Rowling was born on July 31, 1965 to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (née Volant), in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Bristol.Her mother Anne was half-French, half-Scottish. Her mother's maternal grandfather, Dr Dugald Campbell, was born in Lamlash on the Isle of Arran. Her mother's paternal grandfather, Louis Volant, was awarded the Croix de Guerre for exceptional bravery in defending the village of Courcelles-le-Comte during the First World War.
J. K. Rowling's Family Tree
Vandals toppled eight tombstones, including one marking the grave of one of the area’s earliest settlers, in Belle Isle Cemetery in Camillus.
A search for human remains is being carried out on the site where a World War II Spitfire crashed almost 70 years ago. The RAF Spitfire crashed in the Borders shortly after taking off from Drem air base on a training flight on January 16, 1943.
The founder of Singapore is Sir Stamford Raffles but do people know who their own ancestors are? A project has been initiated to build a database of the history of Singapore families after the Genealogy Society Singapore (GSS) was launched on Saturday.
Library and Archives Canada has compiled the first-ever master list of how well its massive collection is holding up as it prepares for a major move next year of thousands of pieces of Canadian history.
President Obama’s biography — son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.
Swank was born on July 30, 1974 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her mother, Judy Kay (née Clough), was a secretary and dancer, and her father, Stephen Michael Swank, was an officer in the Air National Guard and later a traveling salesman.
If you have a Facebook account, you can now easily and quickly sign in to GeneaNet with the 'Connect with Facebook' button.
The National Archives and Records Administration today announced a fall 2012 opening of the new location for the National Archives at New York City—the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at One Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan.
Van Dyke was born on July 27, 1931 in Danville, Illinois, to Loren (nickname “Cookie”) and Hazel (née McCord) Van Dyke.
Today, The Genographic Project officially announced the launch of their new Geno 2.0 project, a significant update to the type and quantity of genetic information that will be collected and analyzed by The Genographic Project.
Jagger was born on July 26, 1943 into a middle class family at Livingstone Hospital, in Dartford, Kent, England. His father, Basil Fanshawe ("Joe") Jagger (13 April 1913 – 11 November 2006), and his grandfather David Ernest Jagger were both teachers.
A rare accounting document, half-concealed beneath a coat of arms design, has revealed the activities of Italian bankers working in early 15th century London, decades before the capital became a financial powerhouse. The discovery was made by economic historians at Queen Mary, University of London.
Frank Oliver Wiziarde was born on July 25, 1916 in Westmoreland, Kansas, USA.
Hollywood-style huge letters now mark the site of the new multi-million-pound Battle of Bannockburn visitor centre. The four-foot-tall white letters were unveiled yesterday. The National Trust for Scotland said branding at the centre on the site of Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English indicated it would be a “world-class, Hollywood-calibre visitor attraction”.
Amelia Mary Earhart, daughter of Samuel "Edwin" Stanton Earhart (March 28, 1867) and Amelia "Amy" Otis Earhart (1869–1962), was born in Atchison, Kansas, in the home of her maternal grandfather, Alfred Gideon Otis (1827–1912), a former federal judge, president of the Atchison Savings Bank and a leading citizen in Atchison.
As the expedition to Nikumaroro nears an end, hopes to identify pieces of Amelia Earhart's plane are waning.
Generations have passed in the Wynn family without anyone knowing whatever happened to Uncle Jack. John 'Jack' Wynn was a labourer from West Maitland in NSW, a single man who went off to war in 1915 and like so many others, never returned.
Think of it as an episode of "History Detectives" playing out right here in Winston-Salem. Each Saturday morning for nearly three years, a small group of volunteers has met at the Happy Hill Cemetery to reclaim long-forgotten graves from decades of neglect.
National records at the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) continue to deteriorate because of poor facilities.
At high noon on a recent summer day as a gentle breeze helped cool the sweltering temperatures beneath the massive Pringle Tree, a local couple exchanged vows in a unique ceremony.
The Old Log Church Cemetery dates back to at least 1875, when land was deeded for the cemetery and the Methodist Episcopal Church, or Old Log Church, which stood on the site.
The new 
A deadly dessert lay at the center of a World War II plot to assassinate Britain's prime minister. Nazi agents hoped to kill Sir Winston Churchill with exploding chocolate bars, according to a secret wartime letter revealed recently, the Daily Mail reported.
These stunning panoramas, taken between 1901 and 1913 and curated by the Library of Congress, show the city as dusk fell on the New York built before the Civil War.
The first Victoria Cross awarded to a private in World War I has sold for £276,000 at auction. The medal, awarded to Pte Sidney Godley, of East Grinstead, West Sussex, was expected to fetch up to £180,000.
