PROVO — New innovations in doing genealogy research over the Internet
are just around the corner, Web entrepreneur Paul Allen said Thursday.The co-founder of Ancestry.com and corporate executive officer for Familylink.com, Allen said his company is about to launch Worldhistory.com
in the next few weeks. It will allow users to upload their family trees
and then, coupled with historical data on the site, learn more about
the environment in which their ancestors lived."It will bring history to life," he told attendees at the
Conference on Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University.
"It will be a time-travel experience."Site staffers have been gathering world history and vital records
from a wide variety of sources that users can mix with the time their
ancestors lived. They will be able to determine who they knew in their
communities and what life was like for them.The new site will give new meaning to social networking, Allen suggested. Familylink.com is a social networking site for amateur and professional genealogy researchers.Another site, Webtree.com,
was recently launched to collect family trees throughout the world.
Once users submit their family tree the submitter can be alerted when
new sources are cataloged so the user can check for more ancestral
data, he said.Allen's company is also working on better ways to catalog family
history information that includes when and where a person lived with
more detail than now available. Genealogy searches now require sifting
through data that may be irrelevant, but new software will give
researchers a percentage probability that what they are looking for is
in the data they are searching, he said.Like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, researchers can add data
and sources to make the system smarter. "This is a vast undertaking," Allen said.While genealogy research is supported by The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, most research is being done by people who
are not Mormons, he said. In the United States he estimated that only 5
percent of the research being done is by Mormons.However, since work done by Mormons leads to proxy ordinance work
in LDS temples, much of the religious work is duplicated accidentally.
That was bound to happen, he said, but a new generation of computer
software will soon resolve that problem.Historically, genealogy was done by a few dedicated individuals
working alone for decades to eventually publish family histories, he
said. Today, thanks to the Internet, it is done by collaboration of
several parties.Those records are making it online and will include the records
stored in the Granite Mountain Records Vault owned by the LDS Church.
The vault houses an estimated 3 billion pages of family history records."Ancestry.com was built on the shoulders of these people," he said.
E-mail: rodger@desnews.com