I picked up my CSA today, and since I'm going to Maui tomorrow morning, I'm now roasting and freezing all of the things that can be roasted and frozen.

I'm reading a book that includes a lot about mass extinctions and plagues, and the author uses "decimate" over and over to mean "almost everything died." It makes me twitch.

In my opinion, yes. They've got a ton of records digitized, the search engine is pretty good, and if you want to, you can find other people who are researching the same ancestors you are.

I will give the caveat that many of the public records they have digitized are available elsewhere and often for free. (For example, they have all the birth, marriages and death records from Archives I used to be part of and they're free on the NS Archives website, but behind a paywall at Ancestry.) The great advantage of Ancestry is that the records of many institutions are searchable in one place.

Ancestry.com fascinates me, but it seems daunting. And on my dad's side of the family, someone did it all already, too.

I paid the money for Ancestry once and it was pretty useful, but I didn't use it enough to be worth the monthly cost. I keep thinking about doing it again though.

And on my dad's side of the family, someone did it all already, too.

Gotta be careful about that. My cousin had already created a lot of family links in our tree, but when I checked one of his connections, the census report showed there was no way she could've been the person related to us, as she was on the wrong side of the country and already married to someone else at the time.

The story is that we're related to Daniel Boone, and I think whoever did the history might have had it done professionally. It's just not as interesting to me as my mom's side of the family, because to do the research and find out I already knew who I was related to would be a bummer, I think.

Huh. DNA might be a way to go. It's impersonal enough I wouldn't have to worry about living birth family, right? I'm a little curious about my lineage, as long as I don't have to (shudder) interact.

Oo, that's a sweet tree! The only cool thing I dug up in mine was that I had a great-something-grandfather named Jeremiah, which was a nice change from all the Jameses and Marys.

I'm quite fond of Jan Jansen van Harleem, professionally known as Murat Reis of the Salee Rovers, who ended his days as the governor of a Moorish fortress. And family apologies to the people of Baltimore, Ireland, whose people Jan sold into slavery in Morocco when he raided the town.

I know, not someone you should be proud of, but it will be fun in the afterlife, when I host the family reunion, to watch him and Governor Endicott, Puritan bigot extrodinaire, glare at each other.