Punch the word ‘genealogy’ into the growing social networking site Ning, and you’ll find dozens of results.

Ning allows Internet users to create their own social networking site. People are using that to create sites for their own families, for genealogy and technology, and for researching family history in general.

Then there’s Facebook, which of course has taken off exponentially in the last few years. There’s applications that users can put in their profiles, like “We’re related.”

Is this the future of genealogy? I mentioned in my last entry that it seems to be dying down in popularity on the Web. But maybe that’s because it’s just growing in new areas, like social networking.

Social networking and genealogy are obviously a natural marriage. They make sense to go together. Long lost cousins have the chance to create profiles, post their respective trees, and connect. It opens up exciting new doors in the world of genealogy. And I think there will be a lot more of it to come in the next few years.