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Americans of all ethnic backgrounds were inspired by Alex Haley's 1977 mini-series Roots, eventually watched by hundreds of millions worldwide. Today a quarter of the 300,000 amateur genealogists who visit the Denver Public Library each year are Hispanic. Ukrainian Americans register inquiries at www.carpatho-rusyn.org and Cajuns can search for their ancestors on a CD-ROM of half a million names, compiled by Acadian genealogist Yvon Cyr. In San Francisco, educator Albert Cheng, who has traced 2,800 years of his family history, leads a program for the Chinese Culture Foundation, which takes groups of Chinese-American youths back to their ancestral villages each summer after they have researched family and archival records in the U.S. "Now I feel proud of who I am," said 25-year-old Julia Fong, who met her great-grandmother, now 99, in Guangdong province. "She was feisty; she had no teeth and a wonderful smile."
No single group, however, is as involved as the Mormons. Believing that ancestors can be saved through retroactive baptism, they have sent missionaries around the globe, setting up 3,200 library branches in 64 countries and filming massive amounts of documents, touching on 2 billion people. With the promise that the church's vast trove of well-checked data will eventually be available online comes the potential for another burst in genealogical activity.
The Internet has already made the task easier. Cyndi Howells, 35, a Puyallup, Wash., housewife, got interested as a teenager when she read some old family letters and records for a high school genealogy project. "It was fascinating to see all these names and places and think this was all connected to me," she said. In 1992 she quit her job at a bank, bought a computer and began collecting website addresses. In 1996 she posted her list on the Internet. Today cyndislist.com has grown to 300 pages with links to 41,700 genealogical sites worldwide--from ships' passenger lists to prison rolls. Howells travels the country, giving speeches. "Everyone wants to know where they came from," she says. "I don't even have time to do my own research anymore."
Be forewarned: Much of what is on the Web now is akin to signposts--lists of documents but rarely the documents themselves. The National Archives provides a description of its material online--but only 120,000 of its 4 billion records have been digitized. Much of the Net's information is posted by volunteers who transcribe cemetery headstones or newspaper obituaries--with predictable human error. "People think because it's on the computer, it's the gospel truth. But it's only as good as the person doing it," says Cliff Collier of the Ontario Genealogical Society. His view, shared by most serious researchers, is that only an exact copy of an original marriage certificate or immigration visa can be trusted. "The true aficionado," adds Boston genealogist Eileen O'Duill, "wants to feel the paper that his great-grandfather's birth was registered on."
Starting to get interested? If you are willing to forgo leisurely weekends for a search that is bound to be alternately tedious and exhilarating, here's how:
STARTING UP