Social networks are the most popular way to contact other folks on the Web these days. You can keep up with genealogists all over the world with social network services. Using these tools, you can have conversations involving video and sound, read up on the latest news, make new friends, and have fun generally. Oh, and by the way, get some genealogy done!

“Social networks have expanded in all directions, and it’s often difficult to wrap your head around the size and the scope of all these possibilities,” said Amy Coffin, a professional genealogist, librarian, and blogger. “Genealogists who are just beginning to discover all that is available online should pick one or two social networking tools and learn to use them for the benefit of family history research.”

As of January 2014, one site that measures popularity by number of users, number of posts, and number of responses had this ranking of social network sites:

   1. Facebook

   2. Twitter

   3. LinkedIn

   4. Google+

   5. Pinterest

   6. Tumblr

   7. Flickr

   8. VK

   9. Instagram

 10. MySpace

 11. Tagged

 12. MeetUp

 13. Ning

 14. MeetMe

 15. ClassMates

Now, you probably could find a genealogist or two on each and every one of them, but the first five plus MeetUp are the most popular with the family historians I know.

Almost any social media network you choose will have a web-based presence that you can access with your desktop browser as well as apps for portable devices such as smart phones and tablet computers. Most of the time, signup and setup are more easily accomplished on the desktop than on an app, so all these descriptions will assume you are using your desktop computer.

A Few Definitions

Some academics define social networking sites as having three common elements: a member profile on a web-accessible page, a user-defined list of contacts, and interaction between members of different contact lists with user-defined degrees of access. As you can see, this definition would have fit Prodigy, AOL, MSN Network, and CompuServe in the early days of this century, except for the web access part. CompuServe and Prodigy are long gone, while AOL and MSN have morphed into portals, leaving room for these new and interesting “social networking sites” to pop up.

While social networking sites vary in the tools and functionality they provide, usually, where the old “online services” had forums, the newer social networking sites have a way for you to search based on common interest, connect with people, and exchange public or private messages. However, it is not as easy as it used to be. In the old days, you only had to sign on to CompuServe, input the GO word “genealogy,” and wind up someplace where that is all that’s going on. Now, you have to work at it, but you can build your own filters to keep things manageable. So let’s look at how to use these tools for genealogy.

Social Networking 101

Most hobbyist genealogists belong to one or more of the very general ones, like Facebook. As that is the one I use most often, I’ll take you through using Facebook to contact other genealogists. Once you know how to use one of them, the rest are fairly easy to use. Signing up for Facebook can be very simple: your real name (or company name) and a valid e-mail address.

Now that you have yourself set up, you can begin to search for friends, blogs, and applications to make Facebook useful for your genealogy. The easiest way to do this is to allow Facebook to search your contacts on Google, AOL, Yahoo!, or whatever you use. Then you can choose to send people e-mail announcements that you are now on Facebook.

But Facebook has pages for more than individual people. You can find groups, companies, products, and organizations using keywords. At the top left of the Facebook page is the search box. Type in genealogy. You will see a page similar to the one in Figure 8-1.

FIGURE 8-1. Search for genealogy in Facebook, and you will find not only people, but also groups and companies with “genealogy” in their profile.

Just as you can for Twitter, you can create a list of people that follow an interest. On Facebook, you will see a toolbar down the left side. Click Interests and you will see an option to create a list. When you do, you can choose among your Facebook friends and “liked” pages to see a newsfeed that has only those postings. Or, you could choose to follow the posts of someone else’s list, just as on Twitter.

The genealogy exchanges and information on Facebook are fun, but often, feeds will scroll by before you see them. Unlike Twitter, you cannot search the recent history of Facebook for posts that mention genealogy. The closest you can come is an Interest list like the one mentioned earlier. For this reason, it is hard to post a query about a specific genealogy problem and get a response until you have several friends yourself. You can, however, send private messages to, say, West Kentucky Genealogy or the Allen County Genealogy Center, and perhaps get a response.

Facebook does have a video chat feature like the two services mentioned later, but the interface at this writing is clunky and hard to use. It will probably improve in the future to be more like Google Hangouts, which is described later.

