The internet can bring life to a tree of boxes listing who begat whom. Jim will show how – using The Colburn Chronicles, his illustrated website tracing his mother’s family from the time of King Henry VII of England. Working from a genealogy prepared by a relative in the 1950s, he was able to do most of his research online, including town records from Puritan times, obscure town histories from the 1900s, magazines for upstate New York farmers, and an ambrotype of a 5x-great-grandfather serendipitously found for sale on eBay.
Jim Gasperini – the Institute’s webmaster and a member of its board – is completing Fire in the Mind: From the Burning Bush to Burning Man, How We Imagine Fire, a book of cultural history. 
A Williams College graduate, he designed and wrote initial titles for the Time Machine series of interactive history books for young adults (Bantam); wrote Hidden Agenda, an educational game about Central American politics (Scholastic); and designed the third version of the city-planning simulation Sim City. Through his 3D photography company Cockeyed Creations he has researched and published sets of stereograph reproductions for the White House Historical Association, Gettysburg and Antietam national military parks, Cabrillo, N.M., and Old Town San Diego.
