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GeneaNet : Community : Genealogy Blog Saturday Nov 21, 2009

Genealogy Blog 


20 November 2009

WWII Bomber Pilot's Victoria Cross Fetches Record Price

A Victoria Cross awarded to a 21-year-old World War II bomber pilot has sold at auction for £335,000.

The VC, which was presented to Flight Lieutenant Bill Reid in 1944 by King George VI, was bought by an anonymous bidder, setting a new record price.

Flt Lt Reid, from Crieff in Perthshire, was given the VC for his part in a bombing raid on Germany in 1943.

He flew his Lancaster bomber 200 miles towards its target over Düsseldorf despite being wounded in two attacks.

Source & Full Story

17 November 2009

Digging Into the Science of That Old-Book Smell

If you have torn yourself away from the virtual library that is the Internet long enough to visit a real library, you know that the smell of old books — musty, slightly acidic, even grassy — is instantly recognizable. But is it quantifiable? And if so, might old-book odor prove useful to librarians and conservators charged with preserving collections?

Matija Strlic, a researcher with the Center for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, thinks it might. With colleagues in Slovenia and with the assistance of the National Archives of the Netherlands, he has published proof-of-concept research that shows that it is possible to understand both the composition and condition of old paper by analyzing the volatile organic compounds they emit.

Source & Full Story

13 November 2009

World’s Oldest Woman Lives In Turkey’s Diyarbakır

Halim Solmaz, a resident of Diyarbakır’s Beşiri district, is purportedly 125 years old, which if true would make her the oldest known person on the face of the earth.

İrfan Ertaş, the head of the local birth registry directorate, confirms the record of Solmaz’s age, saying: “According to our records Halim Solmaz was born in 1884 and is still alive. She lives in [Beşiri’s] Bismil [neighborhood].” Solmaz’s identification card says she was born on July 1, 1884, and according to reports she had seven children (four sons and three daughters) and is grandmother to 54 and great-grandmother to 150.

Source & Full Story

9 November 2009

Four US Veterans Receive Legion Of Honor For Service During World War II

Four proud old men gathered yesterday at Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum to receive France's highest award, the Legion of Honor, for helping to liberate that country from the Nazis 65 years ago.

Felix Cistolo, 88, of Ellwood City; Martin Tougher, 87, of Forest Hills; Francis Culotta, 91, of Whitehall; and Ross DiMarco, 87, of Uniontown; were ordinary young men caught up in the greatest maelstrom of the 20th century.

Each rose to the occasion, advancing field by field and house by house across the French countryside, forcing the Germans back to the Fatherland and destroying Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich.

Source & Full Story

6 November 2009

UK Kids Think Hitler 'Was German Football Coach'

One in 20 British children think Adolf Hitler was Germany's national football coach, while six percent believe the Holocaust was a celebration at the end of World War II, according to a new poll.

One in five also mixed up Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels with Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who wrote a diary of her time hiding from the Nazis in an attic.

The results of the multiple choice poll, published by a war veterans' charity, reveal that while a majority of children have basic knowledge about the two world wars, a significant minority have no clue.

The survey of 2,000 children was published ahead of Remembrance Day on November 11, when many western nations celebrate the signing of the armistice that ended World War I.

Source & Full Story

4 November 2009

Family Name To Be Preserved At Former St Edmond's Hospital Site In Northampton, England

A room in the former St Edmond's Hospital site will be named after the great-grandfather of a woman from Northampton who has desperately tried to keep her family name alive.

Jenny Cotton-Howells, aged 47, of Abington, Northampton, has won the recognition for George Cotton, a Northampton surgeon in the 18th century.

He helped many people at the Northampton Union Workhouse, the former St Edmond's Hospital site in Wellingborough Road, and was known to not eat until the poor had eaten first.

The Cotton name has been passed down through generations. Jenny's father was also George Cotton.

Source & Full Story

3 November 2009

ITV's Sale Of Friends Reunited Could Breach Competition Law

ITV was told today that it might not be allowed to sell Friends Reunited, even for a £145 million loss.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) ruled that ITV’s attempt to sell Friends for £25 million to the owner of two genealogy sites could breach competition law.

ITV must now convince the Competition Commission to allow it to sell off Friends, which the broadcaster bought for £170 million and once hoped would make a viable British competitor to Facebook before its profits collapsed. Friends’ most successful property is its Genes Reunited genealogy site, but because Brightsolid, the prospective buyer, owns FindMyPast.com and 1911 Census.com the OFT is worried about the reduction in the number of players in that sector.