Another big drawback to Facebook is that the postings can be thinly disguised advertising, requests to play silly games, or outright political shill. You can block such posts, but you have to be diligent to stay ahead of Facebook’s “intelligence” software that throws such postings at you. It is easier to simply glance and scroll past them.

Still, just reading the posts from genealogists, the National Archives, libraries, and more can be addicting! There is value to Facebook.

Success Story: Facebook Connections Become Face to Face

“Facebook used to be for college students, but that’s no longer the case. Now it’s a mainstream social networking tool, and can be used effectively for family history purposes. Users can join groups based on common interests, provide short updates about any topic, and link to ‘friends’ to form networks. Often, users’ extended family members are also on Facebook, and you can use the site as a way to collect family history information. Beginners may want to ask a friend or family member to help set up an account and learn the ropes. Facebook can be overwhelming until new users learn how to set up filters and limit the amount of information coming in at the same time. The result is worth it, however, as many friends can be made with this highly popular social networking tool. “I’ve had a Facebook account for a while, but never used it as a way to connect with genealogists until 2008. Using Facebook’s message feature, I started contacting other Texas genealogists asking if they would be my friend. Many agreed and we got to know each other online. Fast-forward several months later, and I made plans to attend a genealogy meeting three hours away. Since I was new to the group, I expected to sit in the back watching everyone else chat. Imagine my surprise when I arrived and realized that I already knew six people from our interactions on Facebook. I didn’t sit in the back of the room. In fact, I sat right in the middle and talked with all my friends like we’d always known each other.”

–Amy Coffin, MLIS, APG, amycoffin.com

Social Networking Services with Avatars: Second Life

Long ago in the early days of online services (circa 1985), one could visit virtual “rooms.” In these rooms people held conversations, played games, and “traveled” to make-believe realms. It was all done by typing text, so you really had to use your imagination. At the beginning of this century, many chat programs added avatars, cartoon-like characters to represent you to others.

Now, games, meetings, conversations, and more are possible with sound, animation, music, joint web browsing, and more. One such service is Second Life. The software is free, and most of the use of Second Life is too. You can, if you want, spend real money on virtual goods and a premium account, but you don’t have to.

Go to www.secondlife.com and download the free software. Signing up is as simple as creating a handle, entering a real e-mail address, and confirming the e-mail address. Once registered, you can fill out a profile that has some details of your life in the real world, or not. As in Facebook, this Second Life profile is most useful if you include your genealogy interests so that others will see your entry when they search for “genealogy.”

Your avatar can walk, talk, touch and carry things, and change clothing (the genealogists do have costume parties from time to time), as well as sit, fly, and teleport. The software shows you the steps for modifying hairstyles and adding clothing to your preferences.

But you can skip all that, take an avatar as created by the software, and go find others to talk to and interact with—others who share your love for climbing family trees. DearMYRTLE, otherwise known as Pat Richley Erickson, recommends genealogists join in on Second Life’s genealogy discussions in real time and mingle with family historians at all levels of expertise. To find any genealogy-related area, use the Search button (see Figure 8-2). Click an entry in the list, read about it, and click the Teleport button to take your avatar there.

FIGURE 8-2. Use Search to find genealogy venues, people, and groups in Second Life.

I suggest you start with Just Genealogy.

Just Genealogy

This is an area of Second Life where the scene is a castle and surrounding venues. All these computer graphics are designed to make Just Genealogy in Second Life a place to learn how to do family history research effectively.

When visiting Just Genealogy, you’ll see the avatar Clarise Beaumont (who is Pat Richley-Erickson). This avatar develops the schedule of events and coordinates with other genealogy groups in Second Life. Clarise and others host a weekly genealogy chat each Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. “SL time” (which is the same as U.S. Pacific Time, Daylight Savings when applicable). But the Just Genealogy castle isn’t empty the rest of the week. All along the walls of the castle and environs, you will see placards, tartans, and other objects. They are not just decorations; they are clickable links to useful and important genealogy places on the Web—blogs, podcasts, database sites, maps, how-to info, mailing lists, message boards, etc.

