Dear Randy: How Have You Saved Your Research So Someone Can Search For It?

I get this question occasionally.  It usually includes the words "for free."

My answer usually takes two tacks:

1)  Put your research in a public family tree on, for instance:

*  Rootsweb WorldConnect - http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com  -- This site is free to upload a GEDCOM file to, and the information can include notes and sources.  This is a separate family tree - yours!  Persons can be found with most search engines.

*  WikiTree - http://www.wikitree.com -- This site is free to upload a GEDCOM file to.  This is a "universal" family tree where each historical person has a profile.  Someone may change your information.  Persons can be found with most search engines.

*  WeRelate - http://www.werelate.org -- This site is free to upload a GEDCOM file to.  This is a "universal" family tree where each historical person has a profile.  Someone may change your information.  Persons can be found with most search engines.

*  FamilySearch Family Tree - https://familysearch.org/tree/ -- This site is free to add information to, but has no general GEDCOM upload.  This is a "universal" family tree where each historical person has a profile.  Someone may change your information.  Persons cannot be found with most search engines.

*  There are other online family trees with separate trees - yours.  They include Ancestry (free to upload and add, $ to use search functions); MyHeritage ($ for over 250 persons); Geni.com ($ for over 500 persons); GeneaNet (free to upload); FindMyPast (free to upload?); Mocavo (free to upload); and many others.  Persons and information in these trees cannot be searched with most search engines, only from within the website.

2)  Put material on the Internet by writing genealogy reports that define my genealogical research.  I do this using my genealogy family tree software and creating descendants reports and ancestor reports.  For example:

*  In 2012, I made 16 different reports in an attempt to document, with names, dates, places and sources, but not notes) and uploaded them, for FREE, to Scribd (www.scribd.com).  You can see my reports at https://www.scribd.com/randy_seaver .

They are searchable by many of the usual search engines (i.e., Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.).  Here is the page with all of my reports (two screens shown):

Here is the top of the first page (the title page) of one of my reports:

Here is the first text page, of 382 total pages.  There are footnotes on the bottom of each page.

There is a name index at the end of this report.

You can read them, or download them as PDF files.

These reports were generated by the Legacy Family Tree software program, which I find is the best to do this task.  The information is based on my conclusions at the time I created the report.  Any errors or omissions are mine.

I limited the descendants reports so that there are very few persons born in the 20th century.  There are some, but I tried to avoid having living people in the reports.

I put links to all of the reports on my Randy's Genealogy web page.

I get several queries each month from these Scribd reports.  Usually, a correspondent says something like "your report has my John Seaver, what else do you know about him?  He's my 6th great-grandfather."

Bingo, I just found another likely cousin, and they found me.  I can help them with their line back to our common ancestor, but usually cannot help them with an entire genealogy because their line back to the named ancestor is not in my database, and I haven't traced the ancestry of the spouses of my non-ancestors.  I usually send them a genealogy report with Notes for their ancestor back to the gateway ancestor.  And I ask them to revise or correct or add information about their family, and ask if I can add their information to my family tree database.

My Scribd home page tells me that there have been over 2,700 Views of my reports - my guess is that almost all of them came from a name search in a search engine.

3)  What other ways of preserving genealogy research have you used so that it can be found by a search engine?

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/11/dear-randy-how-have-you-saved-your.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver