What the Internet was Made For
This morning I found an email from MyHeritage.com stating that I had 5 “Smart Matches”. Clicking in the email, I discovered that this service had matched my immediately family with an existing family tree on their service. Okay, this is cool if its accurate, right?
I click into MyHeritage.com to check out the family tree belonging to the other guy (who I later found out was actually a 20-something girl from Oklahoma going by the handle ‘trjumpet’.) and see if it matched my own or contradicted anything I knew about our genealogy. What I found blew me away.
Not only was this genealogy spot-on, but it included information such as my family’s middle names (mine is ‘Arjay’, which isn’t exactly easy-to-guess), my parent’s anniversary date, shows a total of 7844 members of my very-extended family, and traces back my great grandfather’s male lineage (mother’s mother’s father) to 1678 in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland through three patriarchal surname changes. Amazing!
Surely, without such a collaborative and perseverant tool as the Internet, such a genealogy would be orders of magnitude harder to compile, and out-of-reach of those other 7843 people in the family who did not order the genealogy study completed. We’re moving into a time where the ‘novelty’ of the Internet is dying down to be replaced with true functionality that can bridge the real-and-digital divide, such as reconnecting generations-lost families together. Facebook can bring old friends together, but MyHeritage has the potential to connect people who may have never known each other but share a common, er, heritage. The Internet has the potential to reconnect us to our real-world roots that could otherwise be lost forever.
On another, slightly related note, I later stumbled upon Google Me (the Movie), which describes the adventures of one slightly-crazy man to meet, interview, and hang out with his counterparts (those sharing his name) all over the world. The goal of this movie is to connect with other people, even around something as small and “silly” as sharing the same name. The Internet provides the bridge to make these real-world connections.
