How far back do you have to go to connect your branches to the rest of the world’s? Says science writer Steve Olson, only about 3,000 years.
Olson, author of Mapping Human History, began his quest to find the most recent common ancestor after hearing about Mitochondrial Eve—a female believed to have lived 150,000 years ago, who can be found in every family tree.
Change is good.
It’s trite, it’s overused, but sometimes that simple phrase makes a point and summarizes a reality. Like in the world of computer technology purchases.
Change comes frequently today when we attempt to keep pace with technology and a busy world, and choices come at us more rapidly than they ever did for our ancestors.
How to use other researchers’ surname clues to help you make progress on your own family history
For decades there has been one surefire method for succeeding in genealogical research—communication.
Every week, hundreds of people discover a new pastime—collecting ancestors. And the computer may be the main reason for this phenomenal growth. The computer is almost as common in homes today as a television or a telephone. Improvements are constantly being made to popular genealogy software programs making them easier to use and making electronic storage capabilities much more efficient.
In late 2000, I did some work for a computer distributor headquartered in Kansas with regional sales offices in Atlanta, L.A., Chicago, Connecticut, and Dallas. In early 2001, the distributor decided to connect its offices with a voice over Internet protocol network, or VoIP for short. It sounded cool, until you tried to watch a video conference or talk on a phone.
WalMart changed the South. We still talk slow. We still like loud cars and dogs. But small towns all over the South have seen dozens of family businesses shuttered.Since 1980, more town squares are empty. Meanwhile, out on the edge of town sits a super center—one that uses technology to quickly and affordably get us the products we once bought from those family businesses.
When you think about it, we all know at least two things about any one ancestor. We may not know his or her name or parents’ names, but we can be sure that our ancestor had children and that they all lived some place. For me, it worked like this: in 1859, James Sharbrough bought some land in Jasper County, Mississippi. I know because my government told me so.
For your consideration, I submit the following:
Item. My brother is an old-school genealogist. He writes to county clerks asking if they have records with the name he wants, then he writes back to request the records. In the mail. The kind with a stamp and an envelope and a dog-delicacy deliveryman.
When Sarah got home from work, she found in her mailbox a big fat envelope from a lawyer in Tulsa. After a moment of fright, she realized that it was not very likely that she was being sued by someone in Tulsa. She didn’t even know anyone who lived there. She took a deep breath. “Why are they bugging me?” she thought as she slid her longest nail under the flap and butchered the envelope.
Google TM has won the search engine wars, for the time being. Its complete text search functionality for its database of over 4 billion webpages has made Google extremely popular. Last year, the search engine processed more than 112 million search requests per day. This year, Google accounts for forty percent of all Internet searches performed in the United States.
