Exercise 18 - YouTube

You Tube is very familiar to me, I've often watched comedy or music clips on it. I've also watched informative vids as well. Its a great medium.
I looked at the library YouTube vids, and most were very informative and entertaining.

I also had a look at genealogy tutorial vids. One of the YouTube vids I thought was very informative was on creating an iGoogle page for your GMail account. You can set your iGoogle page up, to have "RSS" type feeds coming direct to it, so whenever you log into your GMail account, you can see what's new in your subject of interest.

Of course my passion is genealogy, so setting this up, with the genealogy websites that I currently belong to, would save me surfing to each page every time I wanted an up date.

Excellent idea!

Exercise 17 - MyHeritage

As a family historian, I am really keen to investigate new sources and resources connected to genealogy.

I have extensive memberships across Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, and various other genealogy websites.

Many family members have either found me, or I have found them, through belonging to such places. This year alone, four cousins from my father's branch have found me.

My father has little knowledge of his family, as his father ran away from his home in Newfoundland, to War (WW1) at age 15, lied about his age and enlisted in the Royal Navy in England. He was away at sea alot, and my father's mum died when he was only 4 months old, so Dad was fostered out.

So finding extended family has been such a bonus for my father, as well as myself.
MyHeritage claims to have nearly 24 million members from around the world. It is a subscription site, and seems to have a search engine that searches all the major genealogy databases - alot of whom are also subscription based. It does allow a basic membership, which is free however.

Like some of the other sites, MyHeritage, allows you to build your own family webpage, which other members of your family can join. It is fairly limiting, as it offers access for only 15 members.

Family history can get to be a pretty expensive hobby - while MyHeritage looks fun, if you are doing family history seriously, and want to pay a subscription, I'd really recommend selecting one of the really good ones:- Ancestry or Rootsweb, and sticking with them.