GeneaNet

The Master Genealogist 7.02 has been released.

Changes:

• Focus Group - Fixed a display issue with the list.
• Exhibit Log - The image was not being saved when the View/Edit Image [Flip] option was used.
• Embedded Citations - The escape character ("\") didn't work.
• Project Explorer - Collapsed list sorting in the Project Explorer was fixed.
• Person View - Adding a name tag caused an error in a few projects.
• Restore - Some v6 projects were not being updated to v7.
• Siblings window - Clicking on a name would produce a C0000005 error under some circumstances.
• Filters - Fixed various issues.
• Exhibit Log - Exhibit output reordering was broken.
• Right-click menu - The right click menu for several memo fields was revised.
• Project Explorer - Sort by ID# wasn't correct after a data set merge.
• Tag Entry - After copying a tag and changing the principal's ID number, an erroneous warning occurred when the tag was saved.
• Tag Entry - The primary state of a tag could be changed when the tag was edited and saved.
• Citation screen - canceling with no changes caused an erroneous prompt.
• Witness Add/Edit screen - Sentence preview failed to refresh after entering an ID# with recalc turned off.
• Project Explorer and Picklists - There was a sorting issue after renumbering individuals when sorting by ID#.
• Tag Type style selection - Some revisions were made to the mechanism of the relationship between the styles selected for the data set, tag types and tags.
• Compressed Pedigree and Ahnentafel: Fixed a problem that occurred when a person ID was more than six digits.

Genota 4.2.0.80 has been released.

Changes:

• Upgraded for Legacy 7 compatability.
• Fixed an issue causing the Notebook Report to fail when the research log entries split across pages.
• Removed the duplicated RENAME menu option in the Notebook Manager.
• Fixed wordwrap problem occurring in the Research Log section of the Notebook Report.
• Corrected an issue causing the Notebook Report to crash when HTML script was embedded in an RTF file.
• Corrected an index conflict occuring in the Reseach List data file.
• Changed the bug reporting process. The Mantis Bug Tracker has been implemented to ensure better control over monitoring errors and/or enhancement requests in Genota. Now when an error is encountered in Genota the error log is transmitted to the Mantis Bug Tracker and the management advsed. All reports submitted by users may be viewed once logged into the Genota web site.

iFamily for Tiger 2.387 has been released.

Changes:

• GEDCOM Import - Added an extra index to improve loading of large GEDCOM files. The time to load a GEDCOM file containing 143,000 people into an iFamily database has been reduced from 33 minutes to 10 minutes - using a 2.8 MHz Core-Duo Intel iMac with 2Gb memory under OS X 10.5. However, on a P4 running OS X 10.4 and only 500Mb memory this same GEDCOM file may take some hours to load! The crucial things for speed when loading very large GEDCOM files are (a) use OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and (b) have at least 1 Gb (preferably 2 Gb) of memory.
• Family Group Sheet - Added an option to include Event Notes.
• Descendants Diagrams - Added an option to include/exclude Adopted and Step children as descendants.
• Move Data Directory - The correct way to move the folder that contains the iFamily data is to use menu option File -> Move Data Directory. In V2.384 additional validation has been added to ensure that the location the iFamilyForTigerData folder has not been invalidated by the user using other methods to relocate this folder.
• People -> Notes Dialog - Added a Family Name filter.
• People -> Relationships Calculator - Added a Print button.
• People -> Relationships Calculator - Added a Family Name filter.

Brother’s Keeper 6.2.75 has been released.

Changes:

• Group sheet, if excluding data for living people and if first person printing has no dates, then check dates for the spouse, parents, and children to see if first person might be living.
• Norway version will print sb. for common law marriage on Descendant report.

Fix:

• GEDCOM import - Increased picture file name length to be maximum of 120 characters long.

Geves 1.3.17 has been released.

New Features:

• Map Preview in place chooser.
• New Reseach Tab and list.
• New Person Page showing all names used by a person.
• New 'alternative names' list, which can be modified in Deluxe Edition.

