Computer Technology for Genealogy and Dick Eastman

Last week on the Forget-Me-Not Hour, Dick Eastman joined me and talked about computers and genealogy. Dick, the author of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter, shared his experience as a computer techie forging the way in the infancy of personal computers, when computer data was stored on punch cards.  That concept was hard for me to comprehend–genealogy data on a punch card. I vaguely remember those cards when my brother was studying computer science in college and brought some home for his little sister to play with.

Dick talked about how commercial companies like Ancestry.com and FindMyPast.com, not-for-profits like FamilySearch.org and government agencies like NARA are keeping up — or not — with the advances in computer technology and how he stores his genealogy data on his own computer, or island, as he called it.

He later shared with me that he was a DJ at 950 AM radio in Maine–the same frequency as the station where I do the show in Poughkeepsie.

Find Dick’s newsletter at http://blog.eogn.com/

Hear more from Dick on the radio show here.