Five years ago, when Family Tree Magazine  first appeared on newsstands across America, we were still worried about Y2K and hadn't heard of hanging chads. We didn't need middle initials to differentiate between two presidents named George Bush. The only way to find your Ellis Island ancestor was on microfilm—and the nearly three-year closing of the Statue of Liberty was still to come, after the tragedy of September 11, 2001. The human genome was not yet decoded, and researchers hardly considered their DNA a genealogical tool. Cyndi's List, featured in Family Tree Magazine's second issue along with our inaugural 101 Best Web Sites list, totaled a mere 56,000 links; when last we checked, it boasted more than 240,000.

In the past half-decade, genealogy has changed as much as the world at large. Research tools we take for granted today—digitized census images, Ellis Island's online immigration database, genealogy software that does everything but fix you a snack while you input data—were either startlingly new in early 2000, or brainstorms not yet realized. FamilySearch, the breakthrough Web site that put some of the genealogical treasures of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' (LDS) Family History Library (FHL) just a click away, had debuted only the previous May. Response to this development—on thef irst day, 400,000 logons and 600,000 who couldn't get through—caused one of the worst traffic jams in the Internet's history. Time  magazine had recently proclaimed an epidemic of "Roots Mania" in a breathless cover story on the genealogy boom, giving rock-star treatment to Cyndi Howells of the eponymous List. "Ancestors," a PBS series that helped spark the boom in 1997, was about to air a second set of episodes. Like the prehistoric discoverers of fire eyeing a modern jet engine, those year-2000 "roots maniacs" would barely recognized genealogy in 2005.

As we prepare for this special anniversary issue by looking back over the five-year history of Family Tree Magazine—our own "pedigree chart" of issues, if you will—we were struck by all the intervening transformations, trends and other dramatic advancements in genealogy. In particular, these 22 important developments in family history research show how much this business of exploring yesterdays has changed as the past five years' worth of tomorrows have turned into todays.

The Census Gets Digital.
You have to pay for access (with a few exceptions), but cranking microfilm to see actual census records can now be a thing of the past. Digitizing the US census has happened in fits and starts—and the all-important indexing hasn't been quick—but we'll probably look back on posting the census online as the most significant genealogical development in this decade. Now you can access this priceless primary source material from the comfort of your home computer, and search the records in ways never before possible. Not surprisingly, mammoth site Ancestry.com offers the most information, with images of every extant cesus plus 1890 fragments and indexes to all but 1900. Its sister site Genealogy.com has census images and indexes for 1790 to 1820, 1860, 1870 and 1890 (fragments) to 1910. You can view the transcribed 1880 census for free on FamilySearch. And Sources2Go.com hosts free images of the entire 1790 census, plus parts of others.

Ellis Island Opens on the Web.
A close second for genealogy's biggest development—and certainly the most newsworthy single event—of the past five years is the unveiling of the Ellis Island Web site at www.ellisisland.org. The result of five years of painstaking work and a $22.5 million investment, the American Family Immigration History Center provides online access to the passenger records of 22 million people who passed through Ellis Island from 1892 to 1924. That includes 17 million immigrants, the ancestors of 40 percent of the American people. Not only did the site make these records searchable for the first time, but it also let users click from results of their database search to actual images of their ancestors' passenger manifests. No wonder a whopping 8 million visitors logged on during the first eight hours, and NBC's "Today" show covered the center's opening live.

MyFamily.com Dominates.
In early 2000, MyFamily.com's subscription site Ancestry.com was just one of several putting data online for a fee—or planning to. Since then, however, the company has gobbled up Ancestry.com's competitor Genealogy.com (and with it the popular Family Tree Maker software) and acquired the all-volunteer, all-free RootsWeb site (with few of the dire consequences predicted at the time, though the Ancestry.com and RootsWeb message boards were merged, as were databases of users' family tree files). MyFamily.com also has forged marketing partnerships with two major genealogy players: Former competitor ProQuest, maker of the site HeritageQuest Online, is distributing MyFamily.com's Ancestry Library Edition; and the FHL now links to Ancestry.com's paid-access census images. (LDS church members and those researching at FHL branch Family History Centers can view the images for free; others must pay $9.95 for 30 days of access.) Ancestry.com's original database offerings have been joined by a parade of other collections, including census images, immigration records, digitized newspapers and UK and Ireland records. The site even introduced its own free genealogy software called Ancestry Family Tree (www.ancestry.com/aftexec), which automatically searches Ancestry.com's databases for ancestors. MyFamily.com says its fee-based services total more than 1.5 million subscriptions.

DNA Joins the Genealogy Toolkit.
Though the practical application of genetics technology to genealogy is in its infancy, services promising to use DNA testing to break through your family tree brick walls have proliferated. It's not just the commercial side that's made strides: Scientific researchers have used DNA evidence to learn more about the Jewish Diaspora, African-American ancestry and the isolated population of Iceland. When we write a retrospective on Family Tree Magazine's 10th anniversary, we suspect DNA technology will be near the top of the list of developments over the next five years. (For more on using DNA in genealogy, see the February 2005 Family Tree Magazine.)

FamilySearch Grows.
Refusing to rest on its laurels as the first genealogy site to really rock the Internet, FamilySearch has continued to add new features. Thrilled as we were to get online access to the site's pedigree files and International Genealogical Index, the addition of indexes to primary source material is ultimately a bigger breakthrough. You can search the 1881 British and Canadian censuses, the US Social Security Death Index, vital records indexes for Scandinavia and Mexico, and most remarkable, the full 1880 US census—which, as mentioned before, is linked to digital images at Ancestry.com. Plus, the FHL's online catalog is now updated daily, and FamilySearch has added a virtual Research Assistant that walks beginners through the roots-tracing process.