GeneaNet

In an historic, first Irish Americans Ronan and Rory Rosputni are twins with different birthdays in different years.

Ronan was born to mother Brighid Maura O’Brien Rosputni before midnight on 31st December 2011 in Buffalo while his brother Rory was born 33 minutes later at 12.10am on 1st January 2012.

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Next week, city council’s finance committee is to consider the naming of the new archives and library materials building, the one Mayor Jim Watson had proposed to name for Charlotte Whitton and he now proposes to name for James Bartleman.

Bartleman not the best choice for the name of the new Central Archives/Ottawa Public Library Materials Centre. The City chose 19 names out of 43 names submitted; but it only profiled one throughout the process, ignoring the biography and the tighter connection of some of the other nominees to the building.

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For a member of the aristocracy, it’s not unusual to have a coat of arms. For the son of a coal miner who grew up in a terrace house in Pontypridd, it is, however, something to sing about.

Mandrake hears that Sir Tom Jones has applied for his own armorial bearings. “He has been granted arms in the last year,” says David White, Somerset Herald at the College of Arms.

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Aged Holocaust survivors made impassioned pleas to the US Congress Wednesday to allow them to sue France's state-owned SNCF railway over its role in World War II deportations to Nazi death camps.

"We are asking for the right to personally, rightfully claim what is ours," said Renee Firestone who was born in the former Czechoslovakia and spent 13 months in Auschwitz before liberation and emigrating to the United States.

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More than six decades after being freed from a Japanese prisoner of war camp, a Utah veteran was compelled to relive the horrors and triumphs of his World War II experience this month when he received a mysterious package containing seven military medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star.

The medals have become a source of pride for retired Army Capt. Tom Harrison, 93, since they arrived in a box with nothing more than a packing slip from a logistics center in Philadelphia on Nov. 4, which happened to be his 65th wedding anniversary.

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Andres Flores has taken an imagined moment in World War II and turned it into a piece of art.

Using toy soldiers and carefully cut and painted Styrofoam, Flores created a dramatic diorama depicting the center of a German village circa 1945 under attack by American forces. The display has received statewide recognition.

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The government has vowed to pursue the census despite the violence. "The government will ... take the necessary time to allow all Mauritanians to register and get secure documents," Interior Minister Mohamed Ould Boilil said in a radio and television address.

Critics claim the census discriminates against black people, but Ould Boilil insisted it was aimed at giving Mauritania "a modern and trustworthy biometric register." The demonstrator was shot and killed when police tried to disperse people protesting the census in Maghama.

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On a visit to New York last week to speak at the 66th United Nations General Assembly, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Eamon Gilmore T.D., used the opportunity to present the first Certificate of Irish Heritage to the family of Joseph (Joe) Hunter, a New York fireman who lost his life in the 9/11 attacks.

The Certificate of Irish Heritage aims to recognise those of Irish lineage in an official way, giving greater expression to the sense of Irish identity felt by many around the world who might not otherwise be able to do so.

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Maria Lucimar Pereira is arguably the world's oldest living person: a member of the Kaxinawá tribe, Pereira lives in the Brazilian Amazon and will be soon celebrating her 121st birthday, according to Survival International.

Pereira has had an official birth certificate approved in 1985 that states her year of birth as 1890, meaning she would have been 24 when World War I broke out, 49 when World War II commenced, and 79 when the first man set foot on the moon.

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Filmmaker Sofia Coppola has married in the southern Italian town where her great-grandfather was born. She married Thomas Mars, lead singer of the French rock band Phoenix and the father of their two young daughters.

The ceremony took place in the garden of a palazzo which her father, Francis Ford Coppola, has renovated in the centre of Bernalda. The town, near the UNESCO-recognised troglodyte settlement of Matera to the north, was home to Francis Ford's grandfather, Agostino, before he emigrated to the United States.

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A Montreal family is in bureaucratic limbo waiting for a birth certificate for their baby after using an unregistered midwife. Sunshine Rose, now five months old, is not legally registered in the province because the midwife who attended to her home birth couldn’t provide legal attestation.

Her mother, Heather Mattingsley, tried for several months to get a registered midwife to deliver her child. But, after languishing on a waiting list at two birthing centres, she connected with an underground midwife who had the credentials, but not the civil authority, to supervise the birth.

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For more than two decades, a pair of sisters in rural Kentucky have lived without Social Security numbers. Now Raechel and Stephanie Schultz want steady, legitimate work, yet the federal government has refused to issue numbers to the women, saying they need more proof the pair were born in the U.S.

Raechel was born at a home in Madison County, Ky., near where the family lives now; Stephanie was delivered in the back of a Dodge van in southern Alabama. The births were recorded in a family Bible but were otherwise undocumented.

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Tim Blevins, mild-mannered and bespectacled, spends much of his time looking for lost people, ferreting out obscure clues about them and sometimes finding them across oceans or hundreds of years back in time.

Blevins is manager of special collections for the Pikes Peak Library District, and most days you can find him poring over obscure documents, gumshoeing on the computer and examining brittle, yellowed history books in a climate-controlled vault in the Car-negie wing of Penrose library.

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Spies from former communist East Germany demonstrate the art of disguise by donning fur wigs, fake mustaches and dark glasses in a Berlin exhibition of recently uncovered and once highly classified photographs.

German artist Simon Menner, who put together the exhibition "Pictures from the Secret Stasi Archives," said it should show how something that seems harmless, such as these images that could be shots from a spy film spoof, can harbor danger.

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