Tim Urban, on his Wait but Why blog wrote a very interesting article about how we all seem to wait too long to talk to our parents or grandparents about their lives.     He begins his article saying:

“I have one living grandparent—my father’s mother, who’s 89 – Nana.

 I visited Nana recently and went through the usual activities—talking about myself in a loud voice, fixing her “broken machine” by unminimizing the internet browser window, being told to “slow down Timothy and get in the left lane”, even though the turn is still a half mile ahead. But I also used the visit as an opportunity to do something I have not done nearly enough in my life—ask her questions about our family.

I don’t know you, but I can almost guarantee that you don’t ask your grandparents (or older parents) enough questions about their lives and the lives of their parents. We’re all incredibly self-absorbed, and in being so, we forget to care about the context of the lives we’re so immersed in. We can use Google to learn anything we want about world history and our country’s history, but our own personal history—which we really should know quite well—can only be accessed by asking questions …”

His article speaks to us all, as most of us have lost the opportunity to talk with a parent or grandparent about their lives.   To read the complete article, please click here.

“Wait But Why posts regularly.  You can also follow Wait But Why on Facebook and Twitter.”

A Huffington Post article dated April 6, 2015 stated that, “Ancestry.Com Is Quietly Transforming Itself Into A Medical Research Juggernaut”.  The article states:

“In 1984, a genealogy geek named John Sittner published The Source, a book meant to unearth and analyze never-before-seen records that genealogists could use to put together family histories with unprecedented detail. Several years later, he founded Ancestry magazine to teach people how they could use public archives and technology — which, back then, meant CD-ROMS and primitive websites and search engines — to build out their family trees.

Sittner sold the company long ago, but three decades after it began, Ancestry.com — the $1.6 billion Internet company that his magazine evolved into — is poised to become one of the most unlikely, yet powerful, scientific tools in the world. For about three years, it’s been collecting and analyzing genetic information through a service called AncestryDNA, and in the process, quietly asking consumers if they’d be willing to share their data with Ancestry for research. To date, it’s banked more than 800,000 samples from customers all over the world, rivaling the database of Google-backed genetics-analysis company 23andMe, which boasts about 900,000 samples. And now, armed with mountains of health data, Ancestry.com is slowly transforming itself from a retiree’s hobby into a medical research juggernaut …”

The complete blog post is well worth reading as it shows the future of DNS research.  Please click here to read the entire article.