Technology creates extreme genealogists
NEW YORK -- Lee Drew had a chat with some cousins the other day.
He was sitting in his home office in Orem, Utah. Four of the cousins were in England. One was in Australia, another in South Africa. A few more joined in from other parts of North America.
Drew is one of a new breed of genealogists who are doing things that would have been impossible in the not-so-distant era of dusty archives and whirring microfilm readers. He has found so many of his relatives that he needs a computer database to keep track of them all -- all 1.7 million of them.
Just as modern equipment has made it possible for any reasonably motivated person to climb Mount Everest or dive to the Andrea Doria, new technologies have made it possible to achieve incredible genealogical feats with relatively modest effort.
Now, it takes nothing more than casual curiosity and a few hours of research to discover that civil rights activist Al Sharpton is descended from slaves who were owned by ancestors of the late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, a staunch opponent of desegregation.
That feat was accomplished by the commercial genealogy Web site ancestry.com, which boasts of having the largest online family history database in the world, with more than 4 billion records. Among the company's 725,000 subscribers there are people who have discovered they descend from royalty, or Mayflower passengers, or that Butch Cassidy is their seventh cousin.
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He was sitting in his home office in Orem, Utah. Four of the cousins were in England. One was in Australia, another in South Africa. A few more joined in from other parts of North America.
Drew is one of a new breed of genealogists who are doing things that would have been impossible in the not-so-distant era of dusty archives and whirring microfilm readers. He has found so many of his relatives that he needs a computer database to keep track of them all -- all 1.7 million of them.
Just as modern equipment has made it possible for any reasonably motivated person to climb Mount Everest or dive to the Andrea Doria, new technologies have made it possible to achieve incredible genealogical feats with relatively modest effort.
Now, it takes nothing more than casual curiosity and a few hours of research to discover that civil rights activist Al Sharpton is descended from slaves who were owned by ancestors of the late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, a staunch opponent of desegregation.
That feat was accomplished by the commercial genealogy Web site ancestry.com, which boasts of having the largest online family history database in the world, with more than 4 billion records. Among the company's 725,000 subscribers there are people who have discovered they descend from royalty, or Mayflower passengers, or that Butch Cassidy is their seventh cousin.