GeneaNet

Transcript 2.2.0 build 65 has been released.

Changes:

• Apply AutoContrast to image.
• Stretch filters for zoomed in/out now saved to ini.
• Added menu items to select which filter you want (previously you could only select it with F12).
• Changed default stretch filters to lanczos / mitchell for zoomed in/out (slower but better quality).
• Resume manually paused project timer when typing option added.
• Added options to delete unused en never used autoreplacement items.
• Added option to reset usage count when changing an autoreplacement item.

A number of amateur sleuths have taken it upon themselves to find names for the graves of the anonymous dead.

One such detective is Todd Matthews, of Tennessee, who began his quest with the grave marker of someone only known as “Tent Girl.”

Through researching forensic records, Internet chat rooms, the use of DNA and other records, he was able to identify this woman who had gone missing 30 years earlier.

But he is not alone. There is a nationwide group of people who have formed the Doe Network, all dedicated to giving names to the unknown dead, and in some cases, helping law enforcement identify missing-person cases.

Read more about this story

The moving story of one of the last survivors of the Titanic can be revealed for the first time after touching letters and documents were discovered after her death.

For 94 years Lillian Asplund refused to speak about the tragedy that claimed the lives of her father and three brothers.

Instead, the spinster kept the final moments of her family locked in her memory and the poignant possessions of her father Carl hidden in a shoebox in her bureau.

It was only after her death aged 99 the box was found along with the collection of Titanic-related items that, pieced together, tell the tragic story of the family's demise.

Among them were notes Mr Asplund had copied from a flyer promoting the benefits of living in California, an American dream that enticed the family to set sail for a new life.

An incredibly rare and water-stained ticket for the luxury liner was also found. Only a handful of Titanic tickets are in existance as most of them sunk with the ship.

The paper documents recovered from his body miraculously survived for 12 days after the disaster because Mr Asplund's lifejacket kept his coat's breast pocket out of the water.

His pocket watch which stopped at 19 minutes past two - the exact time the liner sank - was also found on him. And a heart-rending note written by his grief-stricken mother in which she wrote of how she hoped to see her son again in heaven formed part of the collection.

The stunning archive includes a sad photograph of Lillian, her mother Selma and three-year-old brother Felix, who both survived, at her father's grave in 1912.

The Complete Genealogy Reporter 2008.1 build 80327 has been released.

New:

• The special font formatting sequences for bold, italic, underscore, and superscript may be included in notes within the GEDCOM file. A new “Notes” option specifies whether these to be interpreted for the report. See the help file for details of the formatting control characters.

Legacy Charting Pre-Release 7.0.077 has been released.

New:

• Refresh Chart button. If you add/edit information in the original database (Legacy, FTM, PAF, etc.), just click on the Refresh Chart button and those changes will appear in your chart.

Fixed:

• Fixed page update area in status bar when the user changes paper size.
• Fixed feature to suppress private individuals.
• Fixed “Access violation at address 1B74295A in module “Dao360.dll”.
• Fixed “Out of Range” error in Tips & Updates section.
• Fixed private options [[ ]] in individuals’ names.

Reunion 9.07 has been released.

New features:

• Added support for Google Analytics in web output.
• Added the option to exclude event memo fields from GEDCOM export (Export GEDCOM / Optional Fields).
• Added two new options for reporting marriage in narrative reports (and you may exclude the name of the source person).
• New and improved tooltips. For example, the number of children appears when the mouse hovers over a person’s button, quickbar buttons, overview buttons, etc. and when selecting people in menus, such as the Spouse popup menu, Sibling popup menu, etc.

Changes and fixes:

• Appearance Preferences - added an option to enable/disable the use of colored text for children and siblings in popup menus.
• Charts - fixed a problem in the Orientation window where changing numbers of generations didn’t work properly with “Top to bottom, Butterfly, Waterfall.”
• Charts - fixed a problem that generated an erroneous warning when changing orientation in 2-generation descendant charts.
• Charts - fixed a problem where menu commands Align/Size/Frame would sometimes be disabled when multiple boxes were selected.

