‘Genealogy Kid’ has business researching family histories

While most teenagers may spend their time engrossed in their smartphones or playing video games, one Burlington County teen spends his time researching history.
Medford Lakes high schooler Eric Schubert is also known as the “Genealogy Kid.” He’s barely old enough to drive, but hundreds of people have reached out to him to find out more about their families’ history.
“My friends call me ‘the world’s oldest teenager,’” Schubert says. “So that’s fun. I get it.”
Schubert’s passion, and now his business, is genealogy. He researches family histories in order to help people discover their ancestry or find their biological parents.
“I’ve had to tell people that they were conceived [through] rape. I had to tell one woman that her biological parents were a whole murder-suicide thing,” he says.
But it isn’t all heartache. He say that most of the time there are really heartwarming stories.
“I’ve had people say, ‘Oh I just went to the Phillies game with my brother the other day.’ ‘I went to the art museum with my mom the other day,’” he says.
These are all families that he helped to reunite.
Schubert was also able to dig up some information about News 12’s Brian Donohue’s great-granduncle, a well-known sportswriter and boxing referee from New York City who lived in the late 1800s.
“’Lakewood, New Jersey, will hold the mortal remains of a noble man who by his profession had to touch dirt but was never soiled by it,’” Schubert read from an old newspaper article.  “I've never seen something like this.”
Schubert is a senior at Shawnee High School. He says that he has applied to more than a dozen colleges and plans to study history.