Source & Full Story

29 October 2009

Family Welcomes Home Remains Of WWII Airman In Ontario, California

For two decades after her son's bomber went down in the Pacific Ocean during World War II, Vella Stinson faithfully wrote the U.S. government twice a month to ask if his body had been found — or if anyone was looking.

The mother of six strapping boys went to her grave without the answer that has finally reached her two surviving sons 65 years later: the remains of Sgt. Robert Stinson are coming home.

Military divers recovered several pieces of leg bone from the wreckage of a B-24J Liberator bomber found at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of the island nation of Palau. DNA testing showed the femur fragments belonged to the 24-year-old flight engineer who died in combat on Sept. 1, 1944.

Source & Full Story

6 October 2009

Vote for GeneaNet Genealogy Blog for Family Tree Magazine’s 40 Best GenealogyBlogs!

Many thanks to all of our readers for having nominated the GeneaNet Genealogy Blog for Family Tree Magazine’s 40 Best GenealogyBlogs!

The voting is done by category with the following categories being listed:

• All-around: These bloggers give you a little (or a lot) of everything: news, research advice, their own family stories, photos, opinions and more.
• Personal/Family: These blogs primarily cover the blogger's (or, in a case or two or more, bloggers') own research and ancestors.
• Local/Regional: Most posts in these blogs cover resources, genealogy events and history for a city, town, state or region.
• Cemetery: These blogs focus on cemetery research, gravestone photos and the like.
• Photos/Heirlooms: Content on these blogs is primarily about sharing, researching and preserving family photos and/or heirlooms.
• Heritage: Here, blog content focuses on a particular heritage group, such as African-American, Jewish or Irish.
• News/Resources: Blogs in this category deliver a range of genealogy news and information about new resources.
• How-to: These blogs have instructional content on genealogical resources and methodology.
• Genealogy Companies: Blogs in this category are written on behalf of a genealogy company, and contain helpful information on the company’s products.
• Genetic Genealogy: Blogs that are primarily about genetic genealogy and family health history.

Voting takes place from Oct. 5 to Nov. 5, and you can vote more than once.

The GeneaNet Genealogy Blog is listed in the News/Resources category.

Click here to get voting!

25 September 2009

World's Oldest Man Celebrates 113th Birthday

Walter Breuning, The World's Oldest Man,was born on born Sept. 21, 1896 in Melrose Minnesota and inherited the title of "World's Oldest Man" when Henry Allingham of England died last July 18. Breuning moved to Great Falls in 1918 with the expansion of the railroad and worked in the railroad business for 50 years. He says he stays healthy by eating just two meals per day and exercises by strolling the halls of the retirement home with the aid of a walker. Breuning, born in Melrose, Minnesota, also revealed that he takes one aspirin a day.

Walter Breuning speaks to guests during his 113th birthday party in the Rainbow retirement home ballroom, Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, in Great Falls, Montana. World's oldest man Walter Breuning celebrated his 113th birthday on September 21. The American supercentenarian blew the candles and gave a brief talk at the Rainbow Retirement Community in Great Falls, Montana.

Source & Full Story

Lausanne, Switzerland, Industrial Archives Fire Still Raging

Firemen were still fighting a fire after 24 hours, at a storage space where some 50,000 industrial companies’ archives are kept by the company Secur-archiv, 24 Heures reported late Friday afternoon 25 September.

The fire, noticed Thursday afternoon by two employees who called fireman after seeing flames at the Avenue de Provence company, is now being doused with water, says the newspaper. The company took over the storage area seven years ago from UBS, it reports, which also kept records there, but no longer does.

Source & Full Story - Photo Gallery (in French)

24 September 2009

Census Worker Hanged In Kentucky, USA

A U.S. Census worker found hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery had the word "fed" scrawled on his chest, a law enforcement official said Wednesday, and the FBI is investigating whether he was a victim of anti-government sentiment.

The law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and requested anonymity, did not say what type of instrument was used to write the word on the chest of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and teacher. He was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky.

The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation. An autopsy report is pending.

Source & Full Story

16 September 2009

Rome Was Built In A Day, With Hundreds Of Thousands Of Digital Photos

The ancient city of Rome was not built in a day. It took nearly a decade to build the Colosseum, and almost a century to construct St. Peter's Basilica. But now the city, including these landmarks, can be digitized in just a matter of hours.

A new computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington uses hundreds of thousands of tourist photos to automatically reconstruct an entire city in about a day.

