Sunday, June 20, 2010

Review of Kindred Trails website

I took a closer look at the Kindred Trails website today.  I often find a reference to pages on the site when I'm searching for information on the web, so wanted to get a better overall feel for the scope of the site.

The front (home) page of the site doesn't give us a very good idea of what is available, so, as is often the case, we must explore...

There are five segments on the site: Resources - Databases - Store - Freebies -News.  One thing I noticed early on was that a number of the links on the site are to pay for use products, most notably, Ancestry.com.   That will limit the value of the website for non Ancestry.com subscribers, but the pages still can still be helpful.

The Resources page is broken down into Links by Locality, Surname, Religion, Convict and Native American.   The databases page covers such topics as birth, marriage, death, cemetery land and others. 

Each page gives some links to online information specific to the topic. Coverage is not comprehensive.  Many links are to commmly used sites that offer a link to a specific kind of resource in each state or jurisdiction.   Nor does the site list all the Ancestry.com databases for a topic. 

The Family History Store page offers items that focus on artistic and display products... charts, scrapbooking, needle arts, forms, gifts and gadgets and more.  It is a fun store to browse in, with some interesting items for sale.

The Freebies page lists some interesting and unusual free sites.  I recommend taking some time to check out the links on that page.

And finally, there is a page of  news and events, but as of now the most recent event is from October 2009, so it does not seem to be kept current.

I think the author of this website shares my problem with me -- too much information out there and not enough time to keep web pages current!  But a visit to the site will probably net you at least one or two interesting sites that you didn't know about and that is worth a few minutes time to investigate it.