Genealogy News in Bloomberg Businessweek ? Irish Genealogical ...

An article on Ancestry.com appears in the Sept 24-30 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek.?According to the story,?genealogy ranks second only to porn?as the most searched topic online?? Perhaps less surprising was their report that visitors to online genealogy sites are mostly white women, 55 and older, who browse the Internet from home. Those were two of the statements made by the article. Here are?a few more highlights:

• President Barack Obama is related, through his white Kansan mother, to one of the earliest slaves in North America.?Obama is also related to Brad Pitt (eighth cousins) and Warren Buffett (seventh cousins, three times removed). Discoveries like these are the work of a subsidiary of Ancestry.com called ProGenealogists.
• The company?s celebrity research strategy is key to generating buzz. ?Ultimately, yeah, it?s a branding play,? admits Ancestry.com?s PR director. ?The more relationship stories you hear, the more you might be thinking about researching your own family.?
• Ancestry began in 1983 as a small niche publisher of reference books and has since?grown to have a near monopoly?in the family tree business. Ancestry will net a projected $480 million in 2012, up 189 percent over the last five years.
• Although market leader, Ancestry.com is not the genealogy industry?s only player. Several for-profit outfits such as MyHeritage.com and Brightsolid are busy building out their collections, but Ancestry.com mostly competes with itself: It owns five of the top 10 genealogy sites on the Net, including RootsWeb.com, Genealogy.com and Archives.com.
• If you assume families have two kids, each parent will have two children, four grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, 16 great-great-grandchildren and so on. After 10 generations, or about 250 years, the average person will have 1024 descendants. The article says practically all people of European descent share at least one common ancestor on their family trees sometime within the last 550 years.
• A computer science professor/genealogy enthusiast was quoted: ?Say you walked into an ancient Egyptian village in 2000 BC and interrupted a peasant making love to his wife, delaying him for five minutes. Then Hitler, Stalin, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Alan Turing, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, name whoever you want, would not exist. They could not exist.??The expert?explains that a different sperm would have won the race, perhaps producing a son rather than a daughter, and the future of the world would be forever changed.

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Source: http://blog.irishgenealogical.org/?p=701

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