Virtual Family Reunions

This article was published in Ancestry Magazine and can be found online at: http://learn.ancestry.com/LearnMore/Article.aspx?id=12816

VIRTUAL FAMILY REUNIONS

By Esther Yu Sumner 01 July 2007Geography and busy lifestyles don’t have to completely separate family.

Distance and time may keep families from face-to-face contact, but thanks to technology, there are convenient and simple ways to keep in touch.

Darcy Montgomery Cole never intended to run a family website. But when her mother, Sue, died in 2006, taking over the family’s electronic meeting place seemed like the best way Darcy could honor Sue’s memory and her life-long devotion to the Denton family line.

For Darcy, however, inheriting a website hasn’t been easy.

Mom Sue started the Denton family website almost a decade ago. Originally Sue was just looking for a place to share the old family stories and tales of ancestors that she found exciting. It didn’t take long before the site took on a life of its own.

Sue’s goals became grander. She wanted, says Darcy, “to make it not just a genealogy site but a current site that is all about family.” And before her death, Sue largely achieved this goal.

Sue filled the website with details of the Denton family line, past and present: headstone photos, downloadable GEDCOMs, letters from the 18th and 19th centuries, literature written by or about Dentons, family photographs, lists of Dentons in the military, Denton artists, and current family events. While Sue collected a lot of this information herself, other Denton descendants who found the site began contributing as well. Now, more than nine years later, half a million visitors have made Sue’s site the Denton family’s virtual reunion.

Why They Bother
Search for “family website” on the Web and you’ll get a list of nearly 1 million sites. Some of them offer how-to information on creating a family website, others are services that give you an easy way to create a site, and still others act as links between famous families and their devoted followers. But the majority of those 1 million “family websites” are just that—places where ordinary families gather in cyberspace, crossing distance and time for their ongoing family reunions.

What each offers runs the gamut from strictly family history items to mostly current events. Electronic scrapbooks and photo albums, message boards, travel highlights, blogs, calendars, or simple links to find other family members looking for more information—anything goes with a family website. The goal of each is the same—to help strengthen family bonds. Sometimes, however, the sites inadvertently go a step further, becoming the catalyst that reconnects long-lost family.

That’s what happened to both Cyndi and Mark Howells. Cyndi, author of Planting Your Family Tree Online: How to Create Your Own Family History Website and creator of Cyndi’s List, started a family website in 1996. Over the past 10 years, 40 cousins, formerly unknown, have come forward.

Her husband, Mark, has also had family come out of the digital woodwork. A single post about Charles J. Aris, Mark’s seemingly elusive great-great-uncle, caught the attention of Charles’s only living descendant—a woman who had never thought of dabbling in family history. She just stumbled upon the website after conducting an Internet search on her own last name.

What’s the Price
It’s not easy running a family website, particularly one with all the bells and whistles the Denton family site offers. Darcy and her brothers share the financial burden. Technical details are handled by Roy Denton, a distant cousin whose initial contact with the family came through the website itself.

But Darcy admits that in spite of the time and money, the site is worth the effort. She receives e-mail from people around the world who have discovered the Denton family website. They want to share findings they made from following suggestions Darcy’s mother gave. They want to offer photos and information for everyone to view. Or they just want to know if they’ve found a missing branch of their family.

Results don’t always come quickly. While an occasional lucky researcher might find a match almost instantly, for Mark Howells, that one connection took over four years. Cyndi says that’s why it’s so important to be dedicated to your family site—and to approach the project with patience. “We have so much instant gratification with the Internet,” she says, but the person with the information you’re seeking “may not be a genealogist yet, or online yet.”

Who They Meet
Darcy tells a story of a relative of her mother’s: a man living in England who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to connect with relatives he thought he might have in the United States. Then he discovered Sue’s Denton family website. latives and even extended an invitation for him to stay at her house when he visited the United States.

“Her website was a way for her to help people and make contact with family,” says Darcy. What started with basic family history blossomed into something much larger, something that bypassed generations and geography. Something that, even after Sue’s death, continues on. That makes the hassle of running a website worthwhile for Darcy. “It was [a place] for her to celebrate current families as well as past families,” says Darcy. And the best part? It still is.

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Esther Yu Sumner, a professional writer and usability specialist, is a regular contributor to Ancestry Magazine. She can be reached at esumnertime@gmail.com.