Benny on March 9th, 2010

 ’Ancestors’ magazine will be discontinued and the last publication will be the April issue (no 94), available from Thursday 25 March.
via Changes to magazine publishing at The National Archives | The National Archives.

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Benny on March 9th, 2010

From Tuesday 6 April 2010 the eight separate fees currently charged by the General Register Office GRO for ordering a certificate will be reduced to two – one for standard orders and one for the priority service. 
read more at  IPS – General Register Office introduces new charges.

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Benny on March 2nd, 2010

“Genealogy is, depending on who you consult, either the fastest growing hobby in the U.S., the most popular pastime in the U.S., or just so hot right now.”
read more at Why are Americans Mad about Genealogy?: The Book Bench : The New Yorker.
It is surprising how many people do not realise how popular genealogy is even [...]

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Benny on February 26th, 2010

Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource, proudly announces it has teamed up with NBC as sponsor of the upcoming “Who Do You Think You Are?” television series in the USA.   Ancestry.com provided important research for the show, including tracing the roots of the seven celebrities featured.
read more @ Ancestry.com – Press Releases.

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Benny on February 26th, 2010

The Alien Arrivals Collection documents the arrival of more than 610,000 immigrants into the UK between the late 18th and early 20th centuries.   The collection includes some of the earliest surviving records of immigrants recorded under the Aliens Act 1793.  The records go online for the first time at Ancestry.co.uk
see full story @ Trace your immigrant ancestry [...]

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Benny on February 2nd, 2010

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 [...]

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Benny on December 16th, 2009

Ancestry.com claim that President Barack Obama and billionaire financial investor Warren Buffett are actually related. The claim to have determined that the men are 7th cousins three times removed related through a 17th-century Frenchman.
Read The Full Story

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Benny on November 29th, 2009

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott is moved to tears when he is given evidence his three times great-grandfather fathered children with his own daughter. This fact is revealed as part of the BBC Wales program 'Coming Home' when he returns to Chirk, in the county of Wrexham, to research his Welsh roots.
Read [...]

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Benny on November 29th, 2009

The earliest date for Scotland's next census is Sunday 27 March 2011 and the the Scottish Parliament has been asked to consider the draft Census (Scotland) Order.
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 [...]

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Benny on November 11th, 2009

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

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Benny on November 9th, 2009

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.

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Benny on November 7th, 2009

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.

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Benny on November 6th, 2009

Apparently, the earliest adult milk drinkers came from central Europe and not from the sun-starved Scandinavian regions. Northern Europeans, unlike more than half the world’ s populations are highly lactose tolerant.

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Benny on November 5th, 2009

Records from the General Register Office: Miscellaneous Foreign Returns, 1831-1964 (RG 32) have been added to the online service at BMD Registers. Searching the records is free, but there is a charge to download images of the original documents.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/stories/381.htm

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Benny on November 5th, 2009

The National Archives, in conjunction with Ancestry.co.uk, has now made the entire collection of British Army World War One Service Records, some 2 million of them, available online.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/stories/382.htm

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Calling on all Americans to “know their family history,” U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, M.D., M.P.H., today unveiled an updated version of a computerized tool designed to help families gather their health information

Continue reading about U.S. Surgeon General Urges Americans To Know Their Family Health History – PRESS RELEASE