The World Wide Web offers a treasure trove of genealogy information and opportunities to make contact with relatives. Create your own website and add your family’s story to the mix. Professional website developer Paul Carter shows you the achievable steps you need to take to make this dream a reality

REAP THE BENEFITS OF THE WEB

Paul Carter

Over the past 20 years, the Internet and World Wide Web have increasingly become part of daily life, to the point where we think nothing of communicating via email, shopping for products, sharing stories on social media or watching a television programme online. The process of researching family history has been transformed over this period as new records are digitised and our favourite pastime becomes more accessible to us in our homes.

But have you considered publishing your own website describing your family history? If you’re unsure what content you’d include or are daunted by how to go about constructing such a site, this article offers some guidance and practical steps to help you produce a successful family history website.

Why have a website for your family history?

Finding and connecting with distant relatives is a big part of what we seek to do as family historians. Those connections, sharing common ancestry, may well have more information or heirlooms to help us expand our own knowledge of the family. This is a key reason why online family trees have proven so popular.