FAMILY TREE MAGAZINE (FTM): Do you consider yourself retired?

STEVE MORSE (SM): Yes. I've already made my fortune. Now I'm making my fame. I telecommuted from home since 1985, and I go to my same office every day. I'm just playing around for myself instead of playing around for my company.

 

FTM: So you prepared for your genealogy career by working on the ancestor of the Pentium processor?

SM: Intel wanted the 8086 as a stopgap; they had a new computer coming out but it wasn't ready. So in 1976, they asked me to do the architecture for the 8086. The new processor came out years later. They had teams of people working on it, and it was a flop in the marketplace, whereas the 8086, I was the only person. The first PC was built around its descendant, the 8088.

 

FTM: What inspired your first search form, for the Ellis Island database?

SM: I came by all my grandparents and my wife Anita's grandparents the old-fashioned way, by going to the library. I found everybody but this one grandfather of Anita's. I got excited when the Ellis Island Web site came online in 2001, because I thought OK, I'll have another chance of finding him. You couldn't get into the site in those days; it was very slow and everybody was trying to use it. So I set my alarm and got up at 3 in the morning. I got in, but it was hard to use and you had to enter one field at a time. The second night I went back, and I said, “I can spend my two hours more fruitfully putting up a search form that has all the fields and do one search.” By 5, I had that done, and I found this one grandfather. I went upstairs to tell my wife, but she wasn't too excited at 5 in the morning.

 

FTM: When your search form became popular, Ellis Island wasn't happy about it.

SM: No, and I had to pull down the Web site. But the backlash that ensued caused them to reconsider, and we reached a mutually agreeable settlement.

 

FTM: Your forms do something called “deep linking.” What is that?

SM: It's just going into a Web site on a page other than the home page. If you go to www.microsoft.com/something, you're deep linking. The whole World Wide Web is based on deep linking. It's got a bad reputation, but it's perfectly legal. When people say “you're stealing my data,” that's nonsense. I'm not pretending it's my own data, but these forms can get to the data better.

 

FTM: Have any sites blocked your searches?

SM: Some sites will block the IP address, the specific code that comes from my server. One did that, and I got a phone call months later, and they said, “If you promise you won't crash our site, we'll take off the block. It turns out we need you more than you need us.” Another site was blocking me, and I went to two friends' servers and one was blocked. I figured out this site was blocking anyone who used a public hosting service.

 

FTM: Your site's interface is no-frills. Do you ever think about making it fancier?

SM: The comments I've gotten are “This is great, we can see exactly what we've got here and go right to work.”

 

FTM: Why do you keep creating the tools?

SM: In some cases I need them, and I'm not being altruistic or anything. In the beginning with the census stuff, they were tools I myself needed. But since then, you know, it's fun and I'm seeing how people are enjoying it and so I keep doing it.

 

FTM: Did you see that Family Tree Magazine named your site one of the 101 Best Undiscovered Web Sites for 2005?

SM: I saw that list and said, “Undiscovered?” I get about 80,000 hits a day, so I think that's pretty much discovered.

 

From the February 2007 issue of Family Tree Magazine.