My future in geneology (personal post)

This course gets my thoughts going. It's been a while since I have had the freedom to take the time to expose myself to a course like this. I don't have the time now, but when will we?

I've researched my family origins since I was 12. They took me to records written in an old German script in south Russia and to dates preceding the 1800s. I reached a wall, though. I have the names of villages that existed in scattered regions throughout what later became Switzerland, Germany, and Poland. But many of those villages and records do not exist. So how could I go the next step back?

I thought I could get books that have records of people in villages with those same names, and build a census of all the names of people and families in villages with those names over the 18th century. But this course has helped me see the future of geneology. People will see they can have this kind of information come to them.

By putting a simple question out there in what I understand to be a ning, I can get people with interests (and knowledge) in the village of that time into a social network. By getting an RSS feed for everything about those villages sent to me from Google, I can get updates and contacts on such information. And I'll bet technologies in the next five years will be developed that will give us an application by which we can feed in specific search criteria and the smarter search engine will do the work for me.....and probably even organize the information in a way that is easy for me to analyze (kind of like Google.docs does now).