Once you've gotten down the basics of your family tree and managed to trace back a few generations, the next step is to share your information with your family.
There are many ways to do this: you can make printouts of the information you've found in chart form or even in narrative form, you can also make books with the information, or framed family trees, you could even start a Facebook group to let everyone know what you've discovered. However, that sort of information only reaches your immediate family, or if you have a lot of Facebook friends, maybe a few extended cousins. There are better ways to share your information that might connect you to others with lines that connect to yours and help you find distant cousins out there. The best by far is starting a genealogy blog.
Genealogy blogs are one of the more common type of blog out there. There's a whole community based on family history research, many of whom can be found if you go to the Geneabloggers website. The site itself was created and is run by genealogists who run blogs themselves, and who wanted to connect to each other in greater numbers. The group goes from those who have just started their research to those who have been working on their family history since genealogy was paper-based. There are many people connected to that site who can help you to further your research, cousin or not, simply because they have faced similar challenges, or a branch of their family comes from the same country yours did. The site has set up a list of theme days for you to use on your blog to give you ideas to blog about, and people are constantly posting questions or challenges or news releases about software or even hardware updates. Being in the Geneabloggers community helps on many different levels, and makes it easier to get to the next level in your research.
Genealogy blogs give you a place to put all those stories that you know you're only half-finished with because you still have research to do on when certain events happened, or how many times this ancestor or that was married. By posting it on a blog, you give your family a place to look so they can see if they have information you need that they know. They are also great for attracting distant cousins who you had no contact with before, so that you can help each other learn more about your family. And it also helps you get your close relations more involved in what's going on, even those who don't have a Facebook.
Following this will be a series of articles on how to set up and use a blog for your genealogy pursuits, though it will be by no means comprehensive. If you're interested on setting up a blog, please follow along, but also visit the Geneabloggers site for more information and ideas about your blog.
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