Telling Your Story & Sharing Your Family Tree - New Online Resources

I belong to many different email and Facebook groups in relation to genealogy and because of this I'm always looking up and playing with different ways to tell stories as I know them through facts. Although sometimes they start off as family stories and I try and see what I can find in relation to those stories. Then I tell the story as far as I know it to date.

Anyhow, as I go through these groups, there are different links for online resources and I try them out and see how it goes. There are ranges of these online resources - some things need to get a bit further ahead and other things are just not good at all or crap. Many times, I do keep the link and go back after a bit and retrial them out to see if they've gotten better or worse, because if a resource is just starting to get used, sometimes it just needs a chance to grow rather than just classifying it as crap and moving on - like fine wine.

Anyhow, some new online resources I've been looking at are:

• Ancestry Cloud - is still in beta format, but I was allowed in to trial it. I think the promise is there but I'm hoping once it gets some growth in it, it will be great. However, at the moment, its still a wait, see and play type of area. I wouldn't put any real information into it as yet, but lets hope it grows to be great. 

  

  Taken from Ancestry Cloud's website (link above)

• Who Do You Think You Are story. This online resource came from a reader of my IT blog. Its takes its ideas from the hit TV show "Who Do You Think You Are?". You put your family tree information in - basic stuff like name, a picture, year of birth and place. I played for a tiny bit and was able to put the following family members information in: Mine, my parents, my grandparents. Then I could play and share it. It also gave me options for putting in more people and other timeline events like death and other events. I thought it was set up really well. The pictures I had to play a bit in order to make sure the face fit into the area, but the face recognition if you had more than one person in the pictures was great. What was a bit of a shock was when I played it, the program actually put some history facts in without me doing anything. I wasn't expecting that at all. I would actually have people use this to share information with others. 

Taken from Who Do You Think You Are Story website (link above)

• HistoryPin - This is where people place pictures of places (or it can be people) and then  you can search on a place on the map and see if anyone has pictures for the year you want. However, I think its still growing and there are some pictures but at the places I checked (Poland, Germany, Hudson Valley in NY) and there aren't a lot for those areas. I think/hope this needs to grow. 

Taken from historypin's website (link above)

There are some pretty good online things you can now do if you want to tell a story with your genealogy, so go ahead and try some of these new websites. You never know you might find an easier way to share with others.