About

Lorelle in the Past Lane is about using today’s tech to research family history.

Lorelle has worked in the web publishing industry since its conception, starting with USENet groups and CompuServe in the eighties and nineties, quickly becoming an expert trainer, instructor, and speaker on blogging, web design and development, social media, and web publishing. She uses all those skills to research family’s history, helping others research theirs.

Lorelle in the Past Lane covers genealogy research topics focused on using modern technology to improve your research techniques. Lorelle’s criteria for helpful family history technology is that it must:

Have a tiny learning curve: Seriously, we don’t have time to mess around with learning new things, do you? Learning is great, but we want to learn fast and and get back to our genealogy research. Today’s technology is required to be user friendly, so we’ll put it to the test for you.
Must maximize time: Since we don’t have much time to mess around, the tools Lorelle seeks must make the process not just easier but faster. This is the promise of modern technology: time savings. She hunts for time saving tools and shortcuts.
Maximizes search results: There used to be so little information on family history on the web. Today, we’re drowning in it. So many resources, not enough time. Lorelle looks for tools, websites, mobile apps, software, everything there is to help maximize search results and family history discoveries, narrowing down the hay we have to search through to find our needle.
Gives me answers: We love playing around with cool gadgets and gizmos, but if it doesn’t give you the answers you need, it’s play. You want to find your ancestors, you want to connect with them, you want to understand their lives, their decisions, their culture, their world, and you need answers. So do we all.
Be fun, enjoyable, and in the no-suffering zone: If the technology meets the other criteria, Lorelle will pass it through the no-suffering zone filter. If it is easy to use, fun, and no blood nor brain matter was shed in the process, it makes her lists.

Lorelle offers posts and videos to take you through the family history research process step-by-step, exploring the computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices we use to do our genealogy research. Together, you’ll explore various genealogy records, record sources, research sites, libraries, archives, and a wide variety of online sources, hopefully finding a few that might open your mind to new research possibilities. Software, hardware, web apps, mobile apps, everything we use, or should be using, or maybe not be using, Lorelle helps you discover how to use modern technology in your family history research.

About Lorelle in the Past Lane

At ten years old, Lorelle was officially introduced to the old family bible. The gold-embossed leather binding was as soft as a kitten, and smelled of dust, must, kerosene, and rust. Her father carefully folded back the thick book to the center where the names of her ancestors were sketched in beautiful penmanship. The first last names she read were Farlin.

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe one day you’ll find out.”

And she did.

It took thirty-five years, but she did.

Since that day, Lorelle felt that somehow this was her destiny, to help others tell their story, whether they are living today or twenty, fifty, a hundred, maybe hundreds of years ago. Today, she is living that destiny.

About Lorelle

Lorelle VanFossen - keynote. Lorelle VanFossen is the author of Lorelle on WordPress, offering thousands of free tutorials, techniques, and tips on WordPress, blogging, podcasting, social media, web writing, online storytelling, and web publishing. She is a popular speaker and presents workshops and training programs around the world on web publishing. Her experience as a leading educator in web publishing is a natural transition into family history, genealogy, oral history, and story preservation.

She is also the author of one of the first websites in the world in continuous existence, Taking Your Camera on the Road, the popular Zen-style site on learning to blog, Blog Your Passion, host and contributor of Writers in the Grove and many other sites. Her personal family history blog, Lorelle’s Family History Blog.

Lorelle has received many honors and awards in over 30 years of web publishing, and is the author of several books on web publishing including Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging and Social Media for Crafters: Covering the Basics of the Social Web, and the soon-to-be published book on “Blog Your Passion” and the book series, “Blogging 101 Master Class.”

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