The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 1999 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. - The End of a Millennium This week we will see a monumental moment in time. Looking back over the past few years, I see a huge change in the manner in which we research our family trees. Fifty years ago the only practical method of accurately researching your ancestry was to go to the places where your ancestors lived and to look in the original records. Wealthy individuals hired people to do this research for them. Less-wealthy people wrote hundreds of letters to distant records repositories, asking the employees to look at records for them. The invention of microfilm changed all that. Now we can do our own research by looking at high-quality reproductions of original records without traveling to distant locations. I believe that the accuracy of genealogy research has increased since each of us can read the originals; we are not forced to depend upon someone else's interpretations. The invention of the home computer roughly twenty years ago meant another huge change in the way we do genealogy research. With PC's we could track, store and sort the results of our own research much more easily. Even better, the widespread appearance of e-mail in the mid-1980s made it easier to expand our "networks" of individuals with similar interests. The introduction of the first genealogy CD-ROM disks about 10 years ago marked still another leap forward for family historians. Today there are hundreds of genealogy-related CD-ROM disks available with references to hundreds of millions of our forebears. The biggest change is not yet ten years old. The World Wide Web didn't even exist on January 1, 1990. Yet this technology invention has quickly revolutionized many things in our everyday lives, including genealogy research. According to Time magazine, genealogy is one of the three most popular topics on the World Wide Web, along with sex and finance. It's a great time to be a genealogist. Things are changing quickly, and we can only guess what the next few years will bring. Here's a question you might ponder: If you could enter a time machine and go back 100 years, how would you explain all this to one of your ancestors that you met on the morning of January 1, 1900? I suspect that your ancestor would think you were crazy as you described all the tools available to you today.