Paula Story has a story (hah!) in the Union-Tribune (San Diego), Knowing your relatives’ medical history can help you identify health risks and develop a personalized prevention program, that gets into an area that some don’t want to confront or think about, or that, on the flip side, actually got some peole into genealogy and their family history.
Excerpts from the article:
Knowing the details of what diseases or illnesses have occurred in your family can be an important tool for you and your doctor in determining your risk for developing illness or disease. Perhaps more critically, talking about genetic risk and recording a family medical tree can be a gift you give to others.
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One problem in going back much farther than grandparents with health history is that medical records were not generally as detailed as they are today. For instance, the term “heart attack†was often used to describe many types of sudden death, and “stomach cancer†could have been any cancer within the abdominal region, including liver, ovarian or colon.
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Using the speed and accessibility of the Internet, many people are beginning to find tools that help them piece together an image of their genetic past, and the increased interest in genealogy in the United States is making those tools more readily available.
I think you are going to see a lot more people looking at this aspect of genealogy.