About a year ago I signed up for a free account at Geni.com. Geni is an easy way for just about anyone to construct a family tree. You can quickly type in names and relationships and it creates a visual family tree representation.
Originally, I wanted to use this as a tool to explain to my daughter how various family members are related to each other. (I remember as a kid being confused about who the heck all the relatives were.) As I added more distant relations, it has become a helpful tool for myself.
You can invite other family members to join too and enable them to add people and information to your shared family tree. If you don't know where or when your great aunt was born, perhaps your mom can type that in, and it will remain on your tree for posterity.
If you're really into genealogy or keeping detailed information, the service lets you put in all sorts of info on each person besides birth/death/children/spouse. You can put all sorts of biographical info, such as where they went to school, where they worked, religion, hobbies, quotes, etc. You name it. It also allows you to upload pictures.
Other features I haven't used include laying out people from your tree on a Google map or sending yourself automatic family birthday reminders.
The best part of all this, it's all free. This is not one of those sites like Classmates.com, that aggressively seeks to entice you to sign up for their paid subscription the moment someone somewhere views your profile so that you can find out who.
Here's an example of what my tree looks like. On my account, more information on each person shows, but I've set some higher privacy protections for the general blog readership. Go ahead and click and drag on the below image to navigate around the tree.
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