I believe the current recession will continue to cause problems among businesses in the genealogy market. I suspect that at least one more major player in the genealogy marketplace will either get out of the genealogy business entirely or else be bought out by a financially stronger company. If so, this is simply a continuation of what we already saw in 2000 and 2001.

Commercial companies are not the only ones to experience mergers and acquisitions. There are strong rumors that one of the major American genealogy societies will soon be acquired by another. I suspect this will happen early in 2002.

Technology will continue to evolve in the next twelve months, although perhaps at a slower pace than what we are used to. Three companies now provide programs that operate in your computer and access online databases stored on the Internet. Those three are Ancestry.com, OneGreatFamily.com and MyTrees.com. These three are quite different from each other, however. Ancestry.com’s new program uses both local databases on the user’s hard drive and online data on Ancestry.com’s huge Web servers. OneGreatFamily.com and MyTrees.com both store all data online with no local storage capability. I expect that in 2002 at least one more major player will release a genealogy program that stores its database online. The data entered into that program will then be shared or not, depending upon the user’s preferences.

In fact, looking a bit deeper into the crystal ball, I expect that in a few more years all genealogy programs will store their data online in huge, collaborative databases. These same programs may have the capability to copy data to local hard drives, but the primary focus will be on collaborative databases. As more and more people "groom" these databases, the quality of the shared data will improve far beyond what we see in today’s user-contributed data.

Genealogists’ use of genetics and DNA information will continue to expand. In 2002, I suspect that at least one of today’s major genealogy programs will add the capability to track inherited genetic disorders and then will generate genograms illustrating that data.

The final prediction for 2002 is simple: hardware prices will continue to drop. A computer store near me presently is selling complete computer systems, minus monitors, with a 1.1-gigahertz (equal to 1,100 megahertz) Intel Celeron processor, 256 megabytes of RAM memory, a 20-gigabyte hard drive, a high-speed CD-ROM drive and modem. The system also has Windows XP already installed. All this for $499. I’m certain that in another twelve months, that price will be significantly lower. In 2002, genealogists and everyone else will benefit from lower prices and more powerful hardware.

2002 should be a very interesting year!

• Read the next article in this issue.
  
• Return to the previous article in this issue.
  
• Return to the Table of Contents