A belated Christmas gift from D-OGS! Wishing you All Happy Holidays and a Happy and Healthy New Year! ******************** Greetings pilgrim. Your search is over! Instant genealogy! Find All Your Ancestor's Online! Dear All, Welcome to my super-fast instant ancestry programme! I am proud to announce the launch of an exciting new service for wannabe family historians who find research the old-fashioned way rather boring. You, too, can have a family tree back to Adam and Eve ENTIRELY from the Internet!!! Here is an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be repeated offer..... SEND me 10,000 dollars, your date of birth, your chest and inside leg measurements, the location of the pub where your granny met your granddad and the name of that milkman with the hairy nose that your Auntie Maude had the wild affair with - and I guarantee I will have your family tree at least back to Nebuchadnezzar the Daft of Outer Mongolia in the 3rd century BC before you can say "IGI" !!! NO more listening to boring old farts droning on about how you need to read a book on family history. Books - outdated, who needs 'em? NO more need to visit dreary old Record Offices or waste your precious time looking at boring bits of paper covered in squiggly writing that you can't understand anyway. NO more need to listen to self-appointed, so-called experts who try to tell you they can help you just because they've been in genealogy since March 1897 and who will try and persuade you to join a family history society where you will meet hordes of equally boring people who also think they know it all. I absolutely guarantee you a family tree you can be proud of, that will show your descent from such famous historical figures as Mary Queen of Scots, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Francis Drake, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, the Norse god Woden, Charles II's head coachman's illegitimate son, a 4th cousin twice removed of Henry VIII, Cyril the Incontinent of Babylon, Frederick the Flatulent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Baron Frankenstein, Joan Collins and the Man in the Off-Licence Round the Corner. How do I do it? Simple - I log onto the Internet, spend half an hour or so trawling the world wide web and - bingo! - there is your Instant Family Tree! Here's how it works... First, I find the marriage of your great-granny on the IGI, then I find someone of the same name who was born in a parish 100 miles away from where she was married, so that's bound to be her, isn't it? Then I ring up this mate of mine who specialises in doing look-ups from the 1861 census [which hasn't been indexed] in places like London, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, Manchester and Glasgow. He sticks a pin in anywhere on the census and gives me a couple more names to work with. I reckon they have as much chance of being your gt-gt- grandparents as anyone else, so it's back to the Net. I feed the names into umpteen databases and websites until I come up with someone of the same name who claims to be descended from Edward III. Ah, yes, this looks as good a bet as any. Nobody is going to notice if I casually slip your gt-gt-grandad and granny into a GEDCOM that shows they were also descended from Alfred the Great and the monk who did the slopping-out at Whitby Abbey, are they? So there you have it - a wonderful, Instant Family Tree, and all from the Internet. And what I don't find I simply MAKE UP!!! What could be easier? Apply now for the bargain of all time and discover how to make Internet genealogy really work for you! Roy Stockdill Editor, The Journal of One-Name Studies The Stockdill Family History Society (Guild of One-Name Studies, FedFHS) reprinted with permission of Roy Stockdill; email dated 21 Aug 2000 *************** Note: Some of you may have seen this before. It has been copied to many websites, blogs and emails since it was first published in 2000. Roy Stockdill is still around and is still the Editor of The Journal of One-Name Studies: http://www.one-name.org/. Oh, and one more thing: Mr. Stockdill is still waiting to receive his first $10,000 fee.