Genealogy is about researching and preserving your ancestry. It’s one thing to find your ancestors but quite another to organize them all in a family tree chart that makes sense and that keeps you from tearing your hair out trying to remember who was great aunt Bertha.

A family tree chart is a great way to organize your family tree and keep small important information available at a glance. Most family tree charts have room for names, dates of birth, death, marriages and perhaps a fact or two such as a place or occupation. These are all important bits of information that you might want to share. But it saves you the trouble of having to haul your entire filing cabinet full of photographs, photocopies, and records with you to every family dinner, birthday, or luncheon.

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Sometimes the best place to start your genealogy research is in the comfort of your own home. A few weeks ago I told you about my favorite free genealogy websites and my favorite paid subscription genealogy websites to help you get started on genealogy search. Now here is yet another excellent tool for researching your family history: Google News Timeline.

This interactive timeline allows you to research specific events and see all the related news and information about that event in a timeline format.

When you get to Google News Timeline, you will see a timeline of current events and the current date. It looks like a series of columns, at the top of each column you’ll see the day and then under that day, you’ll see news events from that day.

To enter a search about a specific event, you enter in the name of the event or the day, date, month or year and then click on Add Query. What comes up is a timeline displaying news from the time of the event that you entered.

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We always see them together, there are pictures of them together all over the Internet, and they collaborate together and they even grew up together, and now we find out they are related!

According to the New England Historic Genealogy Society, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, two prominent Hollywood actors are tenth cousins. Apparently, they share an ancestor by the name of William Knowlton Jr. He was a bricklayer from England who came to the U.S. in the 1630’s, a time when England was aggressively settling the new Colony of Massachusetts.

Here is what I found out about our Mr. William Knowlton Jr.:

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All too often genealogy doesn’t become interesting until a person gets a little older, has a child, or uncovers some amazing truth about the family.

It’s never too late to get hooked on genealogy research, but what if you could have started when you were a child or teen? Just imagine all the information you could have gathered at family reunions, from aunt Bessy, or the pictures you could have had of great, great grandma before she passed away?

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Welcome to the ObituariesHelp.org/blog.

Hi, I’m Melanie and in this blog, I’ll be sharing some interesting bits of information and articles on a few topics including, genealogy and ancestry, family trees, and obituaries.

This blog is for you, so I want to hear from you to find out what you are interested in, what you would like me to write about, and if you have any questions about genealogy or obituary, I will research it and write about it for you. Please send me your questions by posting a comment below or sending me an email to melanie @ obituarieshelp.org (remove the spaces, they are there so I don’t get spammed, but your emails are welcome!)

My goal here is really to make it a little easier to find your ancestors, to offer help when you need advice and to make your family history a little easier to navigate.

So let me know what you need to know and I’ll do my best to get you honest information and straightforward answers. Check back often for great articles and tips on how to find your ancestors both online and offline.