GeneaNet

A grieving daughter has told how she stumbled across cemetery workers burying another person in her mother's grave. Carol Stone, 49, desperately halted a funeral with the hearse just yards from the plot after spotting a large funeral party gathered at her mother Joyce's graveside.

Heartbreakingly, she had gone to the cemetery to mark the second anniversary of her mother's death when she spotted the the mix-up.

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A unique combination of young, old, international and innovative people joined together in Salt Lake City to contribute to the ongoing work of family history. Participants at this weekend’s RootsTech Conference had the opportunity to learn about the immense impact technology can have on genealogy.

The staff, who registered participants throughout the conference, estimated more than 4,300 people attended the event — double last year’s number. Twenty-four countries were represented at the conference. This is the largest family history conference in North America.

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Full Featured - Windows - Shareware

The Complete Genealogy Builder 2012 beta build 110208 has been released.

Changes:

• New: Media file specifications may now be exported with relative paths (relative to the path of the exported GEDCOM file).

Other Tools - Windows - Freeware

LTools 1.3.22 has been released.

Changes:

• Advanced SSDI Retrieval – allow users to reorder columns via drag-n-drop. The reorder is not “sticky”.
• Advanced SSDI Retrieval – added tooltip to ZIP Code column.
• Advanced SSDI Retrieval – now logs the reasons for not processing tagged RINs to the internal log.
• All primary dialogs – made sizing and positioning of the windows “sticky”.

Other Tools - Windows - Purchase

GedStar Pro 4.3.2 has been released.

Changes:

• Use file name as photo caption for GEDCOM records without a specific TITL tag.
• New option to ignore invalid GEDCOM lines instead of handling them as a fatal error.

Full Featured - Mac - Purchase

GEDitCOM II 1.7 has been released.

Changes:

• Place Records - this version introduces place records.
• A new "Place Advisor" window gives you access to a large data base of information on places specially designed for genealogy research.
• Book Style Records - this version introduces book style records that help you automate the process of running the Generations LaTeX book.
• New Application Support Folders - GEDitCOM II has always had two folders for application support files.
• Family tree charts were improved to allow portraits to be either to the left of the text or above the text.
• You can sort multimedia objects by their date in individual or family records.
• Two new menu commands let you copy and paste events between records.
• And more...

The following genealogies have been added to GeneaStar:

Steve Young, Steve Forbes, J. A. Folger, Carlton Fisk, John Wooden, Paul Kantner, Frank Wiziarde, Warren Zevon, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hugh Hefner, Mariel Hemingway, Jon Huntsman, Grover Cleveland, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Millard Fillmore, Zachary Taylor, James Polk, George Gallup, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert Frost, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Ralph Fiennes, Calvin Coolidge, Warren G. Harding, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Chester A. Arthur, James Garfield, Rutherford B. Hayes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Timothy Geithner, Rashida Jones, Kevin Bacon, Alec Baldwin, Marisa Tomei and Barbra Streisand.

Thanks Tim Dowling

Full Featured - Windows - Purchase

Brother's Keeper 6.5.6 has been released.

Changes:

• New under File, Utilities, to do a Global sort of marriages. This is useful if you do a gedcom import and the marriages for each person are not in the correct marriage date order.
• Fix error 53 from happening when you are printing reports if some temporary .dta or .dat files were 'read only'
• On the File, Statistics screen, added the number of source citations.
• When doing a Backup, it will create the file BKFileNotFound.txt to show the file names of text or picture or media files that were not found. (Files that are attached to people, but not on the drive where they should have been.)

Full Featured - Windows - Shareware

Agelong Tree 4.3 has been released.

Changes:

• The algorithm of the tree building has been improved.
• The order of the lines have been optimized, owing to which there are less intersections of lines in the tree and trees are more visual.
• In tree type "Direct relatives, brothers, sisters" subtrees of brothers and sisters are shown now too.
• There was added an option "Carry branches to the nearest edge".
• In calendar there have been added a button "Today".
• There has been added Turkish language.

The San Fernando Pioneer Memorial Cemetery in Sylmar seeks knowledgeable volunteer researchers to help solve the mystery of who is actually buried at the cemetery.

The call for volunteers comes after a scientific study using ground-penetrating radar revealed 214 gravesites, which conflicts with an existing roster of 600-plus burials at the cemetery between 1874 and 1939.

