Coming Face to Face With My Ancestors

I was skipping around the Internet the other day, looking for things and trying to find inspiration for the program that I am writing about Hollywood Cemetery.  One thing led to another, as it always does, and I found myself on a blog that I had never visited before.  The writer mentioned something about Googling her ancestor's name and finding newspaper articles (or was it court records?).  I have a few ancestors with unusual enough names, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I typed a great-great grandmother's name into the search box, Tranquilla Ann Brady.  I was practically blown out of my chair when I clicked on one of the search results.  This is the page:

Link

I clicked on a photo, one of Tranquilla and her son Arnold (my great-grandfather).

 

Each person in the photo is tagged, and the tags are on a menu on the right of the screen.  Clicking on Arnold's tag gave me a drop-down menu, and I selected 'Photos and Stories'.  This brought up a page with photos of him, like the one I found with Tranquilla's photos.

There was a photo of Arnold and his new wife, Augusta Martina Amundson,

and a photo of their house!

Back on Tranquilla's photo page, there was a photo of her house, too.

Here is a photo of Tranquilla and her first husband (my great-great grandfather) Ransom Abraham Stevens.

Following the link to photos of Ransom Stevens led to this gem:

I could have sifted through this stuff all day, but I had to force myself to stop and get back to the real work at hand. 

FamilySearch.org is from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  It is free, though you have to register to use the site.  FamilySearch.org has come a long way since I last visited there.  These must be user-supplied photos, but I couldn't find any indication as to who may have uploaded them.  (I didn't look too hard for this info right now, but you can be certain that I will later.)

I started researching and recording my family history when I was 16, and I have traced most of the lines of my family through the last two centuries.  Most of this was done before the convenience of the Internet, using old-fashioned resources like pencil and paper, telephone calls, snail mail, and countless hours looking at microfilm in dark library basements.  When it was launched, I subscribed to Ancestry.com, but I let the subscription lapse when I had done all I needed to at that time. 

This new resource, with the potential for stories and photos, is going to be a great way to discover new info on ancestors ... and I can't wait to have time to waste to see what else there is out there for me to find.