• Descendant report with Register outline numbering - fixed a problem where Index cross references for spouses were incorrect.
• dotMac/iDisk publishing - the destination has changed to: web.mac.com rather than homepage.mac.com.
• Edit Person window - fixed a problem when removing a citation from an event/fact if the event/fact contained multiple citations.
• Family card - more than 64 children appear properly.
• Family group sheets - fixed problems with multi-line marriage memos when the destination was printer or print preview.
• Family History report - fixed a problem where events with a place but no date were not reported.
• Fan charts - fixed a problem when moving fan charts between platforms.
• Find Anything - fixed a problem with calculation of “Spouse’s Age Difference” when the wife was older than the husband.
• GEDCOM Export - fixed a problem where text in marriage memos denoted as sensitive was not omitted from exported GEDCOM files.
• GEDCOM Export - tweaked the names of GIF and TIF files in the exported GEDCOM file.
• GEDCOM Import - added drag/drop support for Unicode GEDCOM files on Intel Macs.
• GEDCOM Import - fixed a problem when a couple had more than one marriage event.
• Leopard - fixed a cosmetic problem with Sibling and Spouse popup menus creating empty person buttons on the family card.
• Leopard - fixed a problem with the use of certain letter key shortcuts when child/parent lists are displayed on the family card.
• List Window, sorting - improved consistency between fields in the list and fields in the Manual Sort popup menus. Also, allowed sorting on more fields in the Attributes submenu.
• Mailing list report - fixed a cosmetic problem with sticking cursor after the report was created.
• Match/Merge - fixed a problem when comparing birth/death dates within xx years.
• Multimedia - Photoshop files with no extension (in the File Open window) are enabled.
• Multimedia window - first picture dragged and dropped into the thumbnail view will become the preferred picture.
• Multimedia window - fixed a Leopard crash when clicking on comments.
• Opening files - files in the Trash won’t be auto-opened, nor can they be opened using the Recent submenu.
• Pictures - when adding a picture, a new message prompts the user to add the preferred picture to the current view. Also, increased the default size of the preferred picture.
• Soundex - fixed a problem with “Mc” names.
• Source List - fixed a problem with the use of Command-M to mark people linked to a selected source.
• Tags in charts and web pages - fixed a problem where English names were used in the dateFormat tag, regardless of the System Preferences/International settings.
• View Preferences - fixed a problem when deleting all views in order to restore the default views.

Welcome to Planet Earth: Population 0.

This is what our world would look like without people.

The images were created to illustrate what would happen if human life ceased tomorrow, if, for whatever reason, mankind was obliterated.

The question it raises is: how long would the remnants of our civilisation remain?

How much would we leave behind? What would an alien visitor learn about us upon landing on our planet a century or more after we had disappeared from it?

The answer, astonishingly, is: almost nothing.

Within a hundred years most traces of our modern-day lives would be so destroyed by weather, corrosion, earth tremors, surviving animals, insects and bacteria that the monuments and hieroglyphics of ancient civilisations would be better preserved than our buildings and our billions of books and electronic records.

An alien visiting Earth might well believe that the last civilisation on the planet were ancient Egyptians.

The prophetic forecast for the longevity of our 21st-century civilisation is contained in research for a History Channel documentary, Life After People.

And it's not guesswork. The two-hour special uses scientific expertise and understanding of history in order to predict the future.

Principal advisor on the TV programme is a 53-year-old Scot, Gordon Masterton, former president of the Royal Institution of Civil Engineers.

He says: "The lights will start going out around the world almost immediately. The last power will be produced by wind turbines but, after a few weeks, the planet will be plunged into a deep darkness it has not experienced since primitive Man huddled around camp fires."

GRAMPS 3.0.0 has been released.

This release contains many new features and updates, among which:

• Rewrite of the GEDCOM parser.
• Export views to a spreadsheet.
• Formatted notes.
• Multiple notes.
• LDS temple definitions moved to supporting file.
• New database format, using hidden directory, old grdb format deprecated.
• New database manager, allowing create, deletion, renaming, repair and revison control.

New genomics analysis software developed by computer scientists at Stanford appears far more adept than prior methods at unraveling the ancestry of individuals. A new paper describes the HAPAA (HMM-based Analysis of Polymorphisms in Admixed Ancestries) project, which takes its name from “hapa,” the Hawaiian word for someone of mixed ancestry.

Going back 20 generations the software can identify what continent or broad global region an individual’s ancestors were from. But going back about 10 generations the software can be much more precise, making distinctions as fine-grained as the traditional gene pools of nearby population groups—hypothetically differentiating Greek from Italian, or Russian from German.

