What is GenealogyTools.com?
GenealogyTools.com is a blog (short for web log) website for genealogists and family historians. I provide video tutorials, tips, news, and reviews that help you accomplish your research goals more quickly. This site brings together two sites that I created to serve Mac and PC based genealogists separately. I’ve thought better of it and brought it all together in GenealogyTools.com. The resources from MacGenealogist.com and PCGenealogist.com are here.
On GenealogyTools.com you will find:
- a repository of useful news for genealogists and family historians. I create these articles to help you make exciting discoveries and to simplify and speed up your research.
- a collection of instructional video screen recordings, called screencasts, showing you step-by-step, how to make the most of your computer for genealogy. There are controls at the bottom of the video that allow you to pause and play at will, so you can follow along on your PC or Mac. The videos play within the article; there are no files to download and no additional application will be launched. Simply click on the play button.
Who is Ben Sayer?
GenealogyTools.com is produced by Ben Sayer+, a family historian and long-time computer geek from the United States. Ben has successfully researched his closest four generations of ancestors and has traced several of his lines to other countries.
Ben fondly remembers boyhood visits with his uncle Eddie, the Sayer family historian. His den was dark, smoky, stillness periodically punctuated by crackling calls on a police scanner. The best part was the stacks of paper full of fascinating details about our relatives. The genealogy bug had bitten Ben and he occasionally dabbled in genealogy in the ’80s and ’90s. However, the immediacy of a young man’s life and a fascination with computers prevented him from settling into the hobby. Uncle Eddie died in 1995, leaving his son, John, to store the treasured files away for later generations. As they waited in the dark, Ben matured. He started a family with his wife, Carrie, in 2005. Ben took up the mantle of family historian for the Sayer lineage after his children, Logan and Paige, were born.
While genealogy waited patiently, Ben explored personal computers. His first was one his dad built before Macintosh and IBM PCs were even produced. He learned to write computer programs on it when he was 13 years old. This early exposure led Ben to become a personal computer support person in 1983. He quickly advanced to PC support team leadership and then management. Ben now consults on computer infrastructure projects. In his spare time he creates products to help practicing genealogists break through more brick walls. One such is a genealogy research system, lineascope.com.
Ben’s ability to quickly grasp complex technical subjects, his years of experience helping people apply computers to solving problems, and his love of family history converge in GenealogyTools.com.