Friday, October 21, 2005

Are you related to Calvin Coolidge?

My husband and I went to the Brigham Young University Computer Alumni Association Dinner last week. Dr. Sederberg (one of my favorite professors) gave a talk about some of the cool family history projects he had worked on.

One project allows you to print out a pedigree chart on a 3'X4' piece of paper. This is cool because on a normal chart, for each individual you need 2 spaces for his or her parents. This means very quickly the chart gets huge. But most people have a lot of ancestral lines that end fairly quickly and only a few that go back really far, so the program uses the space from the lines that end sooner to fit lines that go longer. (I'm not sure if that made sense, here's an example). They'll print it out for you too for $20.

The other project allows you to see if you are related to famous historical people. I found out I'm distantly related to Calvin Coolidge, FDR, William Taft (my GGM is his 6 cousin 3 times removed, who knew?) , Brigham Young, Dr. Livingston (I presume), and my husband is fairly closely related to the President of BYU (Hubby's FMMFF = Pres. Samuelson's FMMF) To use it you need an AFN number for your ancestors. You can get by finding your ancestors on FamilySearch.org . (I had to use my great-grandparents because my grandparents, parents, and I are still living, so I couldn't find the AFN number.)

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