My Trails into the Past

Back in the day before Ancestry and FamilySearch got so big with images of records and many family trees, we used sites on the internet such as USGENWEB and RootsWeb.  Whenever I located a new residence for my ancestor’s families, I would check out the county page at USGENWEB for user-contributed content. The hosts for the sites would upload indexes, photos, maps, and other useful information about their county. Some counties had more information than others and often you’d see they needed a host for the county. RootsWeb was another site with database indexes, family trees, and message boards. The message boards are still available, as  Ancestry now hosts the site at https://www.ancestry.com/boards/. You can search on surname, place, or topic. In the past, it was a way to communicate with others who were researching the same families or places.  It is where I met three other researchers of the Sievert/Freitag families. Four siblings arrived from Schneidemüh...