system for my genealogy data that allows me to locate data with a minimum number of mouse clicks. I know where my current data is and where / how I will store future data.
A fuller description of how I have developed and used my Research Wiki can be found at the “About My Research Wiki” tab at the top of this page.