Genealogy: Expanding the Family Tree

This is an interesting article from Deseret News. We are excited to use the "how you are related to famous people" search on familysearch.org. Ancestry.com used to have this feature and we used it to show our family and clients how they are related to presidents and poets.
Genealogy: Expanding the family tree
Published: Monday, Sept. 19, 2011 6:40 p.m. MDT
By Joey Ferguson, Deseret News
It was done already. That's why Sean Sullivan, 57, never did much family history, until the Provo resident discovered he was related to Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain .
Sean Sullivan made the connection on Relative Finder, a Facebook application that uses data from FamilySearch.org to show how users are related to friends and famous people. Since then, he has spent hours, logging 40 hours in one week, digesting ancestor research online.
This year family history viewers have topped 149 million, based on website statistics from Compete.com, as users, typically aged 45 and older, seek out connections to relatives.
More than 100 million records will be made available this year via companies like Salt Lake City-based FamilySearch International, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Provo-based Ancestry.com Inc. and Palo Alto, California-based Archives.com. Part-time ancestral sleuths are turning to the Internet to find their progenitors, with companies trying to keep up with a growing market.
"Stuff keeps changing on FamilySearch almost daily," Sullivan said. "You go back today and look at a family line, you may find it goes back deeper than it was last week, or even yesterday. For some reason I hadn't tapped into it before."
With more interest in the market, there is a scramble to gather content in order to keep up with the growth. This has even led to major partnerships, including FamilySearch partnering with Ancestry to digitize the content in the LDS church's Granite Mountain Records Vault, where only 20 percent of the 4 billion records have been digitized.
Genealogy: Expanding the family tree
Published: Monday, Sept. 19, 2011 6:40 p.m. MDT
By Joey Ferguson, Deseret News