JAMESTOWN Megan Smolenyak is the family historian who told the Rev. Al Sharpton that one of his ancestors was a slave owned by an ancestor of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

This weekend, she’s in Jamestown helping visitors start the search into their own family roots.

Smolenyak is part of the ancestry.com booth, easy to spot in Anniversary Park’s Democracy Village because of the large George W. Bush family tree.

For purposes of publicizing America’s Anniversary Weekend, ancestry.com traced the president to Pocahontas through her granddaughter, Jane Rolfe, and Bush’s eighth great-grandfather, Robert Bolling. Bolling’s first wife was Rolfe. President Bush’s relation to Bolling is through his ancestor’s second marriage to Ann Stith.

Smolenyak speaks of genealogy as a game with “clues” along the way. She sees herself as a detective, and not only for a person’s past. She’s also involved in what she calls “orphan heirloom rescues”—reuniting photos, Bibles and other long-lost items with family members of those who originally owned them.

Visitors to the ancestry.com booth have free access to computers and historians to guide them through the first steps in mapping a family’s past.

“It was interesting to find out how much I don’t remember about my family,” said Steve Weigman from Gaithersburg, Md., who spent more than a half-hour at the booth yesterday.

Smolenyak, who is chief family historian with ancestry.com, said the Utah-based company has close to 6 billion names and 24,000 databases in its site. Providing some of the best source material are the U.S. Census reports from 1790-1930. (Privacy laws prohibit access to more recent census reports.)

But that’s just the start, as Smolenyak began to rattle off a list of sources including military records, immigration records from 1820 to1960 and Social Security death lists. She said new sources are constantly popping up.

“Very few people slip through the cracks,” she said.

Smolenyak, who says every story is touching, also does work for the U.S. Army in identifying soldiers still unaccounted for from the Korean and Vietnam wars. She helps identify remains by tracking down possible family members to obtain DNA samples.

She recently had to convince a man in his 70s that he had a brother he never knew about, and then informed him that his brother died in the Korean War.

Genealogy has exploded, Smolenyak said, especially in Europe, where there are now popular TV shows devoted to tracing family roots. Here, the Internet is the most popular tool, often providing instant results.

“People used to do it for bragging rights, to be snooty,” she said. “Now people just want a good tale.”

Smolenyak’s research into her own ancestors uncovered a great grandfather who abandoned one wife and murdered another.

“There’s no such thing as a boring family.”

Contact staff writer Douglas Durden at ddurden@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6359