The Main Event: Live Chats with Sound and Animation

The chats are the big draw. Though any chat group can be small, usually no more than 20 or so visitors, in general, the participation is active and lively. Sometimes chats can garner up to 80 different visitors. Attendance largely depends on the topic of the week. One time the topic was using “eyewitness reports” to document the life and times of an ancestor. During this chat:

    • One person read a letter from his World War I ancestor using the voice function so others could hear.

    • A French-Canadian genealogist described an “eyewitness” report he found in a 1587 document, which he was able to post on the chat. He had digitized the document while on his annual research trip to France.

One person read over the voice chat from The Civil War Love Letter Quilt by Rosemary Young (Krause Publications, 2007), a part of David Coon’s letter home to his wife, Mary, describing camp conditions on March 11, 1864, for the New York 36th Regiment of the Union Army. That is just a small sampling; much more was accomplished that night! Many other social network services with avatars are popping up on the Internet, and you may eventually want to explore them too. However, Second Life is one where genealogy has established a firm beachhead and is creating new communities regularly.

Google+

Google+ is newer than Facebook or Second Life, and has not gotten the media love of the other two. This can be an advantage. It is much easier to sift through the postings to find the items and people of interest, Google+ doesn’t throw so many advertising posts in your face, and it is very user friendly.

Google+ requires you to have a Google account. This is as easy as Yahoo!, AOL, Facebook, and other social networking sites. All that is required is name, e-mail address, and, optionally, wireless phone number if you want a way for them to send you a text when you forget your password. Once you do that, you also have a Google Mail (Gmail) account and a Google calendar. All the Google apps are quite useful and available with a single click from the Google Chrome browser’s apps grid at the top of the browser window.

Profile

The next step is to fill out your Google+ profile. Of course, you can put in just as much or as little personal information as you’d like to share. One convention among genealogists is to include the surnames and the localities you research in either the Introduction section or under the Other Names section. In the Introduction section, you can use text editing, such as bold, italic, underlined, a bulleted or numbered list, and even a link. In Other Names, your entries will be plain text, but you can list as many lines as you like. You can see in Figure 8-3 that I not only entered my maiden and pen names, but I also listed parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents, surnames and the states where those occur.

FIGURE 8-3. In completing your Google+ profile, you can include the surnames you research in either your Introduction or under Other Names as I have done here.

You want to set up your profile first so that when you ask people to connect with Google+ they can easily see you are not a spammer. It will also help if you allow Google access to your address book so that people you already know can be among those you ask to be in your circles.

Circles

On Google+, the people you are connected with (“follow”) are in your circles. Circles are categories you define and only you see. Aunt Martha will not know whether she is in your circle called “Family” or in the circle called “Fruitcakes.” All she will know is that you added her to your circles.

The default circle is called Following; however, you can define as many circles as you want by whatever names you like. The posts from all the people you follow will appear in your Stream, the opening page of Google+. With one click, you can restrict the Stream to show one particular circle you defined. That way, you can see only posts from your Genealogy Circle or read only posts from your Quilting Circle.

You can follow an account even if that account does not follow you back; this is one big difference between Google+ and the other two social networks covered in this chapter. Another is that you can easily search posts by keyword, so if you are looking for posts and discussions of wills or land grants, it is quite easy on Google+.

How do you find people to follow? As mentioned before, if you upload your Outlook or other e-mail address database to Gmail, Google+ can search for matches with those already on the service. You can also use the Google+ search bar for topics and names to find people to follow. Others who use Google+ may find you in their searches and ask you to follow them. Finally, once you have followed a few people, Google+ will start making suggestions.

Pages and Communities

In addition to individual people, you can follow pages or communities. A page is the account for an organization, brand, product, destination, and/or project. You can create your own page to display your family history discoveries, for example.

Communities on Google+ are equivalent to the groups on Facebook: one post going to several people or the entire Stream with posting privileges limited to the members of the community. You can find both Google+ pages and communities when you use the search bar.

Stream

The Stream is the display of posts by those you follow. The posts on Google+ may be short text-only entries like tweets, or may be longer with pictures, embedded video, or links. You can express approval for a post by clicking the 1+ button on the lower left of each post, much as you “like” a post on Facebook.

