It’s already memorial Day weekend. This year seems to be flying by. Randy Seaver is keeping with the technology-themed challenges again this week:

1)  What was your first foray into genealogy social media on the computer? 

I was already a long time genealogy addict by the time the internet started to explode. Although we started off with Apple computers, by the early 1990s, we had switched to PCs.

Today, I’m not very much into social media. In fact, the only source I use now – very sparingly – is Facebook. Back in the 1990s, as Randy mentioned, genealogy message boards were extremely popular. I loved the surname boards and browsed quite a few of them, which at the time, were much more plentiful for my mother’s New England ancestral lines as opposed to my paternal Rusyn ancestors.

We never used AOL or Prodigy. Instead, my favorite message boards were the ones that were housed on RootsWeb, then on Ancestry. I think they are still viewable, but have been closed to further comments for a long time.

I found excellent clues and actual facts for many of my colonial American families.

It also brought the first taste of instant gratification with an answer – no need to wait for my favorite mail lady to see if any letters arrived for me.

It hasn’t been all that long – the last few months, actually – since a couple of archived message boards came up when I did a general online search for a family.

Thanks, Randy, for this week’s challenge.