Personal Genealogy Web Sites Toolkit

The wide reach of the Web has its downside — especially if you don’t want the whole world to see pictures of you doing the Electric Slide at cousin Mabel’s wedding. Several sites offer password-protected online gathering places for your family. That means you can still share your family stories and photos, but with a more limited audience.

Some sites give your family a pre-designed site with built-in features such as a calendar, photo album, address book and chat. When you register, your family gets a login and password, which you share with everyone you want to participate. While all the services have the same basic features, each has different extras and, in some cases, caters to different levels of Web savvy. Your best bet is to visit a few and decide which suits your family’s needs. Here are four to get you started:

?MyFamily.com<www.myfamily.com>: Sister site to Ancestry.com . Gives you space to post your family tree and family history stories. (See the August 2000 issue of Family Tree Magazine for a review of MyFamily.com.)

•Family Shoebox<www.familyshoebox.com>: Offers all the basic features plus lets you upload your own HTML pages to the site. Family Shoebox gives you the most control over the design of your site; you can even put a family logo on each page.

•Family Point<www.familypoint.com>: This cute, fun site is operated by iVillage women’s network, with links to shopping, classifieds and horoscopes. You can post recipes, stories and favorite Web sites in the Family Favorites area, but Family Point also inserts its own list of links.

•Family Buzz<www.familybuzz.com>: Everyone who participates gets a free e-mail account, but you can’t access a pre-existing account from your Family Buzz site. Extensive shopping area.