Why and how was the GenExchange™ started??

This is really an involved question. The GenExchange™ was begun in 1996 by Joanne Green (then Abby) as a small experiment in combining online databases and genealogy. At that time dynamic web content was in its infancy, and it was an extreme rarity to find any web site offering what we wanted to do. In fact some of the largest Genealogical web sites on the internet were dead set against offering this level of search capability, but rather forced you to submit records as text documents. Running searches against those text documents produced links to text documents that held information you sought, and required you to visually scan the text document for the information you sought. Not only is it time consuming to scan static text documents; but it's also much more difficult to find the specific information you're looking for.