Do you remember back in the

1980s, how friends would suddenly disappear for months,

even years, later to surface with the explanation:

"I got a computer"?

My friend Mike Carroll was

typical. We worked together in the fire department as

volunteer paramedics. He was a busy kind of guy, what

with running an industry, working diligently with his

college fraternity, and landscaping his lot on Lake

Peachtree, and he had trouble finding enough hours in the

day.

Then he dropped out of

sight. He was one of the first people I knew who bought a

personal computer, and he became obsessed with the thing.

This was before Windows opened and computers were a lot

more labor-intensive to learn to operate. And as quickly

as a devotee learned the newest technology or the latest

program, something newer would come out and it was back

to square one until that was mastered.

The only good thing about

it was that Patti always knew where to find Mike

- even at 3 a.m.

Dave used to sympathize

with Patti. He was himself late coming to computers and

could not for the life of him understand what Mike saw in

them.

Little did he dream he'd

become a quasi-widower himself, cleaning up after dinner,

watching Braves games by himself, running errands alone

that we used to do together.

But it's not the computer

per se (well, two computers actually) that has Dave's

aging helpmeet glued to an office chair `til all hours,

back stiff and eyes bleary from hours of names and dates

scrolling by.

It's genealogy.

As baffled as Dave was when

Mike morphed into a computer compulsive, he is even more

nonplussed over my fixation with family history. He's not

alone: a lot of people are clueless why others are

obsessed with finding out the family name of a

great-grandmother or hellbent on finding how 14th-century

Knight Balderbert links with our own ho-hum relatives.

I've been off and on with

this for a number of years, but now after a couple

"off," having more or less retired from daily

labors, I find I have the time to resume my search for my

dusty forebears.

Except that it's

disingenuous to say one has the time, especially after

what happened earlier this year. Now we must come to

terms with the fact that there will never, ever, in one

lifetime be enough time to trace every thread of the

fabric of who we are.

What happened earlier this

year is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day

Saints, or Mormons, put their gargantuan database of

names and families on the Internet.

LDS beliefs require members

to document their genealogy, and their collection is

probably the largest single gathering of family

information - Mormon or not - in history.

And all a genealogist needs to access it is a computer, a

modem, and an Internet provider, common tools today.

Many of us have waited too

long to seek family lore from our own senior members.

Even with an oral history, trips to musty courthouses or

country churches would still be necessary to substantiate

it. That's really the only sure way to determine that

great-Aunt Phoebe's father was great-great-grandfather

Hans Georg, and that she was indeed born in 1772.

Computer genealogy is

admittedly dicey and only as accurate as the researcher

who filed it. You can bring up a name listed four times

with parents and county of birth confirming what you

already have - but with four different birth dates.

So you settle on the

likeliest and everything correlates with information you

already have - expect that great-great-Uncle

Theophilus seems to have died three years after probation

of a will you have seen with your own eyes and know to be

authentic.

And the LDS material can be

awfully sterile. At most - at MOST -

you'll get parents' names and perhaps their history

(pedigree, the Mormons call it), and the names and dates

of siblings, spouses and children.

With luck, you'll be able

to go back a few generations, or forward, and know with

certainty that you have one more piece in the puzzle that

shows you from whence you come.

But even with that kind of

luck, you won't find Uncle John's memory of an older

brother who died in the Great War, a man so big he could

hold a 50-pound bag of flour under each arm.

You won't learn that your

third great-grandmother was considered the family's

musician, with an exquisite voice and enough competence

on the violin to entertain in her father's riverside inn.

You wonder if great-Aunt

Margaretha is the one you should blame for your tendency

to get pot-bellied, or should you thank her for the

needlework skills you seem to have inherited?

Since the LDS material has

come out, I've broken through a couple of brick walls, as

genealogists like to call difficult links in a family

line. More importantly, I've revisited some Pennsylvania

Web sites and found that while I was slacking off,

someone was posting enormous loads of new information.

I've also rediscovered the

delight in e-corresponding with people working on related

lines. They are so sympathetic in supplying what they

can, or suggesting other directions in which to search.

Yes, I'm obsessive, yes,

I'm keeping ridiculous hours, yes, I'm neglecting friends

and spouse. But oh! that surge of adrenalin when a name

or date suddenly clicks in place.

"So what?" shrugs

Dave. He hasn't a clue. Never will.

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