It’s such a popular activity these days. If all the talk of family trees, family history and scrap booking your memories has caught your attention but you don’t know where to start, here are some ideas to get you going.
 
You could start building a family tree or conducting a family history search, but probably the best thing you can do before you do anything at all is to think about what you want to get out of the pursuit of your heritage.  You can spend years tracing your genealogy, going back generation after generation through your lineage.  Some people find this alone a satisfying hobby and also get a great deal of fulfillment, knowing something about where they come from. The key question is this: do you want to spend all your efforts looking back, when some of the richest rewards are in your more recent history?
 
Within the living memories of your present day family, you probably have a wealth of fantastic history with which you can identify. Try picking a relatively recent ancestor, who seems interesting and whom you think you may be able to gather material about. This can be a motivational place to start researching your history, before you immerse yourself in records and certificates.  Moving across your tree and fleshing out the details about an ancestor has the added benefits of allowing you to connect with living relatives today. This can aid your search later when you start to move back in time.
 
You may also want to think about capturing some of your own or your family’s living history and preserving it for the next generation.
 
These days researching family history is much more accessible than it used to be.  If you are starting out, there are lots of sites where you can start building your family tree and do family history searches for free.  A good one that allows you to build a tree, search records and flesh out an ancestor for free is right here at arcalife.com, of course. Or if you know where you are headed and have the money you can sign up for a paid membership at a site like Ancestry or FamilyLink. The paid sites do give you an extensive set of records to search and a tree, and are great for this, but they have less of the other stuff that allows for you to connect with your family in the past and the present.

Talking with Dennis Lankes yesterday on Startups Live TV gave me some renewed focus on our end goal with arcalife. Our aim is to unite past, present and futures families using memories, experiences and stories as a timeless bridge. To do this, we’ll need support from the genealogy community for their insight and knowledge, as well as a mainstream recognition and groundswell of buy-in to our site. When you talk with people in the “tech biz” who see start-ups every day, it’s a real boost to hear that our site genuinely offers something new, different and fulfilling in the social networking and genealogy space. Our membership is already expanding rapidly and the team has high hopes for a true explosion of interest. Our Life Cube application on Facebook is one of our steps in bringing our message to the world – your memories and stories are the most important thing you leave as a legacy, arcalife can help you do it right … after all, you only have one shot.