Improvements:

• Allow rows in Source Documents to be moved up and down.
• Census ages now work for months.
• 'Mark of' fields in English BMD forms.
• Source Origin preview shows source which preview person is involved in by default.
• When searching names, also includes all 'names on source documents'.
• Add an 'assumed' relationship to 1841 census forms.
• Give visitors on census forms a 'visited' event.
• When choosing between people, pick the person on the earliest Source Document.
• Person's date checking on all census/BMD forms.

Bug Fix:

 • Correct child/marriage sort order for person pages and charts.

The Complete Genealogy Reporter 2008.1 build 80526 has been released.

Fixed:

• Improper handling of UTF-8 and Unicode formatted GEDCOM files which previously produced an erroneous "File not a GEDCOM" message.

LongFamilyHistory 1.4.4 has been released.

Fixes:

• Some bugs fixed in advanced search.

Details of crimes, carried out by the likes of Oscar Wilde, the infamous Dr Crippen, suffragettes and Irish terrorists, can be viewed for the first time on the internet, thanks to a significant expansion of the innovative Old Bailey Proceedings Online website.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield, Hertfordshire and The Open University have doubled the size of the existing Old Bailey Proceedings Online 1674-1834 website, expanding its coverage to include details of criminal trials from 1674 to 1913, from just after the Great Fire to just before the Great War.

The website, which provides access to the largest single source of searchable information about "ordinary" British lives and behaviour ever published, details over 197,000 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal between 1674 and 1913.

People from all over the world can visit the site and get a valuable insight into a diverse range of crimes from pick-pocketing and robbery, to abduction and murder. The addition of nineteenth and early twentieth century trials also highlights ‘new’ crimes, such as mothers convicted for neglecting their children, reflecting people’s attitudes at that time in history

MacFamilyTree 5.2 beta 2 has been released.

Changes:

• Virtual Tree: Fixed potential crash.
• Virtual Tree: Fixed distorted person pictures.
• Birthday Report: Only parses dates with a full date now.
• GEDCOM importer: Compatibility improved.

GeneaNet users will need to register to access contact pages and online family trees from Friday, 23 May 2008.

Clicking on a link in the search results list will open a registration form to non-registered users.

Of course, registration is free!

We hope to limit data copying from casual users.

Online family tree url (http://gw.geneanet.org/username) is still available for all, and GeneaNet users can send it to family and friends.

Many thanks for your fidelity!

GeneaNet

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has awarded a Research Grant worth just under £500,000 to Dr Adrian Bell of the ICMA Centre and Professor Anne Curry of the University of Southampton to challenge assumptions about the emergence of professional soldiery between 1369 and 1453.

The project has an innovative methodological approach and will be producing an on-line searchable resource for public use of immense value and interest to genealogists as well as social, political and military historians. The project employs two Research Assistants over three years and also includes one Doctoral Research Studentship - all of whom began work on 1st October 2006. The whole team is working on a jointly authored book, conference papers, and articles.

A pilot project database is now available for searching.

The online database currently holds just under 90,000 service records. These are taken from muster rolls, housed in The National Archives, for the years 1369 - 1453.

A section called 'Soldier of the Month' is featuring sketches of the careers in arms of interesting soldiers, drawing on the evidence provided by the online database.

via Genealogy Reviews Online

GRAMPS 3.0.1 has been released.

Changes:

• Translation updates for de, es, fi, fr, hr, lt, nb, nl, pl, sk, and sv.
• Bug fixes for the book report.
• Various improvements for the Relationship, Familylines and Hourglass graphs.
• Improvements to the narrative web report.
• Many miscellaneous bug fixes.

Cross-Database Search is an exclusive and powerful GeneaNet feature that compares your family tree against the complete GeneaNet database index

You first need to complete the form below to describe your search:

Search criteria

As seen in “Searching your ancestors in the GeneaNet collaborative database: 1-The Index”, you can search the index by surname, place and year.

Display mode

The search result list can be displayed in HTML or text mode. Text mode generates a delimited text file that can be imported in any spreadsheet.

