Making Genealogy a Family Affair

How about a family history wiki page or blog?

Creating a family blog or wiki is a great way to get everyone involved in family history, no matter how far away for each other family members live.  

Blogging

You can choose to make a blog, with one or two people adding information and sharing findings or a blog where all family members can post updates, add photos and share links to new finds.  A blog functions like a journal, with each entry dated.  This lets you go back and read older posts or use the built-in search function to find a certain name or keyword. 

A wiki is like a blog, but instead of just adding new posts, members can edit and change previous posts even if they did not write them. It's a great tool for making corrections to dates, locations, relationships, and other details. Think of it as an evolving record of your family history. 

There are lots of sites where you can make a free blog, including: 

Weebly (http://www.weebly.com)
Blogger (http://www.blogger.com)
Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com)

More advanced bloggers might choose to self-host a blog using Wordpress tools.  You can find more information about that http://www.wordpress.org.  The software is free to download, and there are hundreds of themes and apps to choose from. 

Wikis

You can create free or low-cost wikis at a number of sites, too.  Some of the more popular choices include: 

WikiSpaces (http://www.wikispaces.com/)
WikiSpot (http://wikispot.org)
Wikia (http://www.wikia.com) 

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Using Dropbox to share family history

Another great tool for sharing genealogy finds with family members across town or across the world is DropBox. 

This free tool allows you to create a virtual storage and sharing box online which can be accessed anywhere you have an Internet connection.  And if you install Dropbox on your computer, any updates to a folder will instantly be available on that computer and any other computer you've installed it on.  

That means the photos you upload to your laptop's dropbox will be ready and waiting on your desktop when you get home!  This also makes it easy for you to share photos among family members.

You can choose to share folders with others, or keep them private. It's your choice for each and every folder, so your private things stay private!

Check it out at Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/)