Digital copies of photographs, theatre play scripts and posters, songs and newspapers are among the newly catalogued Collections relating to Gypsy/Roma archives in Bulgaria, now available on the EAP webpages.
A cemetery mix up has a local family filing suit! That’s after another woman was found buried in their mother’s pre-paid plot at the Star of David Memorial Gardens Cemetery in North Lauderdale.
Archaeologists are convinced they've unearthed the secret behind the world's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. Buried beneath the floor of a convent in Florence, Italy they've found a skeleton they believe belonged to Lisa Gherardini, the model who posed for Leonardo's da Vinci's mysterious masterpiece.
A tiny northeastern Ohio cemetery containing the unearthed headstones of 19th century Mormon settlers may grow if officials find more of the grave markers on the site of a recently closed school.
To the untrained eye, the screen looks like random static. But Bob Perry points to a white blip that could be a coffin. And a series of impressions at the top of the monitor may be headstones.
When Fonda and Paul Smith moved to a house near Centralia in the winter of 1988, they were looking forward to living in a place with more trees than people. That first spring in their new home, they walked along a small trail behind the house and discovered they had more company than they'd realized.
Even in France, one of the most brazen collaborations between authorities and the Nazis during World War II is unknown to many in the younger generation.
It is hardly racy by today’s standards but this skimpy lingerie has certainly shocked historians. The lace and linen undergarments date back to hundreds of years before women’s underwear was thought to exist.
Historic headstones in Limerick’s oldest graveyard have been damaged over the weekend, with the culprits causing up to €50,000 worth of damage.
Decades of 19th century Nova Scotia history has been given the online treatment at the Nova Scotia Archives. History buffs can now access two early newspapers, the Acadian Recorder and the Liverpool Transcript, electronically by the click of a button.
Seven institutions managing Dutch heritage have joined forces to provide a representative picture of the main political, cultural and historical posters in the Netherlands from 1870 to the present.
Superstar Annie Lennox could be set to discover her family history on a popular TV show, the Evening Express can reveal today. It’s believed Aberdeen-born singer Annie Lennox is set to appear in a new episode of BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are?
Cathy Tyree was on the hunt for an old couch when she stumbled across something incredible at an antique shop in Richmond, Va. Tyree had been in the store for only 15 minutes when she discovered a lost picture of her deceased father among the glassware, furniture and old books.
In a development described by music experts as "a bombshell in the world of Baroque opera", a new version of Vivaldi's opera Orlando Furioso has been discovered, 270 years after his death.
There is a profound moment in Tom Murphy’s play ‘Famine” where John Connor, the Irish tenant farmer, pulls up the potato stalk by the root to see if the blight is back.
Tracing your family tree is easier than ever, thanks to personal computers and the Internet, but it’s still not as easy as TV shows and commercials for genealogical organizations lead you to believe.
Rob Milson always knew his great-grandfather had abandoned his wife and young children. Turns out Lewis Davis was more of a scoundrel than that, spending four years in a Boston jail for counterfeiting — printing Canadian money in Boston and shipping it north to a gang circulating bogus bills in Nova Scotia in 1899.
Covington muralist Andrew Sabori, the son of Sicilian and Spanish immigrants, went to Ellis Island one day in 2003 to find out more about his own heritage. Instead, he came away obsessed with a monumental mural that once greeted newcomers to these shores, but had been destroyed by storms.
Williams was born July 21, 1951, in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Laura (née Smith, 1922–2001), was a former model from New Orleans, Louisiana. His father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams (September 10, 1906 – October 18, 1987) was a senior executive at Lincoln-Mercury Motorship in charge of the Midwest area.
You can now download the latest original GEDCOM file you have imported into GeneaNet.
Today's post has been written by Celina Tuozzo, the project holder for EAP375 The transition from a traditional to a modern society: recovering Argentinean and Latin Americian history through an emblematic publishing company:
More than 200 descendants of a fugitive slave will be reuniting in Hamilton this weekend. They return to the city where their family first gained freedom.
North and South America were first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia rather than just a single migration, say researchers who have studied the whole genomes of Native Americans in South America and Canada.
The Norway Historical Society has received an original Civil War document that curator Charles Longley says demonstrates the charitable nature of the townspeople. “It's an example of how the town has always pulled together over the years,” said Longley.
India has paid US$1.1mil to buy a collection of letters, papers and photographs relating to Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi, preventing their sale at a planned auction in London.
The rain that fell on Arlington National Cemetery on Monday did not wash away the excitement and gratitude of hundreds of volunteers who worked to beautify the solemn resting place of fallen soldiers.
In 2001, three short years after the Good Friday agreement had seemingly drawn the curtain on the violent political conflict in the north of Ireland, the Belfast Project took its first breath.
