Not content with being the centre of internet genealogy research, being the home of the useful Family Search website – http://www.familysearch.org/, Utah looks set to help genealogists and other lay people understand a bit more about genetics. Two Web sites created at the University of Utah were awarded the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education for “providing an excellent source of new material while educating a hugely diverse audience of users.” http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/ uses interactive animations to explain genetics to the un-initiated.
Next year there will be 12,000 people aged 100 or over in the UK. In 10 years time this will have nearly doubled to 22,000. Read Full Story here
DyNAstyBlog wishes everyone a wonderful Christmas and a happy new year.
I finally got round to reading Professor Bryan Sykes’ book “The Seven Daughters of Eve”. Professor Sykes is a leading world authority on DNA and human evolution. If you have an interest in DNA and how genetics affects family history you must read this book. In my opinion, it has, by far, the best layman’s description of what mitochondria is, the tiny structures within each cell, which are passed on purely down the maternal line. He briefly touches on the Y-chromosome only in so far as it backs up the maternal evidence. Amazon readers have given the book four stars. My personal verdict would be four stars.
Be warned, the book does touch on his famous ‘Ice-man’ case and his work with the Polynesians but it is really geared to the European daughters of Eve. Readers in the US, may still be interested especially if you are of European descent.
The census will ask 14 household questions and up to 35 questions for each individual, which helps to decide how billions of pounds worth of future public services are planned.
Thousands of marriages between 1795 to 1895 carried out in Gretna Green (Scotland) are set to be published online by Ancestry.co.uk. This will help some genealogists in finding records of marriages that may have seemed lost forever. Gretna Green became the eloping capital of British Isles after Marriage Act of 1754 and was not immune to some controversy.
Mr Etchells, the Wakefield man behind the early release of the 1911 census for England and Wales, is appealing to the Information Commissioner under the Freedom of Information Act to unlock details from the 1939 National Registration of the UK – an emergency, census-like survey of the country at the beginning of the war. These records will be useful due to the fact that after the 1921 census will be the last census records fro another 40 years! The 1931 census was destroyed in a fire and there was no survey taken in 1941 because of the war.
I took up Genealogy mainly to try and find living releatives on my father’s side but in the course of doing so have also covered a lot of family history. In the course of some four or five years, I have found just one person who unfortunately does not seem prepared to communicate. Challenges like Mr Etchells’ will help me find new family members.
Of course, the Wakefield emphersis is deliberate. I wonder if our families are connected 
. Let’s hope the Commissioner is kind and gives genealogists a nice Christmas present.
The National Archives has made 99,000 RAF officers’ service records available online for the first time. These records are easily searchable by first name, last name and date of birth, and were previously only accessible to visitors at the Kew site. You can view and download records via the DocumentsOnline service.
More details from http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/stories/385.htm
Gale, part of Cengage Learning, along with The British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), have made nineteenth-century British newspapers available on the internet. The database, known as British Newspapers, 1800-1900 gives users access to over two million newspaper pages from 49 different national and regional newspapers from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Silverback female gorillas use sex as a tactic to thwart their rivals with even pregnant apes courting their male to stop other females conceiving. Diane Doran-Sheehy at Stony Brook University in New York says this kind of competitive behaviour may even help explain how humans evolved into a mostly monogamous species. Read the rest of this entry »