Specifically what the software does is compare an individual to all those in the International HapMap database to see what distinct spans of genetic snippets, called haploblocks, they share in common.

Ancestral Quest 12.00.14 has been released.

Enhancements:

• Quick Entry - In addition to the Quick Entry that has been available in AQ since version 3, a new “Simple” Quick Entry was added. For some users, this style of Quick Entry may seem easier to use. It only allows for quick entry in the place names. For a user of a PAF database, this is the only quick entry feature which is available.
• Relationships - When using a .aq file, you can show a different relationship for the father and mother. Enhancements were made to the Family view and to several reports to show this split.
• Relationships - Removed the “Smart” handling of relationships. In the past, if you assigned multiple parents to a person, it would default to “Biological” for the first set of parents, then default to “Adopted” for additional parents. Now the default is always “Biological”.
• LDS - When working on a PAF file, adjusted the handling of the “Live LDS Baptism” flag.
• LDS - Added a column to the Name List view and to the Custom Report that will list the LDS ordinance codes.

Bug Fixes:

• Modified Register (and Descendant Web Pages) - If a couple was marked as having no children, this didn’t show in most cases. A sentence now prints.
• Book Reports and Web Pages - If death information for an individual was set to “Dead” or “Deceased”, the sentence describing the death event sometimes did not show properly. This has been fixed.
• DNA - If you added DNA while initially creating a new person who was female, the DNA screen would allow you to enter Y-DNA without warning. The warning is now given.
• Convert from old AQ 2.2 or earlier file (or PAF 2.31 or earlier). If you had used the tags for including contact information in the notes, the notes for that person might not convert.

Genea 1.4 has been released.

Changes:

• Zoom for Family-Tree-Display.
• Remember the last-used image file type.
• Limit for results when searching for people.
• Automatic database update.
• Funeral-event.
• Godfather in baptism, whitness to marriage.
• User-number to people and events.
• Executing person of events (officials, priests, etc.)
• Combined event data input.
• Help function in backup.
• Date-input: switch focus after last digit.

Fixes:

• On the EditPerson-dialog, tab page “comment”, you can not insert a newline into the textbox.
• Add help for InputAssistanceForm.
• Editing a Marriage duplicates it.
• NullReferenceException when editing Course of Life.
• Working Directory Not Set.
• Wrong LANG in GEDCOM export.
• GEDCOM Import not working.
• Redundant DB update after Genea crashes.
• Backup should use Culture-Settings from Genea.

Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE, sponsored by Ancestry.co.uk and supported by The Times Archive, will be held from 2-4 May 2008 in the Grand Hall, Olympia, London.

You’ll have the chance to uncover generations of people who make up your family and find out how they used to live with the help of TV historians, family history experts and celebrity enthusiasts.

Military History LIVE is a showcase of the Nation’s Military History which takes place alongside Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE. For those of you searching for information about ancestors who served in the Army, Navy or Air Force, the show offers you the opportunity to speak directly to organisations which hold vital records that will aid your research.

Archaeology LIVE is a special event dedicated to the interests of Archaeologists. The show, which takes place alongside Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE, is the place to meet leading experts and TV personalities all engaged in this popular historical pursuit! You'll have the chance to come face to face with leading organisations and groups involved in Archaeology including those that are able to examine and identify your finds.

RootsTelevision Wins 4 Tellys Awards.

The Telly Awards “honor the very best local, regional and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the web.”

via Megan’s Roots World

Genota 4.2.0.37 has been released.

Changes:

• Fixed a memory leak reported when trying to update from the Internet under builds 4.2.0.35 and 4.2.0.36. Persons receiving an error dialog when updating to this new build need to cancel from the dialog and continue with the new installation.
• Dropped the MSI installer and have returned to the previously used format as it required the user to uninstall Genota manually before updating to the new build.

MacFamilyTree 5.1 final has been released.

See 5.1 beta release notes at http://geneasofts.geneanet.org/en

ohmiGene 2.12 has been released.

Changes:

• Better GEDCOM media import/export compatibility with many softwares on Windows and Mac platforms.
• Notes are now in RTF file format but are still exported in plain text.

Genota 4.2.0.36 has been released.

Changes:

• Fixed minor bug when updating Source Details introduced in build 4.2.0.35.
• Changed to MSI installer.