Limit the search to a username

You may narrow the search by entering a username. This is interesting if you want to compare your family tree against a relative one.

Exclude a username

You may narrow the search by adding one or more usernames to the “Exclude a surname” field. This is interesting if you don’t want to compare your file against your relatives’ ones.

Important: Before running the search, save your list of usernames to exclude in the “My GeneaNet : Account : Search Preferences” menu.

You can exclude up to 20 usernames.

Club Privilege subscribers

The basic Cross-Database Search is running through the database index but Club Privilege subscribers may narrow the search to only return the records that fit with the online family trees.


The search results list contains all matches to the specified search and looks like any other GeneaNet search result list.

The “Contact” column gives the link to the user Page Contact so you can access its online family tree if exists.

We hope that the Cross-Database feature will help you find a lot of new ancestors!

Neandertals and modern humans diverged approximately 600,000 years ago and probably did not interbreed, according to a recent analysis of the complete Neandertal mitochondrial genome sequence by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
 
In a talk last night here at the Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Svante Pääbo gave an update on the Neandertal genome project that his group in Leipzig is pursuing in collaboration with Roche’s 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Conn.
 
So far, the researchers have sequenced approximately 70 megabases of Neandertal DNA from three different individuals, the vast majority from a 38,000-year-old male from Vindija, Croatia.
 
From this data, they were able to reconstruct a complete mitochondrial genome, which is 16 kilobases long and was sequenced at 35-fold coverage. At 133 positions, the genome differs from almost all modern humans.
 
Based on a comparison with mitochrondrial DNA from modern human populations, Pääbo concluded that Neandertals and modern humans diverged about 600,000 years ago. According to the data, it is also unlikely that the two populations interbred, although more data from the entire genome will be required to increase the certainty of this.
 
The Neandertal mitochrondrial genome has also enabled the researchers to assess contamination of their data with modern DNA. Pääbo mentioned that about 10 percent of the DNA library they initially sequenced – data they published in late 2006 – consisted of modern human DNA. But over the last two years, they have been guarding against contamination by generating DNA libraries in a clean room and by barcoding the Neandertal DNA.
 
By October of this year, Pääbo said he and his colleagues want to generate approximately 50-fold more, or 3.8 gigabases, of Neandertal sequence data, equivalent to about one-fold coverage of the entire genome.
 
Over the next few years, they hope to increase this coverage to about 12-fold.

From GenomeWeb Daily News

JGen (Joomla Genealogy Database) 0.9.73 has been released.

New:

• Added turkish translation.

iScrapbook 1.6.1 has been released.

Changes:

• Printing of larger scrapbook albums is now much quicker and uses less memory.
• Worked around a problem in Leopard where PDF images would sometimes print low resolution.

Millennia Software announcement:

If you are going to be at the National Genealogical Society Conference this week in Kansas City, Missouri, we invite you to visit the Legacy Family Tree booth where we will be displaying the new features in Legacy Family Tree version 7.0.

In fact, Legacy 7.0 will be available for purchase as a special pre-release edition. You will be the first to try out Legacy 7.0’s new mapping, sourcing, and wall charting features (lots of other new features too - to be announced soon). This special pre-release edition is only available to attendees of the NGS conference.

When will Legacy 7 be available to everyone?

Okay, here’s a little more information than the “soon” answer….For those who purchased Legacy 6.0 from July 1, 2007 to the present, we will begin shipping your upgrades next week. There’s a lot of them to be shipped out, so thank you for your patience. Our hope is to make Legacy 7.0 available from our online store by the beginning of June.

Legacy Charting Pre-Release 7.0.094 has been released.

New:

• Added the ability to display the Prefix and Suffix fields for names.
• Added DPI control for exported file types (50 DPI to 600 DPI).

Fixed:

• The sort order of children now follows Legacy’s sort order.
• Fixed sizing problems with PDF and export file types.
• In some Fan Charts, there was missing information for individuals.
• Fixed some problems with backgrounds and memory leaks. Should run even faster now.
• Fixed some printing issues.

Genea 1.4.1 has been released.

