Welcome to ColonialRoots.Net.

Our focus is on the changing face of online genealogy and tools, and we hop to also offer a blend of genealogy, history, timelines and maps related to Colonial America. This grows out of my own interest in genealogy research which is rooted largely in early Pennsylvania families that arrived in the America but is also intended to include far more than that.

Our ColonialRoots Wiki Project is building a database of people, places and events linked to historical accounts and info in the public domain, initially centered largely around Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic states. Through this I hope to create a resource that can can help me and others find to understand the context of Colonial American times from the 17th to 19th Century.

We’ve also added a ColonialRoots.Net Bookstore of products we find useful or of possible interest to our readers.

We highly recommend the Family Tree Maker 16 Collector’s Edition listed in our shop. This software includes a year of access to Ancestry.com at a discounted price, and makes it easy to build your own family tree by searching online through the FTM/Ancestry.com interface. The ability to search Census records and save copies of the original documents is an invaluable feature in this software bundle. At this point in time I do not recommend the new FTM 2008 version. The Ancestry bundling has reduced the free subscription periods and the software is in my opinion an inferior new product that bears little resemblance to the older FTM software.

Please note that the other versions of FTM 16 and 2006 software come with different trial period of access to Ancestry, and that we recommend the Collector’s Edition as the best value for a full year of Ancestry Deluxe membership at less than the regular subscription rate.