What's in a Name? MSRA Hears About a History of Family History
By Matthew Callcut

The eighth stage in Microsoft Research Asia's Science & Humanities Speaker Series was held on June 12th, where Mary H. Slawson, whose husband Dean Slawson leads the Innovation Engineering group at the Beijing lab, gave a talk on the history and development of family history, the fastest growing hobby in the world.

The number one Internet based activity, and second only to gardening as the world's most popular pastime overall, genealogy and the researching of family trees has gone global since the advent of the World Wide Web. Whereas people interested in creating a family tree used to have to hunt down records on foot in town halls and government archives and trawl through reams of paperwork, now only a few keystrokes are required to give interested folks a huge start in finding out how they got here and where they came from.

Speaking with a confidence and ease borne of high levels of subject knowledge and years spent giving similar presentations, Ms Slawson began at the beginning of record collection at around 3000 BC (when the Chinese, Greeks and Romans all began making archives), taking the audience through old methods of naming people (which included the use of poetry) and the documents that have been used to record old family histories (such as gravestones, marriage certificates and even shop sale contracts).

However, it's not just old documents and records being digitized and placed online that is pushing genealogy forward. Slawson said that DNA profiling is one of a new breed of methods being used to discover personal lineage and will further enhance and complement the existing approaches. With just a mouth swab, it's possible to trace an individual's DNA back through the ages to find their geographical origins and maybe even direct ancestors. There are several web sites that can guide anyone through this procedure but because it is still a relatively new way of tracking genealogy - and further enhancements are necessary to make it more accurate, reliable and available - those interested will have to part with around $300 of their hard earned cash to do so.

Despite the already vast amounts of data and other help available, Ms Slawson said that there are still rafts of improvements that can be made to reduce the difficulty of researching family history. With records being kept in almost every language on the planet, translating the various different documents used to record family history will be a hugely important way of unlocking the past. Advances in data cleaning, allowing the successful matching of one set of database records to another, will similarly enhance user experiences, as well as helping to eradicate duplication and reduce errors. Ms Slawson even went so far as to say that anyone who can make significant strides in data cleaning technology would become very wealthy, such are the financial rewards available in this hugely popular avocation.

The search for family history is not just for interested individuals either, says Slawson. Iceland is putting together a detailed family history over ten generations for its residents for their medical well-being. By collecting as much information as they can about the populace and their ancestry, the Icelandic government hopes to be able to spot potential health issues, change diets and give advice and treatment accordingly.

With some of the technologies still in their infancy and more information becoming available on the world wide web, it appears that researching family history can only grow further, perhaps one day even surpassing gardening as the most popular pastime across the globe.

Mary is the author of Getting it Right: The Definitive Guide to Recording Family History Accurately and co-host of Relatively Speaking, a radio show on KSL NewsRadio in Utah, USA that gives personal tips on researching family trees.