You can easily verify if your data have been successfully indexed on the GeneaNet web site.

Remember that indexed data and online family tree are not the same thing!
 

To index your data, select the "Index your data" option from the "My GeneaNet : Online Family Tree : Update" menu.

On the same page, the option "Export your index" generates a text file from your indexed data to import it into any spreadsheet.

Now, here is a trick to easily verify your indexed data:

Go to the "Search by Place" page and just type in your GeneaNet username in the "Limit the search to a username" field. Be sure that all of the other fields are left blank.

The search results list will be displayed as if you were any GeneaNet user.

Gedcom Census 6 has been released.

New features:

• For those who like to attach images to your sources, you no longer have to link them at the end of the process, it can be done at any time.
• As well as creating estimated birth events for those with no birth record, Gedcom Census will now add birth date or birth place to existing birth events if this information is missing.
• 1911 UK census entries can now be made.
• Census country can be quickly changed on the main screen without the need to go into the options screen.
• Added another reference code to the Title Template option for method 1: {KEYPERSON} will fill in the name of the first person selected for the census. This may lead to some users no longer needing to use the “Other Info” field.
• In the narrative description of an individual that is displayed at the bottom of the main screen, Gedcom Census will now estimate the age of the individual for before, after, between, from and to dates as well as the standard dates previously dealt with.

• There is now an option to limit the number of backups of files kept by Gedcom Census to an amount chosen by the user.
• The user now has the choice to select all the individuals first and then enter their ages. Previously it was not possible to select an individual until the previously chosen individual had their age entered.
• There is now an option to cancel the loading of large GEDCOM file.
• Gedcom Census no longer defaults to saving log files and backups to the Gedcom Census installation folder (e.g. C:\Program Files\Gedcom Census). Unless a different location is specified within the options, the log and backup are saved to a folder in the user documents (My Documents) called ‘Gedcom Census Backups and Log’. This should help to ensure that Gedcom Census always works with standard (non admin) user accounts and avoids the virtual store being used in Vista.
• It is now possible to miss out the space after the comma when typing the name of an individual into the “Find Individual” screen.
• If changes have been manually made to the “Full Text” field when using recording method 1, then the user is now warned if these edits will be lost due to a field change following the rules of the full text template.
• Gedcom Census will now remember whether you previously had “Show All” ticked and retain this setting between sessions.
• There are also various changes to the interface throughout the program.

Bug fixes:

• When using auto-text, Gedcom Census would assume that the head of household was married even if there were no marriage events for the individual in question. This has now been fixed.
• If changes were made to the file outside of Gedcom Census then any birth details entered before the reload were lost and had to be re-entered. This has now been fixed so that these birth details are retained.
• Gedcom Census didn’t handle people with names that had text after the surname, e.g. Mary /Smith/ Bloggs.
• Fixed a problem where flag check would cause a crash if a census event had a blank date.

The 1911 Census for England and Wales must remain closed as a whole document until 2012, to protect personally sensitive information. However the Information Commissioner’s decision means that The National Archives must supply some information from the 1911 Census in response to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

In response to great public demand The National Archives is developing an online 1911 Census service, covering most parts of the census and is investigating the possibility of launching this digital service in 2009. Over two kilometres of census records, containing the details of 35 million UK ancestors, will be digitised. This will provide an online service, across most fields of the Census, enabling researchers anywhere in the world to search and download digital scans of images from the census. It is anticipated that it will be available from 2009. The full 1911 census won’t be released until 2012.

GenXML 2.0 has been released.

Changes:

• Some schema validators did not accepted the schema as valid, although it was accepted most validators. This fix eliminates the issue while being 100% compatible with the previous version of the schema.

Transcript 2.2.0 build 64 has been released.

Changes:

• Fixed recognizing of new GPL GhostScript versions.
• Fixed some bug in AutoReplacement handling.

MacFamilyTree 5.1 beta 5 has been released.

Changes:

• New Database Maintenance Feature to adjust date formats and search for not interpretable date formats. Furthermore, you can remove unused entries without any data with one click.
• New age column in the person list view.
• Background of Media Browser can be changed now.
• Many fixes and improvements in the date parser.
• Many other minor features and improvements.
• PayPal buying option.

