A subscriber on one of my mailing lists put the genealogist’s tendency to focus on the past 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 often humorous to attempt to look into the future of our hobby. As genealogists, we all too frequently have our eyes firmly fixed on the past.
The quote from Edmund Burke, "You can never plan the future by the past," reminds us that our ability to predict the future is limited. We can only look at what is happening now and then extrapolate what trends we see into our future. This article will examine 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.
Genealogy's Rise in Popularity
The major force propelling changes in family history research is its increasing popularity, which shows no signs of weakening in the future. The generational bulge, referred to as the baby boom, has had a pervasive impact on the second half of the twentieth century. Baby boomers have taken to genealogy with the same passion they have shown in other endeavors. Now approaching retirement and increasing amounts of leisure time, baby boomers are expressing their need to understand who they are and where they came from through delving into family history research.
The oft-quoted American Demographics magazine article further illustrates genealogy’s increasing popularity. In 1995, some 113 million adults in the United States, or four out of ten, were at least somewhat interested in family history. This makes genealogy one of America’s most popular hobbies. And remember these statistics were gathered 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.
For genealogy as a hobby, this means we will continue to have expansive growth in public interest in finding their 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 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 are searching for their roots in increasing numbers. Truly genealogy now, and in the future, is for everyone.
Genealogy: Easily Accessible
More records of genealogical significance are being made available to researchers in easier-to-use forms than at any other time in the history of our hobby. This is truly a great time to be doing genealogical research. Family history resources will only continue to become more wide spread and simple to access in the future. Some important milestones in our recent past may help put this trend into context.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) 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 produces have put indexes to millions of individuals into the hands of thousands of researchers. These indexes on CD-ROM are part of a larger trend toward placing other records on CD-ROM. 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 U.S. Census Index on CD-ROM. The future promises more of these same types of major indexes from the LDS Church.
Secondly, the LDS Church’s FamilySearch® Internet Genealogy Service was launched this year. This site now provides searchable access to 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, but 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 was a major factor in the overload of the site’s servers in its first week of operation. This new website and the major finding aids it provides represents a fundamental change in how researchers approach these resources. I recently admitted to the director of my local family history center that I 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 Church’s plans for the expansion of their FamilySearch website will continue to change the way we do genealogical research in the future.
The LDS Church is not the only organization expanding the use of technology. Like 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 UK has recently placed its list of holdings online as well. 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. They recognize that through digitizing the 1901 census and making it available via the Internet, 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.
Ease of Use
One of the publishing activities which shows no sign of abating in the future is the increasing commercial availability of indexes and digitized records on CD-ROMs. Bundled with the genealogy software programs available, the indexes on CD-ROMs immediately provide new researchers with finding aids to millions of individual records. Genealogy companies are continuing to pump out these products and we will have many more to choose from 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 U.S. census images are becoming increasingly available. Heritage Quest’s Family Quest Archives™ has already begun the ambitious project of digitizing all U.S. censuses from 1790 to 1920. When combined with searchable indexes, these images of original records may offer a 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. Since the early 1980s, these programs have become more feature-rich, flexible, and easy 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, these programs now easily transform our data into webpages for display on the Internet. 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, undoubtedly, your imagination will conjure up that product’s next release.
Present Places and Past People
Genealogists always have a sense of place. The geographical locations where our ancestors trod are of immense emotional attachment to us. Many Americans who do not pursue their family histories feel this same connection but often don’t know what to do about it. One development which will continue in significance in the coming years is the addition of access to family history records at places of historical interest.
Perhaps the best example of this will be the American Family Immigration History Center planned for Ellis Island in New York harbor. Scheduled for opening 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 connection of "my people came through here," they will now have a means of possibly finding their ancestors.
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 walked 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.
Complexity of Defining a Family
Another trend which we can expect in the future is the continuously changing nature of the family. As the concept of family evolves, genealogy software will have to adapt to all new complexities of life which effect our family histories.
Just as genealogy software has recently stepped up to non-married partners, step-families, and other extended families beyond the Ward and June Cleaver model, these 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. Likewise with the issue of multiple spouses, a one-to-one correspondence between spouses may not accurately represent family situations.
Medical technology is uniquely pushing changes to the way we will have to represent our family histories in the future. Software will have to alter to handle artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood among other complexities to the family tree which new technology has 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? Biologists have no problem with determining this, but the legal system and society are still struggling for answers. With the world’s first test tube baby just turning twenty-one 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. And genealogy software programs of the future will have to incorporate these answers.
In the next issue of Ancestry, this 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.
What Secrets Does the Future Hold?
No one can determine what, exactly, the future of genealogy will bring. More researchers, more records, better software, new research tools–these are just the obvious guesses. Regardless of what may come, the next few decades are going to be exciting ones for family historians. Truly, the only consistency is change.
Web Sites for Further Information
Mark Howells gazes at the stars and reads tea leaves in Puyallup, WA. He may be contacted on his crystal ball at markhow@oz.net.
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