About Us

My name is Amanda. I designed this website because all of the genealogy software generated websites are boring. Names and dates are boring. The fun part about discovering your ancestors is digging into the records, spending hours searching census pages until you find that name you've been looking for, visiting cemeteries, discovering obituaries and pictures. These things shouldn't be hidden away in footnotes.

I am very interested in contacting relatives, no matter how distant. If you see your family on here, we are related. Hello cousin! Please contact me on facebook or by the contact form. Please share family stories, legends, and pictures. If you are genealogist and want to add your contact information to a particular relative, please let me know.

About My Research

I have been researching genealogy since I was 11 years old when my Granny, Evelyn Botts, took me to the Greenville Court House in Texas to dig through the old birth and marriage indexes housed there. We went to big genealogical conventions in Dallas and smaller society meetups in Greenville. We visited graveyards and hung out in libraries and slowly the tree grew over the next several years.

When we met distant cousins and fellow genealogists, we accepted information provided to us without much question. With a little basic research and correspondence, I was able to get several type-written trees from distant cousins for so many branches of my tree. The internet became a thing in the mid 90's and soon I was finding even more trees and cousins online. I tried out tons of cheap family tree software packages. My favorites, by far, were made by SoftKey. I still have my original gedcom file but it is a crazy complicated mess. A lot of my tree grew before I learned how to properly document evidence and I didn't really separate people I found for myself and those that were sent to me by distant cousins.

About ten years ago I had a new gedcom made with great source citations and lots of paper and digital copies of records. This isn't the story where I tell you to always backup your gedcoms, folks. This is the story where I tell you I HAD backups of my gedcoms that were actually burned onto CD-Roms and stored in usb thumb drives! Guess what happened. My computer died and I couldn't buy a new one for a year, then moved twice during that time, and then when I finally did have a computer I could not locate the backups. They were gone. Lost forever. I still had my charts and paper copies and some really old backups that were next to useless so while it was a disaster, it wasn't a complete disaster. It did turn me off of genealogy for awhile.

The genealogy bug can't stay dead for too long... especially these days when you can find all these juicy records without leaving your house. With this site, I am rebuilding my tree once again. Welcome to my file box.

Contributing to the Research Here

There are several ways you can help contribute to the research here. I have divided them into cost free ways and monetary ways. Keep in mind that I have a large collection of material I still need to add to this site. Please contact me before spending any money or too much time researching something I may already have. Thanks!!

Free Ways to Help Me

The best way to help me is to share your family stories, legends, birth, marriage, and death certificates, and pictures with me. Please don't wait to try to give me everything you have at once. That is overwhelming to both of us. Start by sending me a few stories. Email me a picture or two. That's it. I'd rather receive a million emails from you over several years than to receive nothing because you want to organize your things first or make other 'one of these days' excuses. :P I've made these same excuses to distant cousins as well.

Not exactly free but go on research trips for/with me. Combine your vacations with research stops. Visit courthouses and make copies or take pictures of the log books, probate records, locally held vital certificates, and other useful records housed there for your relatives. Visit libraries and other repositories for your ancestors and find the newspapers, city directories, local off year censuses, and more. Make copies or take pictures and send them to me. Find your ancestors cemeteries and take pictures of the headstones. Go to the NARA in D.C. and make copies of pension records and service records. Visit the Library of Congress for newspapers, maps, and more. Visit the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Another way to help me is to look at the place index and find where you live. Research those family groups at your local library, courthouse, or cemetery. Libraries often have newspaper collections or are in contact with local genealogical societies. They will have city directories and materials on microfilm. This kind of help is invaluable to me.

Monetary Ways to Help Me

Some genealogy research is easy to do online and free to research. Other things are super expensive. Here are a few ways to help me financially that doesn't involve forking over actual cash. :P

Subscriptions to genealogy databases like ancestry.com can go upwards of $200 per year. I don't actually do it that way. I take advantage of free days (like military records on Memorial Day) and save up a massive to do list of items to research so I can subscribe for just one month every other year or so. I'm very cheap that way. There are also loads of newspaper databases I have yet to pay for. I'm afraid none of them will have the actual newspapers I need and I'll just waste my money. Anyways, contact me if you'd like to purchase a subscription for me.

Purchase a birth, marriage, or death certificate. They normally run about $30. It's totally fine to buy them for your relatives and just email me a copy.

Join genealogical societies located in the cities where our mutual ancestors lived. Local societies are often expensive to join but are usually responsible for preserving important historical documents that may be useful.

Pay to maintain this website. It costs $96 for 2 years of webhosting.

Get your genome tested and link me to your data. I did mine at 23andme and would love to buy tests for my brother, father, and half sister some day. I may be able to get a referral reward if you let me email you a referrel link before you sign up. When I did it a few years back, it cost over $200. It's now less than half that if you find the right discount code.

Pay a professional genealogist to research our mutual ancestors. This is the most expensive option, not very fun, but useful if they find some juicy stuff.

Hire me to make you a personal genealogy site using the template I made here. I'll have to contact the stock photo owners I used and get permission to use them or purchase new stock images and remake the design a bit. (The stock I used is free for non commercial use. See below) Expect the website design and template to cost about $200, the site subscription to be under $100 (you can purchase your own, of course), and either me teaching you how to add pages yourself or my maintaining the site for $1 per page or page update beyond the basic 30 pages that comes with the template. Prices are negotiable but they are reasonably priced for the amount of time it takes me to do the work. :) If you did decide to hire me to design your website, keep in mind that you would still be responsible for the actual content of the pages. You would email me the text and images to be included in each page and I would mark it up and add it to the website as is. Contact me if you have any questions. ;)

About the website

This website is designed, coded, and maintained by Amanda Taylor. Some elements of the design are from creative commons copyright stock listed below under the stock credits and are copyrighted by their respective owners. All other images and files are copyrighted 2014 by Amanda Taylor.

Stock Credits

The following stock was used in the design elements of this website.

Header Image

The header image was designed by Amanda Taylor. The woman on the left is my maternal grandmother. Behind her is the oil well from her grandfather's farm. She grew up in Dallas and attended lots of parties.

The woman on the right is my paternal grandmother and behind her is my paternal grandfather. They grew up in East Texas farming and raising cattle. In the background is my favorite farmer picture. My maternal great grandfather is standing just right of center with the white hat.

Profile Card

The profile card was designed by Amanda Taylor. Stock sources for the profile card are provided by creative commons copyright in addition to the stock provider's rules.

Vintage Texture
Antique Frame
Frames Pack
srapbook:vintage mini-kit
male silhouette
female silhouette

Gallery code

The Gallery code used on some profile pages was modified from a code provided by CSS Play.

Flags and maps

Flags are from FOTW Flags Of The World website. Unless otherwise stated, I designed the maps myself.