What do you get when you pair genealogy giant Ancestry.com with your network of living relatives on Facebook? Possibly a lot of good family history information. Ancestry.com has added a new feature that enables users to add information from Facebook to their Ancestry.com family tree quickly and easily.
It is a common misconception that genealogists are only interested in researching people who are deceased. Living family members are important not only for keeping family relationships strong, but also for sharing family history information as well as recording it for future generations. It is this connection between your extended family and your ancestors that Ancestry.com hopes to open up with its new feature.
On the Ancestry.com blog, there is an interesting bit of math which illustrates just how useful having greater access to living relatives can be. Pretend for a moment that you are researching a great, great grandmother who had three children. Each of those children had three children, and every child in each successive generation also had three children. There are approximately eighty one descendants of your great grandmother. That means that there are eighty one people who could potentially have information about her, and possibly even photographs, letters, or other possessions that she left behind. You could learn quite a bit about your great, great grandmother by connecting with even half of these descendants, or a third of them.
Do you want to add Facebook information such as pictures and birthdays to your Ancestry.com family tree, complete with source citations that are created for you? If you do, then you are sure to enjoy using the new Facebook feature. Using the new Facebook feature with your Ancestry.com tree is easy. Simply visit Ancestry.com to find out more. If you use Ancestry.com’s family tree and you are not interested in connecting it to Facebook, don’t worry. Ancestry.com says that the feature is optional, and that your information will not be shared unless you authorize it to be shared.
Photo by jdurham on morguefile.com.