Return to Mark & Cyndi's Family TreeA version of this article first appeared in the November/December 1999 issue of Ancestry Magazine
As genealogists, we have our eyes firmly fixed on the past. A subscriber on one of my mailing lists put our tendency to look behind us succinctly when he wrote that his brain refuses to function later than the year 1918! While we focus on the histories of our own families and cultures, it can be exciting, enlightening, and humorous to attempt to look into the future of our hobby.
The quote from Edmund Burke which titles this article is a reminder to us all that our ability to predict the future is limited. We can only look around us at what is happening now and then extrapolate what trends we see into our future. This article will examine just a few of the more significant happenings of the past few years in the field of genealogy and its supporting technologies and will speculate on what the future may hold for us.
The oft-quoted American Demographics magazine article on the increasing popularity of family history brought this trend to national attention in 1995. In 1995, some 113 million adults in the US, or four out of ten of us, were at least somewhat interested in family history. This made genealogy one of America's most popular hobbies. And remember this was before the Internet found its way into many American homes. Internet access has increased the popularity of genealogy as the "mildly curious" now have a convenient place to start looking. As we know, it doesn't take much to get completely hooked.
What this means for genealogy is that as a hobby, we will continue to have expansive growth in the general public's interest in their own roots. Get your GEDCOMs ready to share, because more of your fourth and fifth cousins will be bitten by the "genealogy bug". No longer the preserve of blue-haired matrons with pedigrees back to Noah (you can't document your sources back to Adam because the records were destroyed in the Flood!), genealogy is truly becoming a national pastime. America's new-found appreciation of ethnic diversity supports an increase in this trend as well. Mayflower descendants are not the only Americans searching for their heritage. Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans, and others in our melting pot are searching for their roots in increasing numbers. Truly genealogy now, and in the future, is for everyone.
The LDS Church has provided researchers around the globe with two types of easy access, easy-to-use resources in the past few years. First, the very inexpensive CD-ROM databases which the Family History Department is producing has put the indexes to millions of individuals into the hands of thousands of researchers. These indexes on CD-ROM discs are part of a larger trend towards placing indexes and records on CD-ROMs. We'll examine this bigger trend in more detail later in this article. In the very near future, the Family History Department will be releasing the 1880 US Census Index on CD-ROM. The future promises more of these same types of major indexes from the LDS.
Secondly, the LDS' FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service was launched this year. This site now provides searchable access to major portions of the International Genealogical Index, the entire Ancestral File, the SourceGuide, and the Family History Library Catalog to literally millions of Internet users around the globe. A whole new population of researchers are discovering how to use these wonderful finding aids. These researchers have never set foot in a Family History Center nor visited the Family History Library. Now they have over 2 billion names to search from on these finding aids and are also quickly discovering the inevitable errors, omissions and other foibles of these wonderful tools.
National and international media attention to the initial FamilySearch site launch helped cause an overload of demand on the site's servers in its first week of operation. This new web site and the major finding aids it provides represents a fundamental change in how researchers approach these resources. I just recently had to admit to the director of my local Family History Center that I myself have not gotten used to the changes this entails. I still think "When I'm at the FHC next, I should look in the Catalog for....". I forget that the Family History Library Catalog is at my fingertips at home. The LDS' plans for the expansion of their FamilySearch web site will continue to change the way we do genealogical research in the future.
The LDS is not the only organization which is expanding the use of technology. Like the LDS putting the Family History Library Catalog online. The Daughters of the American Revolution have placed their library catalog online. In addition, the Public Record Office in the United Kingdom has recently placed online it's list of holdings. Besides giving researchers Internet access to its catalog, the PRO has recognized that the increased popularity of family history research will require it to provision the soon to be released 1901 UK census differently than from past censuses. Filming the census and making the microfilm available through the PRO's physical locations will not be sufficient to meet the anticipated demand for access to the 1901 census. Their plan to digitize the 1901 census and making it available via the Internet is a recognition that these technologies can better support access to the information in their repository. Look to see more such digitization projects produced by record-keepers in the future.
Perhaps the most significant trend in the future of genealogy CD-ROMs will be the ongoing digitization of the images of actual records. CD-ROMs with specific US census images are already becoming available. Heritage Quest's Family Quest Archives has already begun the ambitious project of digitizing all US censuses from 1790 to 1920. When combined with searchable indexes, these images of original records may offer a future cure for "microfilm reader elbow", "poor film quality blindness", and other ailments common to today's genealogists.
In a related ease of use category, we should mention the genealogy software programs themselves. Since the early 1980s, these programs have become more feature-rich, flexible, and simple to use. The future holds continuing improvements to these programs as the genealogy software market continues to expand in accordance with the hobby's new-found popularity. Not only can we add images, audio, and video to our formerly text-based information, but these programs now easily transform our data into web pages for display on the World Wide Web. What had been simple databases are now powerful presentation tools. Take a minute to imagine some new function that your genealogy software program does not yet feature. Wait a few years and your imagination will become that product's next release.
Perhaps the best example of this will be the American Family Immigration History Center planned for Ellis Island in New York harbor. Planned to be opened in late 2000, the Center will provide computerized access to over 17 million entries from Passenger Lists for New York from 1892 to 1924. Visitors to Ellis Island will be able to enter the names of their immigrant ancestors and search the records to determine whether their ancestors are listed. For a nominal fee, a printout of any information found will be obtainable. The Center has plans to extend this capability to the Internet and to expand their database coverage to more years and other ports of entry. When tourists visit Ellis Island and feel that tug of "my people came through here", they will now have a means of possibly finding their ancestors.
Yet another example of this type of combination of place and record access is the National Park Service's Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. While computerizing an index to Civil War soldiers from both sides, the Park Service plans to allow access to this index at various battlefield locations in the country. By linking a visit to one of the Civil War battlefields to the ability of a visitor to lookup whether or not their 3rd great grandfather may have fought there, the Park Service hopes to enrich the visitor's overall enjoyment of these parks and monuments.
These sorts of projects are significant and there will be more of them in future. They will introduce more of the public to the early symptoms of the "genealogy bug". Being able to walk where your ancestors once did is a powerfully moving experience. By showing a "mildly curious" visitor that it is possible to know whether or not their ancestors were in that same physical setting, these projects will bring even more enthusiasts to our hobby.
Just as genealogy software has recently stepped up to non-married partners, step-families, and other extended families beyond the Ward & June Cleaver model, these same programs will have to adapt to current and future changes in family structure. As the legalities of same-sex marriages are debated and same-sex couples raise families of their own, our software programs can no longer assume that the correct way to display a family history is to default to a male "husband" and a female "wife".
Medical technology is uniquely pushing changes to the way we will have to represent our family histories in the future. Software will have to flex to handle artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood among other complexities to the family tree which fertility technologies have introduced. How will a grandmother who acts as a surrogate mother for her daughter's child be recorded in our software? Who is the child's mother? The provider of the egg or the provider of the womb? Biologists have no problem with determining this, but the legal system and society as a whole is still struggling for answers. With the world's first test tube baby just turning 21 years old in Britain and the British government announcing plans to grant children born from donated sperm or eggs the right to trace the donors, we will have to answer these questions relatively quickly. The genealogy software programs of the future will have to incorporate these answers.
In the next issue of Ancestry, the Technology column will further explore the impact of scientific progress on genealogical research. In particular, the role of genetic science in ancestor identification and disease analysis will be reviewed.
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