Amanda Pape's List: Social Media in Genealogy and Family History

• • Use the arrows on the lower right of the screen to maneuver through the presentation. You can close the white box at the top and the slide menu on the lower right to make more of the slide visible.

• • I did not want to use a PowerPoint or even a Prezi or Google Presentation for this session. I played with a stack in Delicious (a social bookmarking tool) but ultimately decided to use another social bookmarking tool, Diigo, because of its Webslides feature. I also created a board on Pinterest (Genealogy and Family History, under Amanda Pape).

• • This article interviews a number of genealogists who use social media tools in their work. In particular, take a look at what Amy Lenertz Coffin (my librarian friend who blogs at We Tree, http://wetree.blogspot.com/), has to say.
    
    "The use of Blogger, Facebook and Twitter together has greatly benefited my family history pursuit, genealogy social circle and research experience. I consider each of these sites essential to my online genealogy toolbox."
    
    Today I'm going to talk about some of the items in my genealogy social media toolbox, focusing on blogging, photo sharing sites and sources for images you can reuse in your blog, and mapping with Google Maps.
    
    The article also quotes Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers, www.geneabloggers.com, a WONDERFUL resource for genealogy and family history bloggers and social media users - lots of tutorials, ideas for writing, genealogy news, and links to other blogs. I highly recommend that you subscribe to Thomas' site - if you can read only one blog a day, read his, as he will connect you to everything else you need. See the next slide for more from Thomas.

• Amy Lenertz Coffin

   

  Amy Lenertz Coffin whose blog We Tree, http://wetree.blogspot.com/, includes her own thoughts on genealogy as well as a calendar of Texas genealogical events, had this to say about social networking.

   

  I use my blog to highlight my research focus and maintain a dialogue about events in the genealogy world. This is a great, search-engine friendly platform that reaches a wide audience. Facebook provides me with an introduction to other family historians, in turn leading to many friendships and an increase in readers of my blog. Twitter provides the avenue for real-time genealogy news and at conferences and blog update announcements.

   

  The use of Blogger, Facebook and Twitter together has greatly benefitted my family history pursuit, genealogy social circle and research experience. I consider each of these sites essential to my online genealogy toolbox
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• Thomas MacEntee

   

  Thomas MacEntee is a blogger extraordinaire. He writes blogs that feature his own research as well as those that help other genealogists with technology. His comments about Facebook, Twitter and Blogging are the following.

   

  Facebook is probably the leading social networking site right now and definitely has an appeal to the 55 and older crowd since it appears to be a bit more serious and useful than MySpace. Facebook allows you to connect with many different people all on different levels – and you are in control of how much personal information you wish to share and with whom.

   

  In terms of my research, Facebook has allowed me to find living cousins – even first cousins that I’ve lost track of – and discuss our common family history. I would never have been able to pursue my MacEntee/McEntee research and discover vital information without being able to search for other MacEntees on Facebook.

   

  In terms of education, I’ve been able to follow many other genealogists who offer online seminars or who have great websites with information on the genealogy industry. I know I could find these same sites using search engines, but there is more of a personal touch when you actual “friend” these people on Facebook – it is easy to drop them a message and ask questions and they can do the same and offer you encouragement.

• As opposed to Facebook, Twitter is much more “instant” and “in the now” than Facebook. Twitter is a messaging platform in which – just like Facebook Friends – you gather Twitter Followers. These are people who find your messages interesting and decide to follow you. Twitter is different than simple text messaging in that you are limited to 140 characters and you have a band of followers.

   

  In terms of my research, I actively “tweet” (the act of sending messages on Twitter) the surnames that I am searching for especially the ones for whom I have brick walls. My followers see these messages and they have offered some great advice for research or even have told me they share common ancestors with me!

   

  Why are Facebook and Twitter important and why can’t someone just network the old fashioned way – in person? First, networking the old fashioned way is expensive – think about how much you could spend on attending genealogy conferences, or traveling to libraries and archives or genealogical societies to meet up with others and share knowledge? With social networking you can reach long, long distances – even across the pond – for almost no cost at all. And usually you are contacting people who have already advertised their body of knowledge and expertise.

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• • Blogging (both writing one and reading many) is my primary social media tool in my genealogy and family history work.

• • I took Thomas' reasons and put them in my priority order. Here's why I have a genealogy blog:
    - research
    - sharing with family (and friends)
    - connecting with family
    - writing (I'm a frustrated author)
    - blogging as a creative outlet
    - connecting with genealogists
    - giving back to the community
    - marketing (I'm not a professional genealogist, so this is a low priority for me).
    
