Finding your family roots online. I'm Fred Fishkin with Bootcamp, a report on computers and technology. What happens when the Mormon Church opens up its vast genealogical archives for free on the Internet? A humongous web site traffic jam. That's what. Try to log on to the site at familysearch.com and you'll see what I mean. Genealogy has become a very popular hobby. The Internet and software packages like Family Treemaker from Broderbund have made it much easier than it used to be. Broderbund's Rob Armstrong says the new Mormon Church site is a welcome addition...

"Certainly the LDS Church right now is drawing enormous attention to their site and they've been very successful in trying to get people to come to their site. My understanding is that they're averaging somewhere around seven million page hits a day."

The folks at Family Treemaker have two web sites that will help you dig up those roots as well. genealogy.com is free and good for the basics. They also have a subscription based site at genealogylibrary.com...

"The cost for our users is 99 dollars a year and what it includes is a variety of different types of materials. Everything from family histories as well as census records and recently we've added census images ."

Online message boards on the sites let enthusiasts share informaton online. You may be surprised when you find some long lost relatives.