The 1911 Census must remain closed as a whole document until 2012, to protect personally sensitive information. However the Information Commissioner's decision means that The National Archives must supply some information from the 1911 Census in response to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

In response to great public demand The National Archives is developing an online 1911 Census service, covering most parts of the census, with an external partner; we are actively investigating the possibility of launching this digital service in 2009. Over two kilometres of census records, containing the details of 35 million UK ancestors, will be digitised. This will provide an online service, across most fields of the Census, enabling researchers anywhere in the world to search and download digital scans of images from the census. As with our current online census services it will be both address and name searchable. It is anticipated that it will be available from 2009. It will offer a much cheaper and speedier access to the census returns than the planned FOI service. The full 1911 census won't be released until 2012.

Read more at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/1911census/

Nearly all of today's Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests.

Those women left a particular DNA legacy that persists to today in about about 95 percent of Native Americans, researchers said.

The finding does not mean that only these six women gave rise to the migrants who crossed into North America from Asia in the initial populating of the continent, said study co-author Ugo Perego.

The women lived between 18,000 and 21,000 years ago, though not necessarily at exactly the same time, he said.

The work was published this week by the journal PLoS One. Perego is from the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Salt Lake City and the University of Pavia in Italy.

The six "founding mothers" apparently did not live in Asia because the DNA signatures they left behind aren't found there, Perego said. They probably lived in Beringia, the now-submerged land bridge that stetched to North America, he said.

Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida, an anthropolgist who studies the colonization of the Americas but didn't participate in the new work, said it's not surprising to trace the mitochondrial DNA to six women. "It's an OK number to start with right now," but further work may change it slightly, she said.

That finding doesn't answer the bigger questions of where those women lived, or of how many people left Beringia to colonize the Americas, she said.

Osk 4.21.5 has been released.

Fix:

• Fixed a bug where displaying day of death was incorrect.

Transcript 2.2.0 build 63 has been released.

Changes:

• Fixed a bug in AutoReplacement database handling: after deleting words from the list the index got corrupted.

Genmod 1.6 beta 2 has been released.

New features:

• VFS (Virtual File System).
• Media Management.

Fixes:

• A lot of bugs have been fixed.

JGen (Joomla Genealogy Database) 0.9.68 has been released.

Changes:

• Added option to select import routine when PHP<5, import function from 0.9.62 returned.

MacFamilyTree 5.1 beta 4 has been released.

Changes:

• Improved Family List.
• Media Browser now supports sorting by date or name.
• New Media Pane with Slideshow Function if more than one picture is present.
• Many bug fixes and smaller improvements.

Osk 4.21.4 has been released.

Fix:

• When resizing the main window it could crash the application.

NBC is to make a US version of the hit BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, which will be co-executive produced by Friends star Lisa Kudrow.

Producers are researching the family trees of several interested candidates to see if they have compelling enough backgrounds.

"It's great storytelling, a journey of self-discovery for these celebrities and truly moving and life-changing," the NBC executive vice-president of alternative programming, Craig Plestis, said. "You often see a very different side of them."

Who Do You Think You Are? launched on BBC2 in 2004 and will air its fifth series this year on BBC1.

The fourth series launched last summer with it highest audience ever - 6.8 million viewers - tuning in.

International versions of the format are also in production in Canada and Australia.

AniMap 3.0 has been released.

Changes:

• The SiteFinder database has been expanded by more than 250,000 places including some new categories: Civil Divisions (Townships, for example), mines, parks, islands and more.
• Bigger maps. Maps can now be expanded to 1280×960 resolution which will fill most of the larger screens.
• Now works with Vista.
• The help files have been expanded and cover every aspect of using AniMap in non-technical language. In addition, a PDF file containing an instruction manual is also included which you can read before beginning to use AniMap.

MemoryMiner for Windows 1.1 has been released.

New feature:

• In the File menu, you now have two new menu items, namely Import and Export which let you do just that: import and export selected portions of your library. In both cases, the file format (.mlz) is a single file (which is actually a zip file) containing the database, all the photo files, all the thumbnails, and any attachments. This format is of course compatible with the Mac version of MemoryMiner.

MemoryMiner 1.85 has been released.

New features:

• Keyword Mappings: both the People and Place editors let you specify a keyword, which, if found either embedded in the image file, or in an iPhoto data record, will cause the appropriate person or place to be associated with the newly imported photo.
• Remove People/Place Context Menu: A new context menu now appears in the Contact Sheet views of both the People and Place editors. This makes it easy to remove a person or a place from a selection of photos.

