It's pretty exciting to find someone researching your same families. It's even more exciting when that person is related to you! After "meeting" a cousin on Ancestry.com and discovering that our grandmothers were sisters, we decided to create a Facebook page for all the other relatives we found. My new cousin has a cousin with 13 siblings. As you can imagine, that means a LOT of family added to our group!! I think we're up to about 70 now. Many of the group are also researching our family. There's a lot of good photo sharing and fun newspaper articles discovered. It's a good group and it was great to meet a cousin MY age interested in genealogy!
Since the creation of that family group, I have joined NUMEROUS other genealogy pages on Facebook. Amid my travels to various genealogy seminars and classes, I've also discovered that many genealogists scoff at Facebook. "Social media" has a bad reputation for many of the older crowd. I can't understand how it could NOT be a great tool for any genealogist. It's free, it's a chance to network with other like-minded individuals, and if you join groups for the area you are researching, you are more likely to meet a relative or even find someone who lives near your research area and is willing to go look up something at the library for you or take that photo of a gravestone for you! I'm researching in areas I am not even remotely close to, and without the help of some of these people I would never have gotten as far as I have! I even had a brick wall blown wide open by a chance posting on a Facebook genealogy page. (That will be another post)
If the goal of genealogy is to network and share, what better way than social networking?
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