Some of my earliest memories of visiting my paternal Grandparent's involve watching them boot up their MS-DOS PC, load up PAF (Personal Ancestral File), and do "family history." I would stare at the bright blue screen, fascinated that contained on a number of tiny 3.5" disks were thousands of names of my ancestors and relatives, stretching back to who knew how far. Some of them even had stories attached to their names, which I enjoyed reading. It was amazing to me that we had such easy access to all of that information. Genealogy, or family history research is so much easier today, than it was when I was a child, and that was leaps ahead of when my parents were kids. But it seems that people my age (including myself) have little interest in doing the work to find out about their heritage, or believe that their parents and grandparents have already done it all. It's so simple, though. Just now I logged in to Family Search and while I was able to trace my ancestors back 11 generations to find Peder Jensen (who died sometime in the 1600s) in seconds, there was a lot of missing information, or incomplete branches. We need a motivator for my generation to pick up the torch. I wonder if adding achievements for filling in holes in your family tree would help boost interest? There could be achievements for how bushy you've made your tree, and for reaching certain milestones for how many generations back you've traced personally. You could post your achievements to Facebook, or Google+ to show your friends how much further you've traced your tree. Adding game elements like that could work. Somebody get on that.
Note: While PAF is no longer available for download, you can use Family Search online, and other software products such as AncestralQuest, Legacy Family Tree, or RootsMagic have picked up the PAF torch.
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