Archaeologists have made a landmark discovery that could help answer the question that has puzzled Irish historians for over 200 years. Could an invasion of Ireland by Napoleon's French forces have succeeded and triggered Irish independence more than century earlier than it was actually won?
The man who has helped safeguard many of Colorado’s most historical documents for nearly a half century has retired from state government. State Archivist Terry Ketelsen, who had worked for the state for 45 years, retired last week at the age of 67.
The frozen remains of three brothers who went missing 86 years ago in the Swiss Alps have been discovered by two British climbers. The pair stumbled across the siblings' skulls, bones, boots, climbing equipment, binoculars and a leather purse containing nine Swiss Francs while in the Valais region of Switzerland.
A rare 17th-century Latin American document that was "lost" for nearly a century resurfaced earlier this year. The kicker: It was right where it should have been all along -- in the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).
Peter Konieczny and Sandra Sadowski, future-minded historians whose websites have attracted audiences from 170 countries and a social media following of more than 50,000, have launched www.thewarof1812.net to spread the word about a conflict many Canadians know virtually nothing about.
He likes it out here because it’s quiet, serene, just him and 6,000 tombstones and a curious breeze that never sways the trees. He passes through the cemetery methodically, pausing at each stone. This one reads “ANDER-SON. Boyd and Ruth.”
A man who urinated on a war memorial plaque and scratched obscene words on to a pavement in South Gloucestershire has been jailed. John Rocky Ayres, 34, was charged with desecrating the World War I monument in Mangotsfield on 26 April.
Adolf Hitler personally spared a Jewish man who served as his commander during World War I from persecution or deportation, according to a letter recently uncovered by a German newspaper.
The remains of 36 British Spitfire aircraft, which were secretly buried during the World War II in what was then Burma to prevent them from being seized by the Japanese, have been discovered in the country.
The gravestones of 40 German soldiers from World War I have been desecrated at a military cemetery in the Ardennes region of northern France, the interior ministry said Saturday.
Borgnine has died Sunday at age 95.
Linda Ronstadt was born on July 15, 1946, in Tucson, Arizona, to Gilbert Ronstadt (1911–1995), a prosperous machinery merchant who ran the F. Ronstadt Co., and Ruth Mary Copeman Ronstadt (1917–1982), a homemaker.
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Over 700 digitised directories covering most of Scotland and dating from 1773 to 1911 are now available on the National Library of Scotland' website.
The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum launches its new website! The website, designed by Viderity, Inc. and built by their sub-contractors at Ariesnet, utilizes the SiteCore Content Management System, which allows users to upload, edit, and publish content in an efficient manner.
When French soldiers and administrators left Algeria after more than a century of colonial rule, they did not go empty-handed. They took historical artefacts, books and maps, a national heritage that still sits in French libraries and archives today and which Algeria says its former colonial master should return.
As part of its attempt to digitalise world history and culture, Google has struck a deal with the Italian government to post 30,000 Italian newsreels and documentaries from the 20th century online, many of which glorify Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship.
Spanish police recovered on Wednesday a priceless 12th-century religious manuscript known as the Codex Calixtinus, which was stolen from a cathedral last year. The find came a day after four suspects were arrested in connection with the theft, the Interior Ministry said.
The American continent was "christened" by the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. A previously unknown variant of the famous world map from the mapmaker's workshop has unexpectedly turned up in the collections in the University Library in Munich.
The private papers of one of Scottish history's most controversial political figures have been saved for the nation. The Melville papers - which include the documents of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville - contain about 11,000 records which span 150 years.
Olivia Cousins can trace her family in the United States to a soldier who joined the rebelling colonists when he was just 17. But when a friend suggested she join the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization whose members can prove they are related to someone who aided the rebels in 1776, Dr. Cousins nearly laughed.
A priceless hoard of Victorian rubbish – including champagne bottles, tennis balls, sports shoes, bowler hats, medicine jars, clay pipes and tobacco tins – has been discovered bricked up under steps leading to the imposing courtyard at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich.
On the 75th anniversary of her disappearance, an expedition heads out to prove once and for all that Earhart landed and perished on a remote island.
Horse-drawn carriages parade down a quaint and unpaved Government Street in downtown Victoria. Fishing canoes rest undisturbed on the marshy banks of the Red River in Winnipeg. A sleepy, muddy King Street West sits empty in downtown Toronto.
The National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (Narssa) has launched a programme aimed at raising public awareness of its role.
Academics last night accused the Catholic Church of "mis-management and indifference" after staff shortages forced the closure of the Scottish Catholic Archives, in the latest blow to one of the country's most prized historical resources.
The only child of Helen Lita (née Westergaard) and Frederick Robert Morrison, Leigh was born as Jeanette Helen Morrison on July 6, 1927, in Merced, California, and grew up in Stockton, California.
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