Enhancements:

• Google Maps Address Lookup: Google Maps address lookup will fail silently if the address being looked up contains “control” characters such as the return character. Such characters are now removed. This can happen with addresses imported from Address Book that have multi-line addresses.
• UTF-8 Encoded GEDCOM Files: GEDCOM files saved with UTF-8 text encoding, such as those created by Reunion, are now supported.

• Keyboard Shortcuts: Added consistent keyboard shortcuts for Select All (cmd-a) and Select None (cmd-d) for all 3 Contact Sheet views.
• Added Japanese Help System: The local HTML help system has now been translated into Japanese.
• Auto Life Period Icon Creation: When edting a selection marker on a photo, MemoryMiner looks to see if can create a icon representing the person in question, either “globally” or for the appropriate life period based on the photos’s date and the person’s birth date. When an “unspecified” marker (such as is created when dragging a person onto a seleciton of photos in the contact sheet) the attempt to create a life period icon is deferred until the marker is actually resized. The same applies when dropping a person onto a photo that’s being annotated. The reason for doing this is to help automatically create the best possible icon for a person when one does not already exist.
• Annotation Web Service: A check is now made for requests whose portfolios are deleted on the server when performing a Status Update. In such cases, the local XML record about a remote request is now automatically deleted.

Bug Fixes:

• Conversion of non-JPEG files in Flickr Upload: Image files such as TIFF which have resolution tags > 72 DPI were not being converted to JPEG at ther full “natural size” before being uploaded. This has been fixed.
• Localization Improvements: Numerous typographical and other corrections were made in the various localizations, partiuclarly the German, Japanese and Chinese.
• Refresh after loading KML files: After importing places from a Google KML file, the Places table was not being reloaded. Now it is.
• Streamlined .Mac Upload configuraiton: When selecting .Mac as the host for HTML export, a bug with the testing phase that would sometimes cause “false failures” has been fixed.
• Annotation Web Service Update: Fixed an XML date/time conversion bug affecting the date when an annotation was last made using the web annnotation service.
• Mac/Windows Library Exchange: Fixed problems with selection marker and life period icons not being properly exchanged when moving a library archive file (.mlz) between the Mac and Windows versions of MemoryMiner.

Family Tree Mapper is a tool, now in Beta, which plots your family tree with data from the New Family Search. You can then interact with your family tree to find out more about the places your ancestors lived.

This is a senior capstone project for 7 students in BYU’s Information Technology major. It’s not done yet, but it’s at the point where we wanted to let people who were interested to take a look at it and give feedback.

GenSmarts 2.1.1.44 has been released.

Changes:

• Fixed “via sources” bug relating to RootsMagic files.
• Improved screen positioning on launch.
• Improved handling of poor internet connections.
• Improved reliability of RootsMagic/TMG interface when running on Vista.

Osk 4.21.3 has been released.

Changes:

• Fixes in the Italian translation.

An investment executive who paid more than $20 million for an original, handwritten copy of the Magna Carta presented the ancient paper last week to the media and plans to loan it to the National Archives.

The National Archives considers the manuscript "a milestone in constitutional thought" from the 13th century, and plans to place it on public display later this month.

The original Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Rubenstein's is one of four remaining copies of the document commissioned by the King of England in 1297 to establish basic human rights as part of English law.

A scholar's contemporary translation of the Latin describes the right of the country's people "to be free and to have all its rights fully and its liberties entirely," as among the 37 principles described in the Magna Carta.

The fragile paper is displayed in a sealed viewing box to protect it from damage.

The Magna Carta will be on public display starting March 12 in the West Rotunda Gallery of the National Archives Building.

Personal Ancestry Writer II v78 has been released.

Changes:

• An error has been corrected when including pictures in HTML websites, HTML reports and showing the scrapbook. A broken link occurred when the file name of a picture exceeded 31 characters.
• A new menu item, Tag People with Multiple Partners, has been added to the More Tag menu.

GenealogyJ 2.4.4 has been released.

