I had the pleasure of being next to some of the engineers from Ancestry.com in the queue for the WWDC keynote this year - it was really interesting to hear about a business that you don't think is that big, but is actually massive. They said Europe was also a very big market for them (I know genealogy is quite popular in the UK at least - the TV show that the article cites, 'Who Do You Think You Are', was originally a BBC show first), so being acquired by a European private equity firm makes some sense.
Yeah, I believe that europe is actually a big market for that. Would be interessting to see if the ancestry.com guys hit the same fogy barrier the 30-years war presents in most of central europe. What I never imagined was that there's enough of a market to come up with a 1.6 billion company. Job well done though!
That's probably an opportunity for someone to pick up. Keep in mind that the data is more easily obtainable thanks to the household registries institutionalized in East Asia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system] which record familial information such as parents, professions, dates, residence changes, etc.
India's gonna be tough -- records tend to be maintained on sheets of leather in ink, by a fellow who'll need a decent bribe to let you see it. Enough to let him copy all his data --- maybe that's doable in scale for everyone, but who knows?
(Note: this is from my Dad, and it's up-to-date as of ~2 years ago, at least for his old village).
