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Organizing your Family History

As you have been working on collecting your family history you will have found many people who are married into the family creating additional family lines. It can be a lot of fun traveling down some of these family lines because of the variety and some of the strange and wonderful things you will discover, but don't let them distract you!

One of the first things you will realize when you go to share your family history is that it needs to be pared down to your basic family.

• You (and your spouse) and your children are the trunk
• your parents (and your spouse's parents) and YOUR aunts and uncles
• your grandparents (and your spouse's grandparents) with YOUR grandparents siblings
• your great grandparents (and your spouse's g grandparents) with YOUR g grandparent's siblings

This goes back 4-8 generations and you want to fill out a family tree form so your mind can keep it straight. Now when you share your spouse's family lines just switch roles, it's that simple.

Why do you do Family History?

There are a lot of reasons for doing family history (or genealogy) but for me it comes down to connecting my family lines and discovering who I am and sharing that knowledge with my Sister and Brothers.


Our family is a combination of five marriages so although we have seven siblings our ages are so different that we really didn't get to know one another until we had children of our own! This is becoming a normal trend across America and makes doing Genealogy challenging but also exciting as through research we pull the family together. Don't loose sight of Artistic Ancestry.com...we are coming soon!

New Millennium Gadgets take Genealogy out of the closets!

When I first began working on my family history I, like many of you, had large landscape sized books filled with forms that had been filled out by hand, edited and rewritten. Nothing like what we use today!

Now there are wonderful software programs that allow us to type in names, dates, etc along with video, poetry, just about anything you can find or create! Would the Lord have provided all that we have to use today if it weren't for the importance of Family History Work to  commence at a much faster pace?

Soon you will be able to download your history into beautiful form you can share with your families, friends and distant relatives. How do I know? Because we are creating just such a program and soon you will find yourselves mesmerized by the joy of creating something so easy to share! So stay in touch! We are almost there!

See you soon, Cristina

Family History Christmas

One of the nicest parts about getting together with my Grandmother and her siblings was listening to them tell stories on one-another. Like the time the brothers snuck (yeah I know it isn't a real word but it fits!) into the neighbor's watermelon patch to steal a melon just before harvest, or how the family of 13 lived in a one room dugout in Oklahoma and still made room for the bachelor that at the next filing and was too timid to sleep alone.

These are the memories that time will forget if we don't save them! It is up to you and me and all we know to keep the real history of America alive and true! Remember, genealogy is more than names, dates and places, it is the events that shaped a family and a nation!

GedCom files vs typing

IF you are like me, you have found that the snazzy websites available for creating Family Trees have one major snafu...you have to type in each name separately! For myself, that could be hundreds of names and dates and places just for the first 5 generations!

Artistic Ancestry.com will allow you to download your basic GedCom files, no more typing!