[I wrote this over on the Beyond blog, but it's an exciting enough idea that I figured I'd crosspost it so y'all can get an idea of how cool Beyond is going to be.]
Back in the mid-1800s, my ancestor Robert Shanks bought and sold a fair amount of land. One name that came up more than once was that of a Mr. Atkinson (I can’t remember his first name), a man who seemed fairly well to do.
Now fast-forward to today. I’m trying to find more information about Robert, but nothing seems to be coming up. If I know that he was somehow connected with Mr. Atkinson (through business transactions, in this case), I could start researching Mr. Atkinson to see if anything shows up. For all I know he could have been Robert’s father-in-law, or perhaps Robert’s family had lived with the Atkinsons for a few years, or Robert and Mr. Atkinson started a business together, or any number of other possibilities.
Now imagine being able to find one of Mr. Atkinson’s descendants, someone who’s been researching that very line and has a wealth of information about Mr. Atkinson, including his journal — which just happens to mention Robert Shanks.
Or pretend your ancestor Humphrey Call had a brother, Josiah, who lived hundreds of miles away from Humphrey and died without ever marrying. You’ve come to a dead-end with their line, but you suspect Josiah may have inherited the family Bible (he was the eldest, after all) and a number of other heirlooms. He wasn’t on speaking terms with Humphrey at his death, though, which is why they’ve disappeared.
Another researcher is working on the line of Michael Indigo, who happened to live in Josiah’s neighborhood. And this researcher finds a bunch of information for the Call family in Michael’s belongings — the family Bible, the love letters of Humphrey and Josiah’s parents, and a number of deeds for the family land. Turns out Michael and Josiah were friends.
So then the researcher adds Josiah Call to Michael Indigo as a friend. You get a message saying someone’s added Josiah Call to the database. You check it out and voila, turns out it’s the same Josiah, and you see that this researcher has a gold mine of records for your ancestors.
That’s the power of including non-family relationships in an interconnected online genealogy network. And that’s just one of the many cool things that Beyond will make possible.
(And just for the record, all of that stuff about Mr. Atkinson was completely made up, other than his name and the fact that he had land transactions with Robert Shanks. And the Call family and Michael Indigo are fictional as far as I know.)
[tags]Beyond, genealogy[/tags]
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