Use the search bar at the top of the Stream display to search for “Genealogy.” You can filter the results by Everything, People and Pages, Communities, Posts, or Photos. Whichever filter you choose from the top, you can also filter those results by “Best Of” or “Most Recent.” What appears in the search will include both those you follow and those you do not.

Hangouts

While you are on Google+, you may notice tucked up in the right side of the toolbar what looks like a quotation mark. This is the link to Google Hangouts and Google Hangouts On Air. These are live video chats, as described in Chapter 6. Just like the Stream, you can search for Hangouts about genealogy. A Hangout On Air is public by default. A Hangout is usually private by default, open only to those invited. Let me elaborate a little on that.

Hangout On Air is a live broadcast on your Google+ account, YouTube channel, and anywhere else you want to put the link. When you host a Hangout On Air, you can have an unlimited number of attendees, but only up to 10 can actively participate with camera and microphone at a time. Everyone who clicks the link can view and send text comments to the host. Most of the time, a Hangout On Air is an event, announced in advance and publicized to some extent. Hangouts On Air are recorded, and you can download that recording for editing and later uploading to YouTube or any other video sharing site, or let it be uploaded to your YouTube channel automatically as is.

A Hangout, on the other hand, is more private by default and, in practice, more spontaneous. All viewers are able to comment and watch the Hangout, but viewing live in real time and participating is by invitation only. Google+ shows who on your Follow list is online right now when you click that quotation mark, and you can invite them to Hangout. Or, you can tell your cousin to log onto Google+ at a certain time and date so that you can initiate a Hangout.

As a genealogist, you will want to use Hangouts and Hangouts On Air often. The Association for Professional Genealogists has one chapter that meets only by Hangouts.

Success Story: Mondays with Myrt Finds Hessians!

It was a typical Mondays with Myrt Hangout On Air on March 18, 2013. During all Myrt’s Hangout On Air sessions, both the video and the typed comments are saved. You can go to http://plus.google.com/+PatRichleyErickson/posts/UPSGKeNGxpL and read how in the original Hangout On Air comments, Heather Wilkinson Rojo mentioned a great site for researching Hessian ancestors. At the end of the session, Heather mentioned to Pat that she was going to go research her Hessians. Within a week, Pat was able to post the following:

       This just in via e-mail/iPad from Heather: “We were just on the 3rd floor of the FHL. We found 20 volumes of the journal of the Johannesburg Schwalm Historical Society. Not only did we find my Hessian and his regimental history, and other previously unknown tidbits of his story, but I found an entire article on the Anton Shoop mentioned by one of your listeners in the comments during the webcast.

       We happened to be sitting with Russ Worthington. He gave me the name of your “Shoop” descendant. I’ve photographed the chapter to mail to her later.

       I thought you’d get a kick out of hearing this little adventure!

—Heather Rojo

Many online genealogy seminars use Hangouts On Air; some genealogy clubs use Hangouts On Air for board meetings before the regular meetings; families can hold confabs during the holidays using Hangouts. Imagine using Hangouts to record an oral history with your grandparents to save for future generations. The genealogy applications are endless!

MeetUp

MeetUp.com is a different type of online social network. The point of MeetUp is to arrange face-to-face meetings in the real world. If you go to the site, you can sign in easily with your Facebook account. MeetUp reads your location from that and shows you the meetings in your area. You can search for genealogy MeetUps and see registered MeetUps from all over the world.

Uses for genealogy include local clubs and association meetings in the city where you live or to which you intend to travel, and finding other genealogists in your area to create a meeting if none exists. I briefly had regular MeetUps with two other genealogists at our local library to help each other tackle some brick walls.

Wrapping Up

    • Social networking services help you collaborate with other genealogists.

    • You can do it by text (the old-fashioned way) or with varying degrees of text, sound, video, animation, and pictures.

    • Facebook has several genealogists, and is a convenient way to keep up with the latest in genealogy.

    • Second Life is a multimedia social networking experience, with many genealogy lectures and chats happening regularly.

    • Google+ is popular with genealogists precisely because the rest of the world has not discovered it yet.

    • MeetUp can help you connect with genealogists in real life.