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Last night's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? featured actress Rita Wilson. The show focused on the life of her father (shown with Rita in the photo to the left) who passed away only a couple of years ago. He apparently never talked much about his life as a young man and Rita found out why. He had suffered hardships and atrocities that he obviously wished to forget. However, Rita learned more about him than she had ever imagined possible.
Rita Wilson traveled to Bulgaria and Greece to find records and even to meet relatives. Since she does not read Greek or Bulgarian, all the work and translations had been performed by local experts before her arrival. She visited various archives where translated documents were waiting for her.
The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:
30 March 2012
FamilySearch Adds Over 25 Million World War One Draft Registration Cards
FamilySearch added just over 34 million new, free records online this past week for Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Scotland, U.S., and Wales. Search these diverse collections and 2.5 billion other records now for free at FamilySearch.org.
I have had the pleasure of knowing both of these gentlemen for several years and will say this is a great addition to the staff of MyHeritage. Russ and Roger formerly were the two top managers at Footnote.com, which was later acquired by Ancestry.com and renamed to Fold3. Now they are taking senior management positions at MyHeritage.
The following announcement was written by MyHeritage (you can click on the image to see a larger picture):
MyHeritage appoints industry heavyweights to spearhead global content growth
Appointment of senior executives boosts MyHeritage’s US presence, drives growth of historical content and kick-starts preparations for worldwide crowdsourcing project
PROVO, Utah & LONDON & TEL AVIV, Israel – March 30, 2012 – MyHeritage, the most popular family network on the web, announced today the appointment of industry veterans Russ Wilding and Roger Bell to Chief Content Officer and VP Product, respectively. The former founders and lead executives of Footnote.com, acquired by Ancestry.com in 2010 for $27 million, will boost MyHeritage’s US operations in Utah by establishing a new department for adding historical content and rolling-out an extensive global crowdsourcing project.
Mitch Betts has written an interesting story about how Ancestry.com is preparing its systems for the 1940 census. The company learned its lesson two years ago from a huge spike in website traffic during the TV show "Who Do You Think You Are." Ancestry.com had prepared for a 300 percent spike in traffic from TV viewers, but that wasn't enough. This time, they company's systems personnel believe they are ready for the increased load.
One statistic caught my eye: Ancestry.com has nearly 5,000 servers at its data center.
When you were a child was there a particular story that family members would love to tell–maybe it got even better over time–that has disappeared from the family repertoire or is rarely mentioned?
The Things We’ve Handed Down is a great song for genealogists, as sung by Marc Cohn on his LIVE 04-05 Album. You can watch the YouTube video at http://youtu.be/pqyc7lWi9xc or click on the image below.
This week's U.S.version of the popuar genealogy television show, Who Do You Think You Are?, features actress Rita Wilson, wife of Tom Hanks. Her name at birth was Margarita Ibrahimoff (Bulgarian: Маргарита Ибрахимов, Greek: Μαργαρίτα Ιμπραΐμοβ). Her father was a Bulgarian, born in Greece, who worked at a Los Angeles racetrack. Before immigrating to the US, he had lived in Bulgaria and Turkey. Her mother, Dorothy, was born and raised in an ethnic Greek village (Sotire) in present-day Albania. Wilson's family changed their surname from "Ibrahimoff" to "Wilson," which was a name of a local street in Southern California.
The following announcement was written by brightsolid, the company that manages ScotlandsPeople:
A fascinating snapshot of Scotland during the First World War and a major new family history resource
A detailed picture of wartime Scotland is revealed today with the release of details from the Valuation Rolls for the year 1915-16, via the ScotlandsPeople website.
The rolls have been made searchable online for the first time, allowing genealogists, local historians and other researchers to view images of entries in the rolls, fully searchable by name or address.
Canadian laws dictate that the country's census records must be kept private for 92 years. After that time, the records are transferred to Library and Archives Canada and will be opened for public use. That means that the census taken on June 1st, 1921, should be made transferred on June 1st, 2013. However,the census records will NOT be available to the public on that day.
Two newsletter readers have reported they received surveys claiming to be from the American Community Survey (ACS) and asking follow-up questions to the information supplied in the 2010 U.S. census. Both wondered if these surveys were legitimate or if they were part of some sort of scam or sales effort.
In fact, the surveys are legitimate. The U.S. Census Bureau randomly selects about 3 million addresses each year to participate in the survey. You are legally obligated to answer all the questions, as accurately as you can.