Changes:

• More detailed No-DB-Connection message.
• Implement complete logging.
• Add Location of Marriage.
• Common GUI for all Sub-Projects.
• Exporting Images as GEDCOM.
• Automatically insert Version Number into Release-Webpage-Link.

Fixes:

• When editing a object, the duplicate-number-questions always appears on saving.
• When zooming while creating a family tree, Genea may crash.
• ObjectId not set when linking a MultimediaObject to a new object.
• ObjectId not set when editing person in family tree.
• Restoring a Backup that contains funeral events fails.
• Exception when Individual has multiple birth-events with the same mother.
• Delimiting characters are not escaped properly.

The Complete Genealogy Reporter 2008.1 build 80511 has been released.

Fixed:

• Error relating to the “Report all first names” option which resulted in both first names and the middle initials being show in family tree charts.

MacFamilyTree 5.1.7 has been released.

Changes:

• The integrated search function now supports searching for dates.
• Fixes for the family chart.
• Fixes in the GEDCOM exporter.
• iPhoto Library import fixed.
• Adding new text to charts now works correctly.
• Minor other fixes.

ohmiGene 2.20 has been released.

Changes:

• New picture viewer with media handling (size, luminosity, etc.)
• Fixed a bug where marriage control was not updated when any of some multiple marriage was changed.

You can easily get the list of your GeneaNet accounts:

Close session

Click on the "Close session" link located in the top right corner.



Username request

Click on the "Forgot Password" link.



Enter the email address used during subscription and in a short while you'll receive the requested information.

To delete any of your GeneaNet accounts, log in and go to ' Account : Profile : Unsubscribe'. This will automatically delete all of your online account information from the GeneaNet database.

Cognatio 1.3.2 has been released.

Fix:

• The standard event and attribute types were not initialized properly when creating a new database.

Transcript 2.3.0 build 70 has been released.

Besides fixing a number of bugs the main new features are:

• AutoContrast.
• Special characters dialog.
• Selecting part of the image (which selection can be pasted into the editor or in a separate window).

New features and bugfixes since version 2.2

Note: The French helpfile is not yet complete.

Simple Family Tree 1.31 has been released.

Changes:

• Fixes photo routine to work properly with Unicode characters.

The Complete Genealogy Reporter 2008.1 build 80505 has been released.

Changes:

• All cousin distances are now precisely reported, e.g., “52nd cousin”. (Previously distances greater than 20 were narrated as “distant cousin”.)
• SEX tags which are invalidly specified as “Male” or “Female” are now interpreted as intending “M” or “F” respectively.
• The highest version of the Microsoft MDAC/ADO library installed on the user system is now used instead of version 2.5.

British historians called Tuesday for a public report on the inquiry into 29 forged documents found at the National Archives that falsely accuse Winston Churchill's government of having a secret, cordial relationship with Nazi SS chief Henrich Himmler at the height of World War II.

Eight leading historians signed an open letter urging police to take action against the suspect who faked the documents, which also allege that Churchill ordered the assassination of Himmler to keep the discussions secret.

"That's a blood libel against Churchill and totally untrue," said historian Andrew Roberts, who signed the letter published in the Financial Times.

Mainstream historians reject the assertion about Churchill because there is no evidence to support it, except the faked papers. Himmler was never assassinated; he committed suicide by poisoning himself with cyanide after he was captured by British forces in 1945.

Roberts was joined in the letter by John Keegan, Antony Beevor, Niall Ferguson and other prominent historians, who hoped swift action by authorities would deter anyone else from tainting the trusted archives with more forgeries.

"It's creating false memory syndromes about a very important part of our national story," Roberts said. "If the guy gets away with it, it will be a green light to manufacture evidence. It's been done in a criminal way, and yet the police don't seem very interested in dealing with it."

Prosecutors, who did not release the name of the suspect, said they would not press charges because the person was in poor health.

Read the full story

In an effort to block posthumous rebaptisms by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Catholic dioceses throughout the world have been directed by the Vatican not to give information in parish registers to the Mormons’ Genealogical Society of Utah.

