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- COST OF FAMILY TREE MAKER 2014 FOR FREE
- COST OF FAMILY TREE MAKER 2014 SOFTWARE
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(Annual membership is $80 a daylong research trip is $15.)Ī trip to Salt Lake City, to visit the archives of the Church of Jesus Christ & Latter-Day Saints? (LDS theology puts a premium on family history, since members seek to baptize dead ancestors into their faith.) Why not? Add in airfare, hotel bills and incidentals. I found all kinds of cool stuff about my own family tree – including proof that I’m Ernest Hemingway’s eighth cousin, four times removed – visiting the New England Historical & Genealogical Society. Some data hasn’t made its way online yet. And as long as you’re researching, you’ll want to keep that subscription alive, right? But if you quickly discover that your grandparents emigrated from Europe, you’re looking at $149 to $199 a year. A standard subscription to US data will set you back $99 a year. Here’s where it starts to become clear just how pricey genealogy can get. Odds are, you’ll be signing up for an subscription. If I believed what I found online, I’d be descended from Charlemagne.
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What is available for free online isn’t (surprise, surprise) always reliable. This is worth the price – it comes with all kinds of bells and whistles, including the ability to scan and attach everything from copies of records to old photos, and to print out family trees to give to your kids for school projects.īut you’ll want the names and dates to put into those trees, and this is when stuff starts getting tricky.
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The starting point is a decent genealogy software package: Family Tree Maker, increasingly the industry standard (it’s made by, the dominant player in the genealogy records business) will set you back $30 and up. Specifically, the ones that involve entering your credit card number, expiry date, and billing address. The result? With one click of a mouse, we can find out that great-great-great grandpa was born in Killarney or Krakow.īut before you get to that click, there are a few other clicks. Over the last two decades, a growing number of eager entrepreneurs have taken note of the fact. These new genealogy addicts are willing to fork over up to $18,000 a year in pursuit of names they can add to the family tree. This kind of commitment to your roots is not without cost – sometimes a high one. 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.
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Genealogy isn’t just for snobs and elitists any more.
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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?
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