The tool is the most recent in a series developed at the UW to harness the increasingly large digital photo collections available on photo-sharing Web sites. The digital Rome was built from 150,000 tourist photos tagged with the word "Rome" or "Roma" that were downloaded from the popular photo-sharing Web site, Flickr.

Source & Full Story

Aborigines Demand That British Museum Returns Truganini Bust

To Tasmania's Aboriginal community it is "racist art", an enduring symbol of the persecution, murder and dispossession their ancestors suffered under white colonial rule.

More than 130 years after her death, a bust of Tasmania's most famous Aboriginal woman, Truganini, is at the centre of controversy, with demands it be returned to her homeland by the British Museum which owns it.

Now representatives of the community have flown to Britain in the hope of reclaiming the plaster cast, along with remains of other ancestors still held by medical and academic institutions in the UK.

Source & Full Story

4 September 2009

Nominate a Genealogy Blog for the Family Tree 40

Family Tree Magazine has announced that it will be naming the Family Tree Magazine 40 Best Genealogy Blogs.

All genealogists are asked to nominate their favorite genealogy blogs between September 3 and September 30, 2009. Once nominations are received, visitors to Family Tree Magazine will vote for their favorites from October 5 to November 5, 2009.

You can nominate your favorite genealogy blogs using Family Tree Magazine's nomination form.

And you can nominate the GeneaNet Genealogy Blog using the same form ;-)

8 July 2009

Woman Sentenced To Prison For Library Of Congress ID Theft

A woman who worked with her cousin to steal the identities of 13 unsuspecting Library of Congress employees was sentenced Monday to two and a half years in prison.

Labiska Gibbs admitted that in spring 2008 she asked her second cousin William Sinclair Jr., who worked in the library's human resource department, to get her the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of library workers from the payroll database.

Gibbs opened several credit accounts in the names of those workers and spent nearly $40,000. Prosecutors said she often bought gift cards that she would sell at a discount.

Source & Full Story

4 July 2009

When The Holidays Chime With Solidarity: The Second Volunteer Mission To Cologne

Some archivists chose for their holiday destination this year the city of Cologne. This was not to visit the Kölner Dom, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but to lend a strong hand to help our colleagues at the Municipal archives affected by disaster.

The Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield (ANCBS) is now putting together a second team of 70 to 75 volunteers who will be deployed from the 3rd to the 8th of August. The first mission was an opportunity for the volunteers to treat around two linear kilometers of documents in four days. David Leitch, our Secretary General, visited the site to meet the volunteers and witness their good work.

On the 15th of June, the Archives of Cologne estimated to have benefited from around 9000 hours of volunteer activity in total.

Source & Full Story

29 June 2009

Conference On Return Of Jewish Assets Starts In Prague

Nobel laureate and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel last Friday expressed anger at the opening of an international conference in Prague at the failure to ensure restitution of assets seized from Holocaust victims.

"Why did it take so long? ... The easiest response would have been to give back after the war, the buildings, the money, the artworks that were confiscated," he said.

"The fact it was not done is scandalous," he added at the conference held more than ten years after 44 countries pledged in Washington to go ahead with assets restitution.

The principles adopted in Washington about restitution and compensation of Jewish assets seized between 1939 and 1945 are not legally binding and some countries, above all in eastern Europe, have not implemented them.

Source & Full Story

24 June 2009

Baby Names: Parker, Broderick Go Old-Fashioned

Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick dug into their family roots for the names of their twin daughters.

The middle names of Tabitha Hodge Broderick and Marion Loretta Elwell Broderick are both family names on Parker's side, according to publicist Simon Halls.

The Associated Press consulted its panel of baby-name gurus to weigh in on the monikers for the girls, delivered by a surrogate mother Monday.

Jennifer Moss, author of "The One-in-a-Million Baby Name Book" and founder of BabyNames.com: "It's interesting that they used the traditionally male spelling of Marion, rather than the female spelling Marian. Either way, it's a very dated name from the early 20th century and has not come back into style for either gender. The name Loretta is from the same time period. They did, however, keep in line with the current trend of using family surnames within baby names, Elwell and Hodge both being branches of the Parker family tree."

Source & Full Story

15 June 2009

Slave Route Museum Opens in Matanzas, Cuba

Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai, President of the Executive Council of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), who is in Cuba for a working visit until next Friday, will participate in the inauguration ceremony.

During his stay in Matanzas, Joseph Yai, who is also the Permanent Representative before UNESCO of the Republic of Benin, will tour the historic center of the city and the Office of the Triumvirate.

The UNESCO high official will also visit Old Havana, the House of Africa and the Museum of Guanabacoa, in the Cuban capital.

Source & Full Story

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