By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Lifestyle Columnist

Do you remember back in the 1980s, how friends would suddenly disappear for months, even years, later to surface with the explanation: “I got a computer”?

My friend Mike Carroll was typical. We worked together in the fire department as volunteer paramedics. He was a busy kind of guy, what with running an industry, working diligently with his college fraternity, and landscaping his lot on Lake Peachtree, and he had trouble finding enough hours in the day.

Then he dropped out of sight. He was one of the first people I knew who bought a personal computer, and he became obsessed with the thing. This was before Windows opened and computers were a lot more labor-intensive to learn to operate. And as quickly as a devotee learned the newest technology or the latest program, something newer would come out and it was back to square one until that was mastered.

The only good thing about it was that Patti always knew where to find Mike — even at 3 a.m.

Dave used to sympathize with Patti. He was himself late coming to computers and could not for the life of him understand what Mike saw in them.

Little did he dream he'd become a quasi-widower himself, cleaning up after dinner, watching Braves games by himself, running errands alone that we used to do together.

But it's not the computer per se (well, two computers actually) that has Dave's aging helpmeet glued to an office chair `til all hours, back stiff and eyes bleary from hours of names and dates scrolling by.

It's genealogy.

As baffled as Dave was when Mike morphed into a computer compulsive, he is even more nonplussed over my fixation with family history. He's not alone: a lot of people are clueless why others are obsessed with finding out the family name of a great-grandmother or hellbent on finding how 14th-century Knight Balderbert links with our own ho-hum relatives.

I've been off and on with this for a number of years, but now after a couple “off,” having more or less retired from daily labors, I find I have the time to resume my search for my dusty forebears.

Except that it's disingenuous to say one has the time, especially after what happened earlier this year. Now we must come to terms with the fact that there will never, ever, in one lifetime be enough time to trace every thread of the fabric of who we are.

What happened earlier this year is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, put their gargantuan database of names and families on the Internet.

LDS beliefs require members to document their genealogy, and their collection is probably the largest single gathering of family information — Mormon or not — in history. And all a genealogist needs to access it is a computer, a modem, and an Internet provider, common tools today.

Many of us have waited too long to seek family lore from our own senior members. Even with an oral history, trips to musty courthouses or country churches would still be necessary to substantiate it. That's really the only sure way to determine that great-Aunt Phoebe's father was great-great-grandfather Hans Georg, and that she was indeed born in 1772.

Computer genealogy is admittedly dicey and only as accurate as the researcher who filed it. You can bring up a name listed four times with parents and county of birth confirming what you already have — but with four different birth dates.

So you settle on the likeliest and everything correlates with information you already have — expect that great-great-Uncle Theophilus seems to have died three years after probation of a will you have seen with your own eyes and know to be authentic.

And the LDS material can be awfully sterile. At most — at MOST — you'll get parents' names and perhaps their history (pedigree, the Mormons call it), and the names and dates of siblings, spouses and children.

With luck, you'll be able to go back a few generations, or forward, and know with certainty that you have one more piece in the puzzle that shows you from whence you come.

But even with that kind of luck, you won't find Uncle John's memory of an older brother who died in the Great War, a man so big he could hold a 50-pound bag of flour under each arm.

You won't learn that your third great-grandmother was considered the family's musician, with an exquisite voice and enough competence on the violin to entertain in her father's riverside inn.

You wonder if great-Aunt Margaretha is the one you should blame for your tendency to get pot-bellied, or should you thank her for the needlework skills you seem to have inherited?

Since the LDS material has come out, I've broken through a couple of brick walls, as genealogists like to call difficult links in a family line. More importantly, I've revisited some Pennsylvania Web sites and found that while I was slacking off, someone was posting enormous loads of new information.

I've also rediscovered the delight in e-corresponding with people working on related lines. They are so sympathetic in supplying what they can, or suggesting other directions in which to search.

Yes, I'm obsessive, yes, I'm keeping ridiculous hours, yes, I'm neglecting friends and spouse. But oh! that surge of adrenalin when a name or date suddenly clicks in place.

“So what?” shrugs Dave. He hasn't a clue. Never will.

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