Changes:

• Report: improvements to GEDCOM Validation.
• User Interface: handle zoom/aspect ratio as zoom-to-fit in EditView.
• GEDCOM: support cardinality.
• GEDCOM: adjustments for conformity / distinguish 5.5 and 5.5.1.
• User Interface: various fixes and adjustments.
• Bugs: various smaller issues fixed.

LongFamilyHistory 1.2.5 has been released.

Changes:

• New main tab page: “All multimedia and text files”.
• New person tab page: “Bio facts” (hair color, height, blood group, diseasis, etc.).
• New “ToDo” page.

TMG Utility 7.0 has been released.

Enhancements:

• Added multiple Research Log fields to the Find and Replace feature.

Changes:

• Changed the Add Married Names feature to support TMG 7.
• Changed the Add Standard Names feature to support TMG 7.
• Changed the Change Name Style feature to support TMG 7.
• Changed the Change Name Parts feature to support TMG 7.
• Changed the Fix Names feature to support TMG 7.
• Changed the Select DNA Descendants feature to force the flag value to be uppercase.
• Changed the Export Data XSLT Stylesheets to create HTML rather than XHTML; this avoids a problem with Firefox (and my XHTML kick was short-lived anyway).

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where styles deleted by Optimize Styles would appear in the menus of Change Name Style and other features if you didn’t close the database or restart TMG Utility.
• Fixed a bug where the Flag Filter was not working in the Set Reference by Name feature.
• Fixed a bug in Optimize Styles that caused an “Unexpected parameter” error in a subsequent use of Change Place Style.
• Fixed a problem where using field labels in Change Name Parts or Change Place Parts caused an error.
• Fixed a problem where a temporary database file was not removed after using the Edit Exhibit Image Map feature.

MacFamilyTree 5.1 beta 3 has been released.

Changes:

• Improved zoom tool.
• Better editing of charts.
• Localization issues fixed.
• Some minor issues fixed.

Jason Salavon crunched mountains of US Census data with code written in C and fed it all into Maya to craft sinuous ribbons representing the population of every US county over the course of more than 200 years.

“There are narratives in this data”, he says. “There are millions of stories about individuals and their travels across the country over time. I wanted to translate those into pure abstraction.”

Jason Salavon crunched mountains of US Census data with code written in C and fed it all into Maya to craft sinuous ribbons representing the population of every US county over the course of more than 200 years.

“There are narratives in this data”, he says. “There are millions of stories about individuals and their travels across the country over time. I wanted to translate those into pure abstraction.”

Did you know that GeneaNet can help you calculate the relationship between two persons from your online family tree?

Select the person who will be the subject of the relationship and click on the "Calculate relationship" link at the bottom of its individual page.

The relationship calculator form will open as below:



Just type in the name of the relative. If needed, just type in the surname and the list of persons with that surname will open to select the individual.

Options are:

- Ancestors/By marriage: find out the closest common ancestor for both the subject and the relative
- Shortest parth: calculate relationship between two persons whatever their lines are

- Long display: display individual names, dates and places
- Include spouses: display individual spouses
- Images: display pictures
- Border: display frames

Relationship calculation:



Shortest path between two persons:



Note: Please check your data if a loop is detected. The relationship calculator can't work if any person of your family tree is its own ancestor!

The Europeana site model was previewed at a conference in Frankfurt last week to holders of digital content, including curators, archivists, publishers and librarians. They were shown how a user would be able to use sophisticated browsing and searching to find paintings, photographs, objects, books, newspapers, archival records, films and sound that have been digitised by Europe’s heritage organisations.

The European Commission, a strong advocate of the European digital library, expressed its support for Europeana.

The demo of Europeana and the video can be seen at http://www.europeana.eu but the full site launches in November 2008.

Legacy Family Tree 7 will soon be released and Legacy Charting will be one of its new features.

All genealogists are invited to take a free test drive of Legacy Charting, the newest wall chart software.

Compatible with Family Tree Maker, Personal Ancestral File (PAF), Legacy Family Tree, RootsMagic, and GEDCOM files, Legacy Charting takes publishing your family tree to a new level.

Key Features:

• Creates 18 different types of family charts.
• All charts are easily customizable.
• Choose the number of generations to be displayed.
• Select the contents of each box.
• Pick from a variety of color themes, including the popular 4-color coding system.
• Select from a variety of beautiful backgrounds and page borders.
• Insert your own pictures and clipart.
• Easily email any chart to family members.
• Export to .pdf, .bmp, .jpg, .png, .tiff, .psd.
• Order a wall chart and have it delivered to your front door.
• Includes a thorough help reference system for easy reference.