An April 5 letter from the Vatican Congregation for Clergy, obtained by Catholic News Service in late April, asks episcopal conferences to direct all bishops to keep the Latter-day Saints from microfilming and digitizing information contained in those registers.

The order came in light of “grave reservations” expressed in a Jan. 29 letter from the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the clergy congregation’s letter said.

Father James Massa, executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, said the step was taken to prevent the Latter-day Saints from using records — such as baptismal documentation — to posthumously baptize by proxy the ancestors of church members.

Personal Ancestry Writer II v80 has been released.

Changes:

A Descent button has been added to the Pedigree window and a Pedigree button to the Descent window:
• If the person in the first (left-most) button in the Pedigree window has partners, clicking on the Descent button will close the Pedigree window and open the Descent window with that person in the large button, the current partner below, and any children of that couple in the buttons to the right.
• If the person in the large button in the Descent window has parents, clicking on the Pedigree button will close the Descent window and open the Pedigree window with that person in the first button and that person’s ancestors in the buttons to the right.
• And so on indefinitely until you cancel or you click on the person in the first button to make that person the current person.
• Interconnecting the Pedigree and Descent windows in this way will allow you to navigate up and down through a person’s relatives without changing the current person unless you wish to.
• As always, you can see a popup of vital events for any person in the Pedigree or Descent window by holding down the option key and moving the cursor over that person’s button.
A Print Family button has been added to the Descent window:

• If the person in the large button has a partner, clicking on the Print Family button will print a standard family group sheet for the that couple. If that couple has children and any of those children have one or more partners, you can also choose to print family group sheets for those children. You can also choose to print notes following each family group sheet printed.
• To save paper when printing, the Print dialog box in OS X allows you to choose Save as PDF in the PDF popup menu. The resulting PDF file can be opened in Preview or Adobe Reader. When you’re happy with the results, you can print from the PDF. It’s also possible to do something similar in OS 9.
The Pedigree window which is displayed when tagging or writing a lineage has been modified:
• The window’s features have been limited to the selection of the ancestor of the lineage.

Family Tree Maker 2008 Service Pack 3 has been released.

Enhancements/New features:

• Major enhancements in performance.
• Major enhancements in stability.
• Book layout in charts.
• Ability to create saved versions for all charts and reports.
• Ability to save user created templates for charts.
• Ability to apply predefined templates for charts.
• Enhancements to place interactions.
• New Find-and-Replace dialog.
• And much more…

Click Here for a more detailed view of the enhancements and bug fixes included in SP3.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a UK-based not-for-profit organisation with the National Archives and the British Library among the membership, issued a report in which it called for PDF/A to be employed by organisations wanting to "be sure that their documents will be preserved for the long term".

In the DPC's Preserving the Data Explosion: Using PDF report, author Betsy Fanning wrote that "the development of PDF/A for long-term preservation of electronic documents is a logical use of the file format". "When PDF/A is combined with a comprehensive records management program and formally established records policies and procedures, an organisation can be sure that their electronic documents will be preserved," she added.

However, Fanning warned: "While PDF/A may be a suitable file format today for long-term preservation of electronic documents, it should be noted that there may be other file formats introduced in the future that may better serve the needs of an organisation. Therefore, organisations should be continually reviewing the available file formats to ensure they have selected the best format for their purposes."

"This report highlights the challenges we all face in a digital age," said Adrian Brown, head of digital preservation at the National Archives. "Using PDF/A as a standard will help information officers ensure that key business data survives. But it should never be viewed as the Holy Grail. It is merely a tool in the armoury of a well-thought-out records-management policy."

GenSmarts 2.1.1.50 has been released.

Changes:

• Added support for the Mid-Continent Public Library (Kansas City area).
• Fixed bug in “always start maximized” option.
• Improved reasonableness of making suggestions when the dates covered is not known.

The Complete Genealogy Reporter 2008.1 build 80430 has been released.

Fixed:

• Error related to interpretation and conversion of non-Gregorian dates which are (i) expressed as month and year, or year only (i.e., no day number), or (ii) expressed as day and month without a year.