According to recent surveys, genealogy has become a huge hobby to great numbers of Americans. Partial credit for this boom belongs to the Internet, which provides easy access to records, e-mail communication among cousins, online how-to articles, search capabilities, reference materials, and library catalogs. Myriad genealogy applications await today’s family historian, from free downloadable programs to $100-plus programs that include lots of bells and whistles and data CDs. But this genealogical information boom did not happen overnight.

Richard Pence has been involved with genealogy and computers since the late 1970s. He has received the National Genealogical Society’s Distinguished Service Award and its Award of Merit for his exceptional contributions to the field. In 2001, he was a charter inductee into the Genealogy Technology Hall of Fame.

In an interview at the 2001 GENTECH conference in Mesquite, Texas, he shared some insights about the early days of genealogical computing.

Pence began work with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association in North Carolina in 1961, with a relocation to Washington, D.C. in 1967. His rural electrification career spanned nearly 35 years and included stints as editor of the association’s newsletter and magazine, and director of publications. In this role, he installed a typesetting system and modem for the organization, but most employees were reticent to use the new-fangled method.

"I could see how beneficial computers could be in our in-house publishing processes, but it took eleven years for others to see it and adopt the technology. You can’t push people into computers. You have to sit back and wait until they see what they will do for them," says Pence.

In January of 1975, an Altair computer appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics. This early computer crawled in comparison with today’s speedy models, and it had only 256 bytes of RAM. The Altair 8800 kit was sold by a company called MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for $395 as a kit, or $495 assembled. A user would flip the on/off switches on the processor’s front panel to enter data or a program, and flashing lights on the front panel would indicate results. The Altair was hailed as the first personal computer, and 4,000 people ordered it within three months of its appearance in Popular Electronics.

About this time, using an automated system at work convinced Pence that a computer at home would be just the ticket for organizing his family history research.

"I bought my first computer for home use in 1978 at the Georgetown Computer Emporium. It was a SOL-20, manufactured by a company called Processor Technology in California. Essentially, the SOL-20 was a pre-built Altair computer with an added IBM typewriter-like keyboard and a black and white TV set that served as a monitor–a big step up from the way the Altair was operated! It had 16 K of memory and one disk drive (disks held 75 K of data). The processor speed was about 2 mhz, 1/500 of today’s fastest PC. The S-100 bus held the video card (16 lines of 64 characters each), a disk controller card, and later a 300-baud modem. This all cost $3,200," explains Pence. "I later added another drive, an additional 32 K of memory, and another disk drive. These cost about $1,200 each."

In about 1997, Pence donated his SOL-20 to the Computer Museum in Boston, where it was on display until the removal of all the computer artifacts to the Computer Museum History Center in California.

"When I bought my first computer, there were no programs for genealogy, so I created my own. I learned to program in BASIC. To punch in my Pence family information, I needed identification numbers. I assigned each progenitor a number or letter and gave each child a number 1 to 9 based on his or her position among the children. If there were more than nine children in the family, the tenth person became ‘A.’ I invented this numbering system and then discovered that it was the Henry system! This system worked very well for me because it would automatically sort database entries into family groups. In 1982, I wrote an article on numbering your ancestors for Genealogical Computing."

Like today’s PC enthusiast, Pence continually upgraded his computer or added new peripherals.

"Printers were very expensive. My first printer was a rebuilt IBM Selectric typewriter, the kind with the round ball that would move up and strike the paper. You couldn’t just walk into any office supply store to find computers and printers. Computer Emporium did have a showroom in Tyson’s Corner [Virginia], and they sold rebuilt printers that had been used by airlines–huge ones that made a lot of noise–for about $1,500. The best one I ever had, though, was a Xerox computer printer with a wide carriage. It set me back $3,200," remembers Pence.

Only 22 years ago, family history research was a slower process. It involved waiting for snail mail responses to queries, or sleeping while your printer labored over a chart.

"My system eventually had four floppy disk drives coupled together," recalls Pence. "My file system and program involved creating a numbered Ahnentafel program that switched from one disk to the next. I could create a five-generation ancestral printout from myself back, and it would take a day and a half to print."

