Project Complete: Family Tree Collaboration Website

I've spent some time over the past couple of weeks putting together a family tree and installing a website to help us collaborate on it. I joined Ancestry.com and found a third cousin or something (Cindia Carlson) who had a pretty extensive tree. She gave me her tree and then I added the recent births to it. Her original tree had 1,764, but most of the people in it were from her mother's side (not Carlsons) that traced their lineage back to John Adams and beyond to the 1300s. I whittled it back down to 331 by taking out anyone that wasn't a blood relative or spouse of a blood relative. Here is the tree on Ancestry.com: Carlson Family . You have to sign up for a free account to see it. Unfortunately, you need to pay them to actually contribute, which is why I don't want to use them in the long term.

I set up a website at www.carlsonville.com for my family to collaborate. I designed the theme myself -- kind of reminiscent of Ancestry.com, and lots better than any of the default themes. I did go ahead and buy desktop software as well to keep track of the family tree. It has the capability of printing nice family trees / pedigree charts, etc. I can do that upon request.

So yeah, bottom line: I've nearly gone cross-eyed weeding through all this information, and I'm happy to say it's now in a pretty manageable state. Now if I can only get my family to contribute ...