My mom is into genealogy in a big way, and has been researching our family history for over 30 years. For a long time, her data existed solely as hard copy documents in a filing cabinet, which made it difficult for other researchers to know what she had discovered. When she came to visit me in August of 2006, she was working on digitizing some of her records, using a piece of genealogy software that had recently become available.

I think the digitization of her records was a good move, but I found the software's interface to be appalling. Furthermore, it was my opinion that the software failed to provide what I think is probably the most important feature that computers can offer genealogists—the ability to search everyone else's records to find people that are working on the same ancestors. The fastest way to increase the span of your family history is to incorporate research already performed by another researcher who shares some distant segment of your family tree.

I volunteered to help set up a publicly-accessible database containing mom's genealogical research along with high-resolution scans of the source documents, etc. We've been working on populating this database for the last 15 months and, finally, the data for direct-line ancestors are all in place (the non-direct ancestors are still a work in progress).

So, without further ado, I present the genealogy project that my parents and I have been working on. And, with this link, Google will index the entire project site making the data accessible to genealogical researchers everywhere.

It is our hope that this will lead to contacts with previously unknown researchers who can gain from mom's research and possibly add to the information contained here.

For an example of a well-populated ancestor details page, check out my great grandfather James Elgie Beals.