On Thanksgiving Day, I was exceedingly fortunate because I was surrounded (in my own home) by immediate family and close friends. Sometime during that day, I received a long-distance phone call from my first cousin in Charleston, South Carolina. Susie is the closest thing I have to a sister, and her late mother (my mother's sister) had always been my favorite aunt. In fact, it was Aunt Jenny's passing in early 1992 that led me and my brother to begin serious work on our family's genealogical research. At one point in her life, Susie had been a Mormon, so I had been able to benefit from the genealogical research she had already accomplished. Lately, it seemed that Susie and I were keeping in touch only because of the need to share condolences due to deaths in the family. Her Thanksgiving phone call was a welcome change of topic.

Susie remarked that it would be wonderful for the extended family to get together for reasons more cheerful than funerals. We both decided that we would have to give serious thought to holding a family reunion in the next year. Now that the hubbub of Thanksgiving is past, my thoughts have begun to turn toward that idea of a reunion and toward how computer technology can help Susie and I make it happen.

My first step was to consider the scope of the reunion. With no experience in such things, I decided that it would be a good idea to keep things relatively small. Our grandparents had seven children (two still living), six of whom had children of their own (fourteen still living). Limiting the reunion to the descendants of my grandparents seemed a reasonable decision. I accessed my computer database and used it to display (and then print) a descendant tree. This gave me a good idea of the number of people involved. It also told me that I had fallen far behind in keeping track of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. If I were to do a proper family reunion, my next step would be to contact all of the branches of the family and update my files.

Some genealogy database programs provide a way to keep track of contact information for one's living relatives. Oddly enough, the program I normally use provides a place for the relative's name, address, and phone number, but no field for his or her e-mail address! Perhaps the maker will add a field for that in the next version of the program. (Be sure to take some time to learn what contact features your genealogy software program provides.)

In the meantime, I can use another program on my computer system to keep track of as much contact information as I like; that program is Microsoft Outlook. The Contact feature of Outlook allows me to keep track of name and address, up to three different e-mail addresses, and a dozen different kinds of phone numbers (home, work, mobile, etc.) for each person I enter. I can then use Outlook to generate an e-mail message to the person or use its auto dialer to call the person's phone number. I can even have Outlook connect to the World Wide Web and use the person's mailing address to generate a map to his or her house! Outlook also provides a place to record the person's Web page address. And there's a place to record a nickname, a spouse's name, a birthday, and an anniversary. Admittedly, much of this will duplicate information already found in my genealogy database, and I would have to decide if it was worth the trouble to maintain the information in both places.

Finally, Outlook provides a way to create categories and to assign a contact individual to as many categories as I like. With a family reunion in mind, I created a category called "Martin Reunion," and I have begun assigning all of my grandparents' descendants to that category. In the future, this will allow me to go into Outlook and print an e-mail list, phone list, or mailing address list of just those individuals who would be invited to the reunion!

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the "Cybrarian" column. He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.