"I wrote a history of the CIG. That’s also when I met Liz Kerstens, the current editor of Genealogical Computing. She used Ventura Publisher and for the first time, the newsletter was actually laid out rather than just typewritten," says Pence.

Genealogy and PC enthusiasts in the mid-eighties were assisted when Ancestry published Computer Genealogy by Paul Andereck and Richard A. Pence, the first book on the topic.

"I was the editor of the revised edition in 1991," Pence says. "By then, things were complicated enough that more than two persons’ ideas were necessary, so each chapter had an ‘expert author.’"

One of the first computer lectures Pence presented was at the 1986 NGS luncheon in Columbus, Ohio.

"At that time, the ‘computer people’ were in a segregated room or hallway, not in the exhibit hall with other vendors. Some of those creators of early genealogy programs included Howard Nurse, Steve Vorenberg, Bill Dollarhide, and John Steed. That conference featured a live session on using bulletin boards." Bulletin boards were forerunners of today’s Internet mail lists or newsgroups.

Pence has great admiration for his former neighbor, Paul Andereck, and for others who started bulletin boards or created early family history programs.

"Paul operated the first genealogy bulletin board in the world from his basement a few hours a day. There were only about three genealogy bulletin boards in the D.C. area then, and naturally the hackers attacked Paul’s. Out in California, Howard Nurse had a bulletin board. Howard was president of CommSoft, the folks who created Roots software. In Massachusetts, Steve Vorenberg, who later started Quinsept and created Family Roots, had another."

Pence was in on the ground floor of early genealogy bulletin board development. He explains, "In 1986, Howard Nurse and Dwayne James from New Hampshire joined Fidonet, an amateur bulletin board network, and swapped genealogy information. This was the beginning of the Genealogy Echo. A few weeks later, an NGS member, Ray Gwinn, called me and wanted to donate a computer to NGS to set up as a bulletin board. Those of us in the NGS/CIG tried to get Paul [Andereck] to start it, but he wasn’t interested after his own had been hacked. The NGS board started in my basement. Ray helped me out by updating the software until I could learn the finer points of bulletin board management and administration. One of my jobs was to keep people from having virtual fist fights in messages on the bulletin board. We joined the Fidonet Genealogy Echoes. In the beginning, connections used to echo from one free phone call area to the next all the way around the U.S. Then four hubs developed and there was less than a two-day time lapse on receiving messages. By 1995, there were about 1,800 message boards all over the world in the Genealogy Echo, carrying about 700 to 900 messages a day. Howard Nurse turned it over to NGS, and Don Wilson kept the bulletin board running, moving it to NGS headquarters."

Pence believes that widespread use of the Internet doomed bulletin boards. He says, "By the time the Internet was prevalent, the message base on bulletin boards was down to nothing. Fidonet had declined by 1995 to almost nothing."

Twenty-first-century researchers e-mail queries to others around the world, and may have responses within minutes instead of days. Messages posted on genealogy forums are accessible quickly and easily from all over the world, via a simple Internet connection.

"I’m trying to clean up all the errors on the Web," he intones, only half in jest. He also tries to educate today’s new enthusiasts about the early contributors to computer genealogy. "It’s a shame that there is no sense of history in the genealogy field. Paul Andereck, a pioneer in this field who founded Genealogical Computing in 1981 and provided untold informative genealogical writings, is not recognized by today’s genealogists when he responds to a question posted on the Internet."

The next time you dash off an e-mail query to thousands of other users on your surname mail list, or decide to GEDCOM a huge family file to a many-times-removed cousin in Germany, think of those early genealogical computing pioneers who helped make this possible. If not for them, we might still be perusing typewritten queries in hopes of finding a distant connection.

Pamela Boyer Porter, cgrs, is editor of the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly, and past chair of the St. Louis Genealogical Society’s CIG. She began tracking her genealogical data in 1984 on a Commodore-64 with Family Roots software, and worked as a technical writer and software trainer before becoming a full-time professional genealogist. Pam can be reached by e-mail at <Pam@MoMemoryLane.com>.