What the Internet did was to make genealogy accessible to the mass of American people.
Many of them are increasingly poorly educated, and nobody, including 18th and 19th century
European writers, has ever praised ordinary Americans for their manners.  If "genealogy" is
marketed as a product to consume like any other product, and this is surely the approach 
that sites like Ancestry have taken, that is the way many people will relate to it.  Gimme,
gimme, gimme:  how different is this from the absence of principle (not to mention civilized
manners) in our public political and economic life?
 
I suppose there are as many reasons for doing genealogy as there are sorts of people:
loneliness; a desire to connect and work with others; a hope that one, however insignificant
today, might connect to a once significant family; a turning back toward the past, in a
rejection of the all too terrifying and disgusting present.
 
Real genealogy is painstaking work and time-consuming.  How many people out there are
really up for this?  A lot of them seem to gobble up gedcoms the same way that they stuff
in junk food, and no one should be surprised.
 
 
_________________________________________________________________
Use video conversation to talk face-to-face with Windows Live Messenger.
http://www.windowslive.com/messenger/connect_your_way.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_messenger_video_072008
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-roots.html