BACK TO YOUR ROOTS

摘要

For a few days in January it was the hottest property on the Web. Demand was so high that the site had to be closed down for fear it would paralyse the telephone network. It still hasn't reopened. So just what was on this site? A century-old British census, the first to go online. The Public Record Office expected 1.2 million hits a day. It got 7 million. The 1901 census wasn't the first genealogical website to be swamped. When the Mormon Church put its vast archives online in 1999 it too had to re-engineer its site to cope with unexpectedly high demand. No one, it seems, bargains for the enormous popularity of genealogy. For some reason people have a deep-seated fascination for their family histories. Until recently, researching them meant spending hours thumbing through dusty old files in out-of-the-way record offices, trying to make sense of the paper trail left by long-dead relatives. Online services have made the task easier. But there's an even more sophisticated way of tracing your family tree. Each of us has a permanent record of our ancestry written into our genes. And now you can access it―for a price.