Here is an email I received I thought you might like to know about:

By Rodger L. Hardy
Deseret News
Published: Friday, Aug. 1, 2008
PROVO -- New innovations in doing genealogy research over the Internet are just around the corner, Web entrepreneur Paul Allen said Thursday.

The co-founder of Ancestry.com and corporate executive officer for Familylink.com, Allen said his company is about to launch Worldhistory.com in the next few weeks. It will allow users to upload their family trees and then, coupled with historical data on the site, learn more about the environment in which their ancestors lived.

"It will bring history to life," he told attendees at the Conference on Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University. "It will be a time-travel experience."

Site staffers have been gathering world history and vital records from a wide variety of sources that users can mix with the time their ancestors lived. They will be able to determine who they knew in their communities and what life was like for them.

The new site will give new meaning to social networking, Allen suggested. Familylink.com is a social networking site for amateur and professional genealogy researchers.

Another site, Webtree.com, was recently launched to collect family trees throughout the world. Once users submit their family tree the submitter can be alerted when new sources are cataloged so the user can check for more ancestral data.