Genealogy

A group of employees at Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance packs into a conference room, watching Maya Angelou and Billy Crystal on "Oprah." "Why do we need to know where we came from?" the talk-show host asks. Crystal gamely plunges in. "It places me ... it gives me a center," the comic and sometime Oscar host suggests, ceding the floor to Angelou. "In this fast-food world, everyone feels like he or she is a blade of grass," the author intones in her mellifluous contralto. "In fact, we're trees.

The Mormon Church has put millions of 19th century ancestors on its genealogy Web site, giving family tree buffs a more convenient -- and free -- way to trace their heritage. The church said Wednesday it is offering free Internet access to 55 million names from the 1880 United States census and the 1881 Canadian census. Before, census records from those years were available on a microfilm set spanning 56 compact discs -- a search process many found cumbersome and time-consuming.

Janis Minor Forte found her great-grandfather in a jail document: He was listed among the possessions his owner had lost in a bet. "Needless to say, I let out a holler," Forte said. The discovery was chilling and exhilarating: "a certain Negro man slave, Walton, about 26 years of age and of black complexion." Forte had found another slave in her family tree.

Marie Padilla has always loved her niece "Bertie," remembering how she once read the child stories, bought her dresses and pushed her on park swings. She remembers, too, the day she said goodbye, 50 years ago. "It was awful," the 92-year-old Whittier woman said. "She thought I didn't want her anymore. I missed her a lot.... I was her 'Mama Rie.' " Padilla cared for her niece in the early 1950s, when Bertie's mother struggled with epileptic seizures and her father battled alcoholism.

A group of Thomas Jefferson's descendants decided Sunday that DNA tests and historic evidence are not enough to admit relatives of Sally Hemings, a Jefferson slave, as bona fide members of their organization. The Monticello Assn., whose 700 members are descended from Jefferson and his daughters, Martha and Maria, opted not to welcome the Hemings family into the organization.

There are no babies in this hamlet headed for ghostdom on the edge of the Mojave Desert, population 23. "Study the Past" reads the inscription above the swinging gate into Dennis and Jo Ann Casebier's compound, otherwise known as Goffs Cultural Center. If the desert has an attic stuffed with memorabilia, this is it.

Most days, researchers camped out in Laguna Niguel's National Archives reference room chitchat about the past as they untangle the threads of family history. In recent weeks, though, the talk has been about the future--today, to be precise, when archivists believe the unsealing of 72-year-old census will set off a mad scramble of genealogists hungry for what one called "the first fresh meat" in a decade.

Spreading out of Africa like starlings, early humans conquered the world by embracing the strangers they encountered around the globe, not by forcing them into extinction, as many researchers believed, according to a new analysis of human genetic history. In the textbook view, the founding fathers of modern humanity emerged suddenly from Africa about 100,000 years ago and swept into oblivion all other prehuman species--Neanderthals, for example--that they encountered.

Behind the colonial church where her father was baptized nearly a century ago, Teresa Maldonado Parker on Tuesday celebrated her first Mexican Christmas. Under streams of colorful banners on Auza Street in this small agricultural community, dozens of neighborhood children and distant cousins lit candles and sparklers and rocked baby Jesus in blankets on Christmas Eve. They shared sweets and punch. There were no gifts, no trees, no Santa Claus.