My side of the family is pretty small, and we are all here in the same metro area (except for DS1 in VA).  DH’s family, however is large and scattered across the country.  DH is the 5th of 7 children, and each of those “children” have children who have children…it’s a BIG family.  Besides Minnesota, we cover the aforementioned Virginia, Missouri, Texas, North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Utah, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona.  We used to have huge family get-togethers on my in-laws’ farm in western North Dakota, which we all loved.  There was room for the kids to all run and play and get to know their cousins.  There was always good food, good times, and some good mischief.

Since my in-laws have passed away, reunions have been limited to weddings and funerals.  This family is terrific.  When there’s a family wedding, everyone who can travels for the occasion.  Maybe your family is like ours, and maybe you have a smaller family, but it seems like keeping in touch gets harder all the time.

Several years ago we found MyFamily.com.  It’s a free on-line service, but I pay the $20 or $30 upgrade a year and then no one gets pop-up ads, plus we get additional space for pictures. 

What I really like about MyFamily is it’s a secure web site.  Only your invitees can see what’s there.  When you set it up, you plug in the e-mail addresses of whom you’d like to invite, and MyFamily sends out the invitations.  Because it’s private, you can have address lists, phone numbers, family pictures — more information than you would care to share with the universe.  There are even sections for recipes, book and/or movie reviews, family tree, a “file cabinet” where you can share documents.  It also shows when people have visited the site last. 

The person who sets up the site is the Administrator, so you will be the one that helps out if someone forgets their password, etc.  Or you can designate everyone an Administrator.  It’s up to you.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of MyFamily, and it’s part of my morning routine:  I check it to see if anyone has posted anything new since yesterday.  It also shows upcoming birthdays, and probably other features I’m not remembering.  Oh, it also has a Chat feature, where you can arrange a certain date and time for everyone to be online at the same time and you have your own chat room.  We’ve tried it a couple of times, and it didn’t work out the best for our family.  But I love every other feature, and MyFamily works great for us. 

When Ike was bearing down on Texas/Louisiana, SIL Grace (who lives south of Houston) was able to post information about the family who lives in that area.  There was a lot of activity on our MyFamily page during that time, and it was great that there was one central place to check for updates.

Just something useful that’s out there that you might not have known about. 

Sue