Who are we, really?
For many, the best way to answer that question is to dig into their genealogical pasts, amassing family trees that go back generations, supported by birth certificates, immigration documents, municipal records and whatever else can be tracked down. Before the dawn of the personal computer, that task was a prodigious and labor intensive undertaking.
But it’s a personal journey that has become considerably easier in the last decade or so thanks to the widespread digitization of public records and document archives and technological advancements that have turned genealogical research into a user-friendly, plug-and-play process.
The engine behind much of that research evolution is a genealogical products and service industry that generated some $3.5 billion in revenues in 2021 is expected to grow to over $8 billion annually by 2030.
Search specialist and veteran entrepreneur Kendall Hulet knows a thing or two about genealogy and search services having spent 14 years upgrading the search functions for family history giant Ancestry.com and launching his own mobile browser, Cake, a few years back.
Now, Hulet is CEO of Storied, a newly announced rebrand of newspaper and record archive service World Archives which was acquired in 2020 by Charles Thayne Capital. Storied is looking to make stories, from relatives as well as the important people in our lives outside the family circle, an integral part of building family histories.
“Records are awesome and a lot of family history sites are really good at hosting records and making them searchable,” Hulet said. “Right now, when discussions about family history happen, people’s eyes glaze over a little because it’s not stories they’re hearing, just a list of facts and dates.
“But stories are what really matter. Telling stories around campfires has been happening throughout our history and it’s how humans are hardwired to communicate.”
Storied is getting a running start as a new genealogy service, thanks to the billions of domestic and international records already amassed by World Archives.
While Storied is continuing to build out that database, its new platform offers tools to create, document and share stories from family members and the pivotal, nonfamily members who’ve impacted life stories and whose narratives complete the richer tale of a life lived, Hulet said.
You can read more in an article by Art Raymond published in the Deseret News web site at https://tinyurl.com/2zrdnhf2
You can also watch a YouTube video that describes Storied at https://youtu.be/ESYJZGGGCbU.