Using genealogy tools with patrons

There's a character who comes in the library every day it seems, with a long white beard, and stories of his being a miner in Idaho and Montana. He likes to learn, reads avidly and uses reference books. Today I showed him Ancestry Library Edition. One common theme in all the things he asks about and offers up is a sense of validating the past. So today I told him about Ancestry Libary edition. With only names of his half brother, his mother's name, and his own birthday, we were able to find out details of his past like his mother's marriage, his half siblings' names, the occupation of his stepfather, a date of dissolution of his own marriage, his mother's middle initial, and the like. We learned that his brother-in-law nlisted in the Army and only in 1992 passed away at a Veterans Hospital, so he must have been a veteran. We discovered that his mother was not born in Romania and was not a gypsy, like he thought, but instead born in Ohio. Which brought out a "well I'll be damned!"