The Daughters of the American Revolution may still have an image problem, but most of the women I met at the Brooklyn chapter were a fair cross section of thirty- and fortysomethings: a chef, a PR professional, a literary agent for children’s books, a design industry exec. Genealogy isn’t just for snobs and elitists any more. It's a quick web search.Īs the process has changed, so have the demographics. But today, if you’re interested in your family history, you no longer have to drive across country to out of the way courthouses and dig through dusty files or traipse across fields to overgrown cemeteries to find the records you’re looking for.
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When NBC aired episodes of its genealogy television series Who Do You Think You Are? in primetime, 2 million households turned off the porn and downed their gardening tools to watch celebs like Brooke Shields and Sarah Jessica Parker discover they could boast of, respectively, a French king and an accused witch in their family trees.įor decades, genealogy research was pretty much confined to elderly maiden aunts with too much time on their hands and an obsession with the family name, and a willingness to do all the legwork required in the pre-internet era.
For the past eight years or so, I’ve heard people toss around the claim that genealogy sites are the most frequently visited (second only to pornography) and that ancestor-hunting is the country’s most popular pastime (after gardening). The growing urge on the part of millions of Americans to investigate their roots has spawned a billion-dollar genealogy industry that is still growing by leaps and bounds. Who do you think you are? And how much are you willing to spend to prove it?