Genealogy: Building a family tree on-line

In my last post, I talked about genealogy software and organizing your information.

But what if I don't have a computer at home? What if I want my family tree on-line only? This is an option and not necessarily a bad one. Services such as Ancestry.com, genealogy.com, geni.com and many others allow you to build your family tree online and view it. Each site requires you to register with them – the family tree building can be done for free but they WILL try to sell you other services.

You might want that - or not. The sites I mentioned are also search sites for genealogical records and you may NEED to use them to find the records you want. If that's the case, you may very well need to pay a subscription fee to access the records you're looking for.

Do keep in mind that these sites usually offer a trial period. You can try out the service, hopefully find the records that you're interested in and, if you've found what you need, cancel the subscription without having to pay.