Legacy Charting will be one of the new features with the soon-to-be-released Legacy Family Tree version 7, but until June 15, 2008, this special pre-release edition of Legacy Charting is freely available to everyone.

iFamily for Tiger 2.358 has been released.

Changes:

• Story Pane: Added options to include step and adopted relationships for parents and children.
• Spouse Sequencing: When no marriage dates are available or they cannot be approximated by using children’s birth dates, then spouses will be sorted in the chronological order in which the spousal relationships were created by the user.
• Disconnect Person: A spouse relationship may now be disconnected when the parents have children in common and one of the parent-child relationships is Adopted or Foster. If the parents have a child in common via a natural or step relationship then the spouse relationship may not be disconnected.
• Family Pane: In the Family pane of the main window - when a Source is “Active” and a new child is added then the gender field of the new child will be automatically selected without having to re-select it with the left mouse button.

• People Index - Sorting: The People Index may now be sorted by birth and death years by clicking on the column headers in addition to sorting by ID, Family Name and Given Names.
• People Index - CSV Report: Added an options panel so the user can choose which columns of data to generate for the People Index CSV Report.
• People Index - CSV Report: There is a new option to create a single column for spouses separated by commas.
• People Index - CSV Report: Multiple spouses can now be in separate columns instead of using linefeed characters within individual column. Some 3rd party programs had difficulty handling the embedded linefeeds even though they were CSV compliant and could be handled by the majority of CSV parsers. Linefeed characters in the ToDo column have been changed to \n.
• Ancestors and Descendants Diagrams: Added an option to display the default image for each spouse in the Descendants Diagram.
• Ancestors and Descendants Diagrams: Added titles to the Ancestors and Descendants Diagrams.
• People - Family Names: Added a new main menu item called People -> Edit Family Names - to assist when editing and making Family Names more consistent. This function should be used with care - if the name on a birth certificate is misspelt then so be it - that was the person’s registered name - so it should not be changed just for the sake of being consistent and making names look consistent. This function also allows you to uppercase or capitalise all existing Family Names.
• People - Duplicates: Added a new menu option People -> Duplicates and enhanced the functionality that was previously in the People Index for Duplicates. This can still be accessed from the People Index.
• People - Personal Notes: Added a new dialog under menu option People -> Notes where the user can quickly review and edit people’s Notes fields. Allows you to more easily reformat Notes that were imported from a poorly formatted GEDCOM file.
• People - Personal Comments: Added a new dialog under menu option People -> Comments where the user can quickly review and edit people’s Comments fields. Allows you to quickly to remove unwanted data that was dumped in the comments field during import from a Gedcom file.
• People - Relationships Calculator: Added a new dialog under menu option People -> Relationships Calculator. This is an enhanced version of the dialog that was previously only available from the People Index. It displays the shortest path relationship and the consanguinity between two people.
• Sources Report: Added an option for One Line Per Source for the Sources report.
• Sources Report: Added an option to output to RTF or CSV for the Sources report.
• Export BDM to iCal: Added a a kinship spin button in lieu of the “Close Relatives” option.

FotoTagger 2.9 has been released.

Changes:

• More powerful search feature letting you find tags which contain the phrase you are looking for. Search is available both in Organize mode and in Edit mode now. Search in Edit mode marks tag(s) containing desired text, helping see all occurrences.
• Added Comments editing in Edit mode
• Added a feature to Export regions into HTML as separate images (improvement suggested by our users), which is rather handy if you’d like to show valuable pieces of the picture separately from each other.

Legacy Family Tree 6.0.0.190 has been released.

Changes:

• Descendant Book Report - Fixed a problem with dates showing incorrectly.

Explore all of British history, from the Neolithic to the present day, with this easy-to-use interactive timeline. Browse hundreds of key events and discover how the past has shaped the world we live in today.

Neolithic and Bronze Ages, Iron Age, Roman Britain, Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, Norman Britain, Middle Ages, Tudors, Civil War and Revolution, Empire and Sea Power, Victorian Britain, World Wars, Britain: 1945 to Present.

'Take a Journey' when the timeline has loaded to follow themes such as Slavery, Women's Rights and Technology.