
The access we have is specific to the school setting, and students are not able to set up private accounts or enter their own information and create their own family tree accounts. For this, they would need to set up an account (and pay for it) with parental permission at home.
After playing with the program, I have already found information, primary documents, and photos that I have never seen before regarding my own family. I now have images of the World War 2 era draft cards for each of my grandfathers. I am able to see census data from 1930, including the then-current jobs of my great grandparents. I now know where my great grandfather attended church. I have a photo of my grandmother when she was preschool age (right).
These are all interesting pieces of the puzzle of my family's past, and by putting them together I can better understand our history, but it can also be overwhelming. I tend to chase one branch of the family tree, then another, and before long, I have forgotten which branch I'm looking at. I can already tell that I need to organize my findings as I go. That's good to know if we are ever to allow students to utilize the program.
Ancestry also gives us access to Newspapers and Fold3, websites that show actual news reports and military records since the conception of our nation. Those are also quite interesting. In fact, I now know exactly where I was a few days before Mr. Culbertson was born. I was less than a year old, and was visiting my grandparents in Ada, Oklahoma. I only know this valuable tidbit of information because it was reported in the gossip section of the Ada News.
I know there are some issues that will arise through the collection of family data through a program like this; I am sensitive to the reality of divorce, adoption, and other things that could come up. I am thinking one idea may be to host optional family events in which parents or grandparents could visit the school with their children to do genealogical research. We shall develop ways to use our new Ancestry access as we continue to dig into its possibilities.