How To Connect Long Lost Relatives With Facebook

I'm going to say right off the bat that I'm not going to go into a whole huge amount of details about the websites I found, the many different forums I went into, or all the genealogical sites I used, this is just going to be a general story and explanation of how to bring the new family members you do discover together.

The first thing I wanted to do was see if I could find some of the same information that my uncle found around 20 years earlier? I started going to the Davidson Family Forums online and to ancestry.com and got a membership for a year. I started asking questions and looking up names on ancestry that my uncle had found and discovered that his information was correct. I started hearing through emails from a few Davidson's where I had posted on the forums looking for certain names. So, I knew I had some good resources to start with on finding my mom's side of the family.

I started with the Smoot Family and Herald Family Forums online and posted names of different family members I wanted to find out about. I was lucky in that my mom's side of the family had talked about old family members throughout my life and I had heard a lot of names from them and also the information I started gathering from my grandmother. My grandparents had been married for over 50 years and both came from pretty big families. I was also lucky enough to have met most of my grandparents brothers and sisters and knew my grandmother's mother (my great grandmother) before they passed away.

In the meantime while I had started my research I had asked my grandmother to dig out any old photos she thought I may need for my research plus the fact I really wanted to see pictures of these people I had heard about all my life. After many postings of different names and inquiries about different family members in the forums I found online, I began getting quite a few people sending me emails saying that they had this person or that person's name in their family and wanted more information from me to see if we were connected. The more emails I received the more relatives I was beginning to find. We would swap stories about different people in the family that we had heard about and I would go to my grandmother and confirm any stories that someone had told me through her if she had known them. I was starting to get so many emails it was getting difficult to keep track of them. I had also started looking up names of my great grandparents parents as well and the ball just kept on rolling, LOL. It really was becoming addictive to wake up almost every day and get an email or two from someone who was possibly related to you. I was also getting a lot of documents from both ancestry.com and the websites I was finding online from the states where my family had lived.

Probably the most fun and exciting part of gathering this information was both hearing from newly discovered family in different parts of the country through emails and gathering the pictures that my grandmother, mother and other family members have been sending me since I began this adventure into my families past. Also the time spent with my 89 year old grandmother listening to her stories as she brings out old photos has especially been a very special time for both of us. For me, seeing the actual faces of these people I've heard about all my life and how in many cases they struggled to create a life for their families and future generations is very heartwarming to learn about.

My grandmother is very protective of her old photos as she should be so the method in which I've been using to get copies of these old photos is by using my Nicon Coolpix L18 camera that my boyfriend got me a couple years ago for Christmas and taking pictures of the pictures she has and then cropping them when needed. I've found this method very effective and I have been saving them both on my computer and online in various places so that they will not be lost. The best thing about placing these photos on the facebook group pages is that they are now digital photos that are on a well established web site and will be around as long as facebook is around. As an added precaution I have also added the photos to several other online places such as photobucket and flickr to avoid them being lost as well. Being able to save these photos this way will ensure that they will be around for generations to come and will not be lost to deterioration as many photos succumb to eventually.

Once I had gathered enough information, although my research will never end, I placed all my information into a 3 ring binder notebook and gave it to my mom and my grandmother as a Christmas gift in 2009. I organized it as best I could and asked them to go over the information to see if there was anything that needed correcting before I made more books for my mom's other siblings and family members. They were very happy to get the information and surprised at some of it as well.

Even after that Christmas I was still getting emails from people asking if I could be related to them and in most cases finding out that I was, so I decided to try to bring all these people together. I already had a personal profile on facebook and really enjoyed the way you can keep in touch with others so easily so I thought, why not try getting all my newly discovered relatives and relatives I already knew together on a facebook group page? I went and created two facebook group pages, one for my Smoot Relatives called "The Descendants Of William Smute and George Whitfield Smoot". My original title had just been "The Descendants Of George Whitfield Smoot" since that was as far back as I could find because to this day it is still not really known who George's father was; but thanks to a member of my Facebook Group who is descended from one of George's sons and who is the brother of my great, great, great grandfather; we found out that his ancestor is actually a descendant of William Smute who came from England and is believed to be originially from Holland, through a DNA test.

Another great thing that I discovered is that there was actually a book written by Harry Wright Newman called "The Smoots Of Maryland And Virginia" that he wrote in 1936 about our Smoot line starting with William Smute who came to America in approximately 1633 as a boatwright. Now that it is proven that George Whitfield Smoot and his children were descended from William Smute through a DNA test I will probably just end up eventually changing the title to "The Descendants of William Smute". Discovering this information was a great breakthrough in my research and broadened the amount of people that would join my new Smoot facebook group. At this point there are almost 30 members who are related to me and each other in this group. There are also many others who are not in the facebook group because of work or they just are not into joining facebook that have emailed me and that I still keep in touch with.

As for my second Facebook Group, I made it for the Herald side of my family. I had also had many relatives who found me through my posts in the forums and had contacted me. My Herald side of the family is somewhat more difficult since it is believed that the name changed from some other variation of the name Herald but I do believe they were mainly in Kentucky? The facebook group I have for them is "The Descendants of James Riley Herald, Sr", who was my great great great grandfather. I do believe that his father's name was William and his mother's name was Peggy but I have not found definite proof of that as of yet so I will be keeping this particular page name til I find out differently. If William is his father, then he was born around 1763 and that is about as far back as I have currently found. In this particular family group I've found that bringing everyone together on facebook has been very meaningful because there is not as much known about the Herald's as the Smoots and the information and pictures shared with each other on this page are very much appreciated among all the relatives.

Well, that's my story of how I connected some of my long lost relatives together on Facebook. I hope you enjoyed the story and if you are into genealogy, you may want to try this method also. Thanks for checking out this lens. Below I have a youtube video of some of my families older pictures and some other helpful genealogy videos.