    My genealogy blog is ABT UNK, at http://abt-unk.blogspot.com. ABT and UNK are abbreviations commonly used in genealogy. Blogspot, or Blogger, is a common blogging platform that is easy to use. Other good platforms are Wordpress (which is harder to use, but can give you more flexibility) and Tumblr (which is great if your blog is primarily photographs).
    
    A plus for me with Blogger is that it falls under the Google umbrella and I don't need another user name and password. Also, I have found my blog posts often come up high in the results in Google searches.

• • Here's an example from my blog of how blogging can help with your research and with connecting with family. Someone named Emma Pape Childs provided the photo in this post of my great great grandparents to my great aunt. This post led to a descendant of Emma finding me - see the comment at the end of the blog post.

• • This photo was sent to me by my third-cousin-once-removed Carole, who saw my blog post about our common ancestors and later provided this photo. Carole and I are now friends on Facebook.

• • This post led to obtaining many more family photos, two of which I've posted about so far on my blog.
    
    There's also an example here of using Google Maps to find an address (the one on the back of the Christmas card) and figuring out what city it was in AND that the home on Google Maps Street View is the same home pictured on the card! I'll talk more about using Google Maps in this presentation.

• • The photograph of Ewald is one of the pictures sent to me by my third cousin Mary Kay, after she saw my earlier post on Ewald Pape and e-mailed me. Her sister googled "Ewald Pape" and my earlier post about the Christmas card from Oregon was the result.
    
    Note that the photographs of the buildings Ewald designed in this post are images available for use with attribution from Wikimedia Commons. I'll talk more later about photo sharing sites as a source for images you can use in your blog as well as a way to share your own images.

• • This is one of the reasons I have a genealogy blog! My third cousin Mary Kay sent me this picture, too. This is a photograph of my paternal grandfather with his siblings and one family of cousins that I'd never seen before - and Mary Kay had the photo but didn't know who half the people were.

• • My blog post with some tips on setting up your blog - essentials, and "bling" that you might not really need, and that could be a distraction.

• • Buy Amy's book! The Big Genealogy Blog Book, by my friend and fellow librarian, Amy Coffin, has lots of great tips for genealogy blogging! IT"S ONLY $2.99 and available in a variety of formats! Amy Coffin is a librarian and genealogist, and blogs at We Tree: http://wetree.blogspot.com

• • Some of the photo sharing tools I use in my genealogy work, for storing and sharing my photos and documents as well as for finding photos and documents I can legally use in my blog posts, are Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, and SmugMug. I also use flickrCC to search Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images, and Wikimedia Commons to find such images as well.

• • This is an example of my using Flickr to find an image I could use in my blog. I needed a photo of Kitirik for this post. I searched Flickr for an image using the advanced search at http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced and checking the box to "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content."
    
    Another way to search Flickr for such content - use FlickrCC: http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/flickrCC/index.php
    
    Don't forget to put the photo attributions in your blog posts! Click on the link in the caption of the Kitirik photo in the blog post, and it takes you to the original photo on Flickr.

• • Another source you can use to find photos with Creative Commons licenses is flickrCC:
    http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/flickrCC/index.php
    
    I did a search for "Kitirik" here as well.

• • Here's another example of using an advanced search for Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr - the latter-day photo of the 1905 building still on the campus of Incarnate Word Academy in Houston, Texas, my mother's high school. I used this photo in this blog post. Once again, click on the link in the attribution caption under the photo, and it takes you to the photograph in Flickr.

• • Yet another example of finding photos I needed for my blog post, and could use, on Flickr with a Creative Commons search.
• Lisa by atmasphere - Jonathan Greene
• Macintosh 128 by Ian Muttoo

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• • You never know how people are going to find your blog. This is my all-time top post, with three times as many page views as #2 on the list, and it "has nothing to do with genealogy"! Since I'm using Blogger, a Google platform, I think this page is a top result when people do searches on "rainbow eucalyptus," "eucalyptus," or "eucalyptus tree."
    
    This also makes for a nice segue into another good (and free!) site for storing photos: Photobucket

• • This is the photo referred to in the blog post in the previous slide. I put all my photos from a Hawaii cruise in Photobucket as that was the easiest way to share them with family and friends, but I hate the ads on this site.

• • SmugMug is another way to share family photos and documents. My second cousin Bill posted over 500 photos and scanned documents here that were among his grandmother's (my great aunt's) collection. This site is not free, but it's beautiful, and enables you to store high-quality images and easily make them available for others to purchase prints in different sizes.