It's All Relative: Building a Global Family Tree

Guest: A.J. Jacobs, Author of “It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree” Growing up in Utah a couple decades ago, the genealogy basics were a prerequisite from around the age of 10. All the kids in Sunday School took home a paper chart and scratched in their names and birthdates, then those of parents, then grandparents and great-grandparents. Four generations were the goal. And that’s where family history efforts usually stopped, because going any farther would have required hours of staring at microfilm in a musty library.  Then the internet happened. And today building your family tree is more like building your little twig on the branch of on one enormous, collaborative online sequoia. A global family tree showing how all 7.6 billion of us on the planet are connected. Experimental journalist A.J. Jacobs figured a global family needs a reunion. So that’s what he set out to organize, because he’s a guy who likes using his own life as the stage for big ideas. After all, he spent a year trying to follow all the laws of the Bible and then wrote about it in the best-selling book, “The Year of Living Biblically.” His new book is “It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree.”