biohacker

Researching one's own (or anyone else's) family history has just gotten easier.

Ancestry.com has built a database of "every name in every publicly available [US] federal census taken from 1790 to 1930" (the cutoff date is due to a 72 year delay before the US government releases original census documents). According to an AP story, the database contains 5 billion searchable names linked to 13 million images of original census pages. The searches can reveal such odd bits of historical trivia as Mary Lincoln aging only 7 years between the 1850 and the 1860 census. The site also includes Flash-animated tools to look at historical snapshots of the US every decade from 1790 to 1930.

For those not serious enough about researching their ancestry to shell out a yearly or a monthly fee, there is even a convenient 14-day free trial.