Campus has been abuzz with conversation about “The Social Network,” Facebook’s cinematic creation story. The movie highlights how quickly and how closely connected we have become in today’s global cyberverse. With over half a billion users worldwide, Facebook has redefined what “global connection” means.

But frankly, I’m tired of all the commentary on Facebook. It’s amazing. Who cares? I’m more interested in another type of digital social network: Ancestry.com. On Wednesday night, my roommates and I decided skip out on Toad’s. Instead, we drank beer at home and browsed our family histories.

The Yale Library gives us free access to Ancestry.com, which boasts a massive database of census records, voter records, immigration documents, naturalization forms, and birth, death and marriage records. The Huffington Post recently reported that through Ancestry.com searches, genealogists determined that President Obama and Sarah Palin are 10th cousins through an ancestor named John Smith.

The coolest part is that all the records are digitized. You can see your ancestor’s handwriting, the things they crossed out, how they signed their names. It gives me chills.

This is what I knew about my family before I went on this site: My mother’s side of the family comes from Denmark. They lived in New York. Now they live in New Jersey.

Here is what I found out after 30 minutes of Ancestry.com searching: My great-great-grandfather Johannes Define Olivarius was born in Denmark in April 1858. He married a German woman named Carrie and they immigrated to Brooklyn, where they had three children: Amey, Edward and Holger (my great-grandfather). Define owned a sporting goods store and could read, write and speak English. Define also noted that his father was born in “West India.”

All of this information came from one 1900 census record. But my relatives also appear in christening records from Denmark in the early 1800s, on draft cards from World Wars I and II, even on the logs of ships that transported them across the Atlantic.

It helps that my last name, “Olivarius,” is fairly obscure — if your relative’s name is “John Smith,” you are going to have an exhausting time. It also helps that the Olivarius family came through Ellis Island during the 19th century. But if your ancestors came to the States undocumented, illegally, very long ago or very recently, or if they were slaves, you are going to have a much harder time finding information.

But my roommates had luck. Isabel Polon ’11, from Los Angeles, found out that one side of her family came from Austria, a piece of knowledge her family had forgotten. She saw the record of her grandmother’s journey to California after the Holocaust; she weighed only 105 lbs. Anna Robinson-Sweet ’11 followed her family to Eastern Europe and freaked out when she found out her ancestor Abraham Robinson was a labor organizer, just like her.

Centuries ago, people wrote down family trees in their Bibles, including births, deaths and marriage dates. Knowing this basic information was important to them — it gave them a sense of place in a world with much more death, disease and uncertainty. Today, we in the “Facebook Generation” know far less about our great-grandparents than we know about that cute kid in section you recently “friended.”

Ancestry.com reminds us that the world has long been globally connected, long before Mark Zuckerberg’s parents were even born. It also affirms how serendipitous it is that any of us are even at Yale or alive in the first place. Would my great-great-great-grandfather from West India ever have dreamed that I would be living in New Haven with people whose family, two or three generations ago, were from different continents, escaping the Holocaust, speaking Hebrew? What if my great-great-grandfather had been lost in a shipwreck? A personal history, filled with “what ifs.”

Our mothers told us to look both ways before crossing the street. Really, it’s thanks to generations of ancestors who did look both ways that you are here today.

Now, you don’t need Ancestry.com to know that we are alive thanks to a series of unconscious and amazing decisions made long ago by people who never conceived of our existence. But records give us tangible proof, a vivid window. You see your ancestors make decisions about their lives in the moment — big decisions, like travelling around the world, or getting married, or getting naturalized. These decisions, accruing over time, led to the indirect creation of little old you.

How much time do you spend thinking about your potential children’s lives? How about your progeny five generations from now? What are the chances that their circumstances will even resemble your own? Will they remember you?

As we continue to disperse our social interactions — making “friends” with people we hardly know — simply looking back gives us a far greater idea of our identities — a far realer sense of connection than our “friend” count.

Kathryn Olivarius is a senior in Branford College.