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The National Archives is supplying digital data from its catalogue to an international partnership of historians, archivists and computer scientists to help make historical documents more accessible.

The Charter Excavator (ChartEx) project will use technologies and data management techniques typically used in the sciences to provide historical researchers with new ways to explore medieval and early modern documents relating to the buying and selling of property in England and Wales.

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The secrets from a vault of moldy documents long covered in bat and rat droppings could soon help to put former top Guatemalan officials behind bars, years after the country's brutal civil war ended in 1996.

Clues found in the millions of police documents have lifted a lid on government repression during the 36-year war, and provided enough evidence to start sending cases to trial.

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A US presidential historian has admitted stealing dozens of historical documents including letters signed by George Washington, Sir Isaac Newton and Marie Antoinette. Barry Landau, 63, admitted he and an assistant, 24-year-old assistant Jason Savedoff, swiped items from museums across the US, and sold selected documents for profit.

The pair face up to five years in prison for their conspiracy and 10 years for the theft. In Landau's New York apartment, authorities uncovered over 4,000 items traced as being stolen from libraries and museums Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut.

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A woman thought to be the world's last known surviving service member of World War I has died aged 110. Florence Green, from King's Lynn, Norfolk, served as a mess steward at RAF bases in Marham and Narborough.

She died in her sleep on Saturday night at Briar House care home, King's Lynn. Mrs Green had been due to celebrate her 111th birthday on 19 February. The world's last known combat veteran of World War I, Briton Claude Choules, died in Australia aged 110 in May 2011.

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Web Publishing - Windows, Mac, Linux - Purchase

The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding 9 has been released.

New & Improved:

• Look and Feel: Most page elements have been restyled for a more modern appearance.
• Templates: Three new templates have been added, and several of the older ones have been updated.
• Speed: The introduction of "image sprites" and other techniques should allow most pages to load significantly faster.
• Sharing: Social media icons will now allow visitors to your site to more easily "spread the word" (can be deactivated).
• Timeline: Several improvements to this page will make it an interesting destination for each person in your database.
• Google Maps: TNG is now using the latest Google maps engine (API 3). A developer key is no longer required.
• Geocoding: New places are now automatically geocoded with latitude and longitude info, and existing places can be geocoded in large batches.
• Rich Editing: Histories and other elements can now be composed in an inline "WYSIWYG" content editor.
• Media Sorting: New tools make it easier to organize your images and other media.
• Citations: Sources can now be created from the same screen where you cite them, and a "Copy Last" button allows you to easily re-cite the source you used most recently.
• Living & Private: New user rights allow you to distinguish access rights to these two groups of people.
• Mod Manager: Several upgrades make it a more intuitive process to add or remove third-party customizations.

Technology has allowed the Southington Library to digitize its entire newspaper collection. Now people anywhere can view online the black-and-white pages that date back to the 1800s.

More than a year ago, library administrators decided it would be a good idea to put the library's microfilm collection on the Internet. With help from Southington's Friends of the Library, $10,000 was provided for the project.

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When your society has inhabited a small, remote island for countless generations and boasts a population of only 300,000, the odds of having sex with a relative are significant. Luckily, Icelanders now have a handy tool to avoid family-sex.

Íslendingabók—meaning "book of Icelanders"—is an online incest avoidance search engine. Plug in your name and that of a potential mate, and the site searches a genealogical database to see how closely you're related.

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The National Archives of Ireland have just given their website, nationalarchives.ie, a welcome facelift. The new design is a model of clarity: easier to read, more intuitive to navigate, and with expanded guides to collections, digital resources and genealogy.

However, the real meat and potatoes of any archival website is the online catalogue. Even where entries consist only of record descriptions and titles, rather than actual records, a database catalogue gives users the power to search much more widely and more precisely.

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The site of a Maryland plantation which is renowned by local historians for its connection to Black history and to the Civil War has lost its historical designation and is on its way to becoming an 85-store outlet mall, after an early January vote by the Prince George’s County Historic Preservation Commission.

Salubria is the name of a Maryland plantation, where in 1834, a 14-year-old slave girl—possibly influenced by Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in South Hampton, Va., in 1831—poisoned her master’s children and was later sentenced to death.

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