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Thursday, March 06, 2014

A WEEK WITHOUT ANCESTRY.COM CHALLENGE

As I said in the update to my last post, I've unsubscribed from Ancestry.com because
of my frustration over the end of Old Search. I've gone without Ancestry before so it's nothing new for me. I'll still maintain and add to my tree there, but I'll do my searching
for records at other sites. There's a lot more available online than there used to be, as Michael John Neill has said..

Here's an idea Michael gave me: the week without Ancestry.com challenge. Can you
go for a week without it? I know, it's addicting, but there are plenty of things you can
do without Ancestry.

-You can work on organizing all the things you already have in the genealogy program
  on your hard drive. If you don't have a program on your computer, maybe now's the
  time to try out one of the free versions that are available, like the free edition of the
  RootsMagic program. You don't have to start from scratch either. You can have
 Ancestry create a gedcom and then download and import it in to the free program.

-Write up or transcribe some of the documents you already have found, and analyze
 those wills and probate files to see what they may tell you about your ancestor.

-You can get rid of the duplicate names and dead branches on your family tree.

-You can search the document images on FamilySearch or look for information on your
family in Google Ebooks.

What do you think? Can you go a week without Ancestry.com?

3 comments:

Bubba said...

I bet you can go a month ;-)

Kristin said...

Actually, it might be more productive if I would quit getting lost in a maze over there on Ancestry everytime I start writing up a post. I'm going to try it. And maybe ditch fb for a week at the same time.

Anonymous said...

I'm with you in the challenge. For me, it has nothing to do with any frustration over the elimination of "old search." I'm using it as an excuse to put my energies into other aspects of genealogy for a week.
-Mary