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"Definitely, technology plays a very Philadelphia important role in bringing young people into genealogy:' Horowitz said. n genealogy research, crumbling "Once the computer and technology documents and high-speed are used to research or share informa- Internet connections often go tion, young people are attracted to it. hand in hand. The amount of young people getting So it goes for Schelly Talalay involved in things like Facebook — it's Dardashti. incredible. In Israel, there's a Facebook At a workshop she ran a few years for kids 12-15 years old. That's a very ago in Barcelona on the role of tech- good catch to bring young people into nology in conducting genealogy genealogy." research, Dardashti met a former While few teenagers and 20-some- attorney, Maria Jose Surribas. Surribas things attended the conference, some now works as a freelance archivist spoke of their young children catching and has helped Dardashti research her the genealogy bug. roots in the Colombian town of Lerida. Barbara and Richard Wissokur Dardashti now can trace her fam- came from Boston with their daughter, ily there to 1353, to Moshe Talalaya, a Amy Wissokur Graham, a Philadelphia kosher winemaker. librarian. When Barbara periodically "If not for technology, we'd be updates the family database, she e- doing what we used to: dealing with mails Amy, who shares the informa- the dust and the creepy-crawlies, like tion with her three children for their Maria does in Spain, wearing a face class assignments. mask:' said Dardashti, of Tel Aviv. "They've been working on this so "Technology has made it possible for long," Amy said of her parents, "that people interested in the same topics to my mother is counting on me to move share, collaborate and learn." this forward." The ever-expanding research oppor- And new opportunities continue to tunities enabled by technology was a open up. central theme at the recent conference The International Tracing Service in Philadelphia of the International archives in Bad Aronson, Germany, is a Association of Jewish Genealogy font of newly declassified information. Societies, which drew nearly 900 My Heritage now links researchers to people. 1,536 databases around the world. Last year's conference session on Ancestry.com says it spends mil- using Google for genealogy research lions of dollars per year digitizing proved so popular that three Google records that can be searched online. sessions were held this time. Even before records are indexed, said Speakers, including representatives the company's indexing manager, of companies specializing in technol- Crista Cowan, Ancestry.com users can ogy-assisted genealogy, covered such browse such digitized documents as matters as constructing digital family naturalization papers much like scroll- trees and sharing them online, search- ing microfilm spools. ing databases, choosing genealogy Many software programs also software, collaborating with other enable the posting of family trees researchers via social networking online, which allows relatives to share sites and utilizing face-recognition and edit each other's information. For technology to identify relatives in pho- privacy reasons, users can restrict tographs. access to the trees; some sites limit "Until now, history and genealogy, what information can be viewed. which are related, are things that old "What all this means is, if you have people were said to be doing," said an Internet connection and are sit- Daniel Horowitz, manager of geneal- ting in a yurt in Mongolia, you can ogy and translations for My Heritage, find out information:' Dardashti said. an Israeli software and Web company "What we always say is, `If you don't that operates in 36 languages. find what you're looking for today, try That reality is changing, he said, as tomorrow" Fl