This was in yesterday's "Houston Chronicle": A poet looks to 1999 >From the Dec. 31, 1899 Houston Daily Post, reprinted from Pearson's Weekly: "A Century From Now "If you and I should wake from sleep A century from now. Back to the grave we'd want to creep. A century from now. We'd witness such a startling change, Find everything so wondrous strange We'd hurry back across the range, A century from now. "A woman, forty, fat and fair, A Century from now, May warm with grace the Speaker's chair, A century from now. The Cabinet may be a flock Of girlies, gay of hat and frock, Who talk but who won't mend a sock, A century from now. "The people all will fly on wings A century from now (Not heavenly, but patent things) A century from now They's soar aloft devoid of fear On pinions of a chainless gear, And change their "flyers" every year, A century from now. "There'll be no restaurants at all A century from now. The home will have no dining hall A century from now. The chemists all our wants will fill With food in tablets, and to still Our thirst we'll simply take a pill, A century from now." The author wasn't too far off the mark, was he/she? Adrian At 06:44 AM 12/27/1999 -0600, Jim Turner wrote: > >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. > > > >