While I am not exactly sure yet when the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) started the Roots Project, I found a 1989 article from the Pacific Daily News written by Tambra Maddock providing some background information. The article featured Assistant Professor and MARC Librarian Albert L. Williams. “Williams, who put the information into a user friendly form, says people are interested in knowing who their ancestors are for a number of reasons.” Back then, the Roots Project contained 10,000 names in the database, was touted as “probably the largest compilation of Chamorro genealogical information in the world…” The names and data came from births, deaths and marriages taken from the Guam News Letters from 1914 to 1921, the 1897 census and the 1920 census of Agana.
