Gadgetory

I sort of started getting into this maybe four or five years ago a friend of mine was telling me how she was really into doing it and it sounded like fun sort of i started online and God got hooked and it's been a fun thing to do sort of as a hobby in my spare time I really yeah it's really relaxing I would say I'm a hobbyist genealogist the need to provide records to people goes to sort of the need that we all have to understand where we came from you our ancestors were who helped us understand who we are it's actually fulfilling a very human need I would say to understand ourselves genealogists research oriented genealogists they're interested in names and dates and places and facts but I think there's a vastly larger number of people who are interested in understanding the story of their ancestors I'll just give you a little background we think there's a bit about a hundred billion people live on the earth there's about 10 billion of the 100 billion that have ever lived for which there is some documentation early on at the turn of the last century we would go in we would find an archive and they would have these records and we said listen what we'll do is we will come in with our volunteers and cameras we will take a picture we will image these records you have and in return for doing that will give you a copy so if you get a flutter of fire something you've got a copy and we will keep a copy and all we ask you is the right to share that microfilm was somebody wants it we have five floors over a hundred and forty thousand square feet over 500 computers over 750,000 books we have approximately 2.4 million rolls of microfilm that's about 3.3 billion individual images of the 3.3 billion only about 800 million of that has been digitized being sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints we have a special kind of affinity for family history research we love our families we want to be connected to them through the generations and so we have sort of a tradition in the church to research our ancestors we don't have anything we sell everything we have is free and people ask well why would the church do that we believe that families not only exist in this life but they exist in the life to come and so if we can document our families and they can be together and we know who they are then we believe that's an eternal principle not just a worldly principal and and frankly we are all dots children and so it not just members of the church is this useful for but really for everyone who's a child of God who comes to know themselves so knowing their ancestors and you can serve their ancestors through identifying them and learning about them there are large profit players there are large nonprofit players there's the commercial and non-commercial side of it and they all play together in the sandbox data is big business there are a lot of data brokers out there ancestry.com technically could be seen as a data broker they are in the business of acquiring data and selling it to you and me under the guise of searching for our ancestors 20 years ago family history was pretty much the definition of a niche now the family history is social it's a lot easier than it used to be hundreds of millions of documents actually go through our operation to be digitized and presented to the side we have 10 billion records actually on ancestry.com right now and once all of that information has been transcribed or entered into the system then our teams here work to optimize that data so that it's searchable in the site we make deals with repositories all over the world archives courthouses libraries to go in and digitize original family history material we spend over 20 million dollars a year acquiring content this combination of a continual feed of new content along with our customers using that data adding structure to that data is very powerful what's just so satisfying about it is sort of solving all these little mini mysteries and you feel like this sleuth and that you you know used your hard detective work to figure something out there are certain points in the research that done we're just haven't been able to go back any further I've hit roadblocks there's just so you know I met a dead end and hopefully the DNA test will be able to tell me further back and with some actual accuracy correct any mistake that may have made I'm sure I have made mistakes and that is why I'm going to spit in this tube and take this test one of the issues that we have with family histories it takes a little bit of time you have to do some research you have to look up records and you know your younger generation doesn't necessarily have all that time and so by taking a DNA test it's a way to supercharge and jump right into family history so 23 Emmy was founded with a mission to really change healthcare by giving people access to their personal genetic information and we had some genealogy features where people could learn a bit about their ancestry and ever since then we've been adding health reports and adding ancestry features that enable people to learn more about who their ancestors were parts of your genome might look like they come from Northern Europe parts from southern Europe parts from the Near East and then we at the end once we've covered the whole genome we add up the fractions of all pieces and and that's your basically gives you the percent ancestry from each region DNA is really exciting is a technology that family historians have not yet fully harness I don't think we have some great products on the market and what I can't wait to see further integration of the records companies with the DNA companies to provide a really interesting experience you can walk through the past with your DNA and it's coming it will be there I get I mean I guess what's sort of surprising here is that this doesn't include it doesn't include British or like southern European which in theory should be a significant portion of my genetic makeup I mean I would hate to see it at a point where it was so good that it took away the old method of research that you know you could just take a test and would tell you everything just about two months ago my uncle Doug up in his attic this whole box of old family photos one of the pictures was of my great great great aunt and uncle as children at a costume ball that they attended and there in the you know sort of funny outfits and they look like kind of weird glowing Victorian children you could sort of immediately relate to them as these kids in these stupid outfits I do not want you to have their picture taken their parents dragged them to this children's costume ball they're probably a little bit too old for it the DNA information itself the ast season geez are not very interesting to people it's just a long string but it's really about the stories that you can pull out that are meaningful to people when I share this with my niece and nephew if I show them a chart they run the other way that's not interesting but if I tell them the story about my great-grandfather who actually died in Jacksonville Florida that's neat that puts it in perspective as a family history business we see right at the root of everything I the every person's story you know that story is what's important to us what was life like for them and what was going on at the time in the place that they live tour de do you know the environment look like what kind of jobs that they have we are related distantly related to Abraham Lincoln right and so I went home that night I told my kids listen he's a distant relative and so now when they see Abraham Lincoln or they see something about him but they read a story my little seven-year-old the other day he goes dad remember he's our relative right and it was like you know what that's what it's that's what it's about there's an old saying you don't know who you are and tell you know where from where you've come when you try to find out about people if they didn't leave anything you're frustrated so the best thing you can start doing is preserving about yourself right now if you think about it today we're actually generating more records than we've ever generated before and yet UNICEF recently came out and said over forty percent of the world's population will die with no records at some point we need to think about what our grandchildren here to wish that we would have saved I'm it's almost a fundamental human right to exist you know and once you're gone if you've left no story behind then did you exist