Comments on: How Do You Feel about Facebook - Waste of Time or Great Genealogy 2.0 Online Social Tool?

By: Kathie

Kathie — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:03:07 +0000

My cousin located his biological father through Facebook. First he located his half brother and through him his Father. Facebook is good for ancestry searches too.

By: Adele

Adele — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:49:06 +0000

I just started using facebook with much hesitation. But now Im hooked. I can keep in touch with friends and family in one easy spot. Everyone these days are so busy and this just makes it so simple. Since I am the one in the family doing our family’s research it is great for me. I can find lost members and keep in touch with everyone, even family far away or not in my immediate family. I was very skeptical at first but now im a believer.

By: chrystal

chrystal — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:00:13 +0000

well i just got facebook and i cant get into it i dont know why. it seems silly and a big waste of my and everyone elses time. i thought it would be great but i dont really care what someone is doing on their pet farm or that some guy i hardly know is shopping or to see pictures of people doing nothing. I have found that i like to blog and read others blogs about things that matter to me. besides you dont need facebook to keep up with family or friends they are going to call you if anything happens of importantance. its funny that people get into this so much i guess im old fasioned or something i dont know.

By: Donna

Donna — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:58:12 +0000

I didn’t find facebooks genealogy family tree site very easy to use. It is very confusing and I am a veteran genealogist. For the beginner it would be a nightmare. Wish facebook would come up with a better site. I love facebook itself just having a hard time with the family tree area.

By: C.R.

C.R. — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 18:34:25 +0000

There are some significant benefits to using Facebook, and for that matter probably other social networking sites. However, I recently ended my involvement with Facebook. Reason? There are too many security issues with it for my taste. And recently they changed a number of things that make it even harder to really lock down security on Facebook - you have to work at it, and if you don’t know what you’re doing by studying right from the beginning, you can have information available “out there” that you didn’t even know about, that you thought was restricted to only a small number of “friends.” The risks outweighed the benefits in my opinion.

C.R.

By: james gross

james gross — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 05:16:01 +0000

Q: How Do You Feel about Facebook - Waste of Time or Great Genealogy 2.0 Online Social Tool?

Robert,
As a 1986 college grad, I experienced the march of technology of the PC. I went from using an electric Silver Reed typwriter to a 386 pc, dial-up modems, and now, cat-5 wired and wireless computer systems.

Facebook is yet the latest in an ever developing march of technology. This social networking technology is an excellent resource for genealogists as it can assist them in both locating, as well as identifying, relatives.

Granted, finding relatives is limited by the balky and unfriendly search box in facebook. Perhaps someone will devise a bypass search engine, such as Steve Morse’s Ellis Island search engine.

But, regardless of its limitations, I have nothing but praise for facebook.

tip: locate the younger cousins and you will find the older ones. Relatives with unique names, and known geographic locations, may be easier to locate.

By: John McGrath

John McGrath — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:39:29 +0000

It seems people have the wrong idea about Facebook being too much work. Either they are terrible lazy or are making assumptions without trying it. I also don’t think they understand the value of “Social Networking” when it comes to genealogy.

There is also assumptions that Facebook is all about young kids, and that’s just not true. We organized a 38 year high school reunion with the power of Facebook and I’m 56. Anyone who has tried to find family information after 1930 ( the last exposed census) knows how hard it is to find cousins. Facebook provides this medium and will continue to as folks try it out. The really requirement is to learn how to setup a group site for genealogy. You could certainly help here.

John

By: Ian White

Ian White — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:57:22 +0000

My experience with Facebook has been mixed. Overall, I think it is great, but as others have said in here, it can be a huge time waster.

On the positive side, it has enabled me to keep in constant contact with my family, that is scattered all over the world, Scotland, New Zealand, France, Australia, Italy, Germany etc: I have exercised discipline when it comes to adding contacts and out of 65 people in my list, 45 of them are related, the rest go back to my school days, or are very close family friends. I set up Facebook for my kids also with STRICT instructions to keep it Family Concentrated only. This works well and enables us all to “Meet” our relatives that we would have otherwise not known. Got a first cousin visiting us from France this month, and had it not been for facebook, I would have had no contact with her. So this is awesome.

As far as Genealogy goes in Facebook, I use the “Were Related” application, which is useful to see at a glance where everyone fits. The “Family Tree Builder” on the other hand is more trouble than it is worth. It loses information after entering it, it often drops the first letter of a persons name requiring it to be re-entered and is clunky to use. Good idea that is badly executed IMHO

I have done my tree and host it on Tribalpages, but if the “Tree Application” in Facebook was better, I would probably upload the GED file to it. As far as research goes, I have not used facebook to do any research as I am from Scottish parents and the information can only be got from scotlandspeople(.)com which costs money. The only other avenue that I use is Freecens and I do census transcribing for them as well. Their goal is to make all the Census forms for Scotland available FREE.

By: Laurie

Laurie — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:50:02 +0000

I have personally found several family members just by typing in the surname in their search bar. I think it will help tremedously!!!

By: Judie

Judie — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:35:34 +0000

I recently joined Facebook. Although it’s a great way to communicate with family, I have derived nothing as far as genealogy…no one seems interested in that aspect. I have reached out and no one has answered me nor communicated with me in this regard. Hopefully someone will eventually.