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is making rare and fragile medieval books available to everyone, thanks to nearly a million dollars in grants. About 79,000 pages of medieval Islamic and Christian orthodox books are now available, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Best of all, the images are available online for free.
The following announcement was written by Calico Pie:
28th March, 2012. Calico Pie today announced the release of version 5 of Family Historian, one of the world's leading genealogy software products.
"Version 5 is a major step forward for Family Historian", says Simon Orde, managing director of Calico Pie. "We've added a powerful new tool for creating great-looking books & booklets. We've reworked and much improved our support for website generation and for creating family tree CDs and DVDs. We consider ourselves the world-leader for genealogy charts and diagrams, and we've taken that further and added a lot more great charting functionality in version 5. For example, there's a new tool for graphical relationship mapping which shows you in a diagram how any two people are related. We've also greatly improved data entry and data validation. We've added a lot of new features but at the same time worked hard to make the program look better, and be easier and nicer to use than ever.
A cute video is available on YouTube. It is essentially an advertisement for the New York Public Library, but should appeal to all genealogists. You might like to view it at http://youtu.be/xEIO4mWgS2E or click on the image below.
It is impossible for me to read every newspaper and genealogy site in the world. And yet, my goal is find the most interesting genealogy news and happenings and to present them to you everyday.
Can you help?
If you find something interesting that is genealogy-related, can you send it to me? I am interested mostly in technology and in things that are new. I am less interested in someone discovering more ancestors as (hopefully) we are all doing that. I want the unique bits of news: new databases added online, new software released, historical notes of interest, and similar stories. I am especially interested in news from outside North America.
The following is a Plus Edition article, written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
In the March 22, 2012, newsletter, I published an article about the release of the 1940 U.S. Census. I stated that this census would be the first to use cloud computing in order to handle the expected, sudden increase in workload of the servers during the first few days. Millions of genealogists will attempt to access the census images at 9 AM Eastern U.S. time on April 2. In order to handle that huge increased workload, the servers at 1940census.archives.gov will actually be a collection of hundreds of servers in the cloud. (The Plus Edition article is still available at http://eogn.com/wp/?p=19846.)
Feedback from several newsletter readers indicates that not everyone understands what a "cloud" is in the Internet world. I thought I would publish this introduction to cloud computing and also explain how cloud computing is used to provide digital images of census records to millions of online genealogists.
A web site that which once claimed to be the UK’s first social network is changing its focus. Friends Reunited will become a “digital scrapbook” where users can collect their own pictures along with copyrighted photos, through a series of deals with image libraries.
The following announcement was written by Deceased Online:
Approximately 72,000 burial records for the older section of Overleigh Cemetery in the ancient northern English City of Chester have been added to the Deceased Online database.
The records date from 1850 to 1953; records for 1953 to October 2011, the Overleigh ‘New’ Cemetery, are already on www.deceasedonline.com.
The following announcement was written by findmypast.co.uk:
Over a million baptism, marriage and burial records dating back to 1538 now available
First time that images of the original parish records from Westminster go online
Leading UK family history website findmypast.co.uk has today published online for the very first time parish records held by the City of Westminster Archives Centre. The Westminster Collection at findmypast.co.uk comprises fully searchable transcripts and scanned images of the parish registers, some of which are over 400 years old.
R.C. Leavenworth and his employees and partners took more than 200,000 photographs of Lansing, Michigan during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Thousands of the negatives are now wrinkled, buckled, warped, fused together in bricks, deteriorated and deteriorating. They were made using cellulose nitrate and cellulose acetate films — both chemically unstable and the former highly flammable — and stored for years under less-than-ideal conditions.
State Archivist Mark Harvey called the collection “the most complete photographic record of the city.”
The following announcement was written by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration:
National Archives Launches 1940 Census April 2 Online at 1940census.archives.gov Live webcast of Opening Event, 8:30 A.M. EDT
Follow the 1940 Census on Twitter (using hashtag #1940census), Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, and YouTube, and subscribe to our blogs: NARAtions and Prologue: Pieces of History.
In the February 26, 2012 edition of this newsletter, I reported on the successful Who Do You Think You Are? Live! exposition held at the Olympia Centre in London, England. That article is still available at http://goo.gl/Y2wkE. In that article, I wrote, "I don't have the final headcount as I left before the count was made. However, I am guessing it was about the same as last year or maybe a bit less, probably in the range of 12,000 to 14,000 people."
My guess was rather accurate as to numbers, but I was wrong as to the trend. Instead of being a bit less than the previous year, this year's attendance reflected an increase. The show's organizers now report that attendance was 12,798, a 12% increase over the previous year.
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