GeneaNet

The Dictionary of Scottish Architects (DSA) is a database providing biographical information and job lists for all architects known to have worked in Scotland during the period 1840-1980, whether as principals, assistants or apprentices.

The resource is searchable by name or location of architect, practice, or building, as well as by client. Architects based in Scotland have their known works fully catalogued; but only the Scottish works of English and Irish architects have been included. The Dictionary is currently being extended to cover up to 1980 and the entries for many architects who practised after World War II are skeletons only. These will gradually be filled out over the next three years. The works of architects who trained in Scotland but practised in England, Wales, the Dominions and the USA have not been comprehensively catalogued because of time and cost constraints.

A Second Life destination created to assist researchers, much in the way the real life (RL) versions does.

In the Live Roots on Second Life area, you can easily locate all of the available SL genealogy (related) areas, and get information about a variety of database companies in the upcoming exhibitor area.

Future enhancements to the Live Roots on Second Life area will include being able to preview available results for a specific surname (or full name) you are researching on a variety of database sites.

Already a Second Life member? Jump to the Live Roots on Second Life area.

MissingLink Software Corporation announces the official launch of its new web site Genealogy In Time, a free online genealogy magazine containing genealogy news, articles and links.

Genealogy In Time is owned by the MissingLink Software Corporation, an independent company located in Ottawa, Canada. They specialize in family history software.

Unfortunately there's no RSS feed available.

Enter the surname or given name that you want to find and FamilyTrackers will give results including:

- Surnames used by other researchers including those elusive dit names.
- Surnames that start the same way.
- Surnames that have a matching Soundex code.

The GeoNames geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.5 million unique features whereof 2.2 million populated places and 1.8 million alternate names.

GeoNames is integrating geographical data such as names of places in various languages, elevation, population and others from various sources. All lat/long coordinates are in WGS84 (World Geodetic System 1984). Users may manually edit, correct and add new names using a user friendly wiki interface.

ItRunsInMyFamily.com is a new free, open-access Family Health History wich allows you to easily create your family pedigree, enter in diseases that run in your family, and present your family health history report to your healthcare professional.

"Because family members often share the same genes and environment which contribute to health risks, family health history is important health factor. Knowing your family history is a glimpse into your own genome. Talk to your family members about their health, doing so will help you determine which diseases you are at risk for so you can take prevention steps to avoid the disease."

On December 11th, 1858, in the midst of a gold rush, a man with the improbable name Amor de Cosmos inked up an old hand press and launched a newspaper -- the British Colonist -- into the world. Published in Victoria, it became the leading paper in the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, and was the paper for the province of British Columbia until the emergence of Vancouver and competitors in the 1890s.

The British Colonist website contains all the issues of the British Colonist (also called The Daily British Colonist, the Daily Colonist, and other variants) from its first issue in 1858 to June of 1910.

The English Reports from 1220 to 1873 are available online for free on CommonLII.

The English Reports is the oldest collection of the most authoritative, comprehensive law reports in publication. Over 100,000 of the most important cases reported between 1220 and 1873 compiled into one collection.

These reports are available as printable PDFs that replicate the pagination and appearance of the hard copies exactly.

The database is based on data provided by Justis.

Historians hope a new Web database will help bring millions of blacks closer to their African ancestors who were forced onto slave ships, connecting them to their heritage in a way that has long been possible for white Europeans.

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database launched today in conjunction with a conference at Emory University marking the bicentennial of the official end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Emory spearheaded the two-year interactive project, which is free to the public.

"Voyages" documents the slave trade from Africa to the New World that took place over three centuries — between the 1500s and 1800s — and includes searchable information on nearly 35,000 trips and the names of 70,000 human cargo. The voluminous work includes data on more than 95 percent of all voyages that left ports from England — the country with the second-largest slave trade — and documents two-thirds of all slave trade voyages between 1514 and 1866.

Ben Sayer, author of MacGenealogist.com, has launched PCGenealogist.com:

"I was concerned that the Mac community would be confused or just not happy with my support of the PC. I decided to go ahead because my interest is helping genealogists and family historians regardless of their computer platform choice.

I remain committed to improving the state of genealogy on the Mac. I think PCGenealogist.com can, ironically, help toward that end as well."

WorldHistory has just entered it’s private beta phase. The interesting interface allows users to pick a location on a map to see historical events that occurred there. You can even set a date range to see events that happened during those years. The program also allows you to enter your own ancestors and genealogy information to the site, say if you had an ancestor that fought in a historic battle.

The program, for the most part, accesses Wikipedia data in order to create the content. They also say they are hard at work on an iPhone version of the program that will show historical events that occurred near you at any given time.

Click here for a series of demo videos.

Google Maps has long been able to convert an address into a latitude/longitude pair. Now it can do the opposite: converting a latitude/longitude pair into an address.

Blogger Amit Agarawal has created a mashup to display the reverse-geocoded address when you click on a map, and MeetWays provides you with an address of location equidistant between you and someone you'd like to hang out with.

Genealogy Today announced the release of a new website designed to help researchers locate genealogical data -- both online and offline, and either digitized or in-print. Live Roots bridges the gaps between independent websites, large commercial repositories and printed materials yet to be digitized and published on the World Wide Web.

"I've always tried to stay informed about new resources; but with so many outlets, there hasn't been a single place to search across different catalogs," commented Illya D'Addezio, owner of Genealogy Today. "Through Live Roots I'm partnering with major genealogy companies and many medium and smaller publishers to combine their respective catalogs into one repository."

"The "live" part of the Live Roots concept lets your research continue even when the publication isn't available online," added Illya. "There's nothing more frustrating than finding a resource that could hold the missing link in your tree, and then discovering that there aren't any places online to access it."

For many of the resources in its catalog, Live Roots captures names from their listings and aggregates the data into a searchable index. This makes it possible to locate names within resources, rather than just searching for keywords in titles and descriptions. This includes many of the resources that have yet to be digitized and/or transcribed online.

For additional details, visit "Genealogy Today Launches Live Roots Meta Search Website"

The Canadian War Museum’s did for it’s newly launched Canada and the First World War Web site. The online resource will allow the public to read and view thousands of war-time photographs, art, letters and diaries. Kathryn Lyons, senior interpretative planner at the Ottawa-based museum, said the massive collection gives users an amazing look into the day-to-day lives of Canada’s soldiers circa 1914.

"The thing that sets us apart from other Web projects is that we have hundreds of objects – lots of real stuff," she said. "We took really great, high-quality photos of all the objects we have in our collection as a way of rounding out the story for visitors to our site."

But with a project of such massive scale comes serious technical issues. "Size was really the biggest challenge for us and probably the one we were least prepared for," Lyons said. "We had to edit and translate about 100,000 words of text and keep track of the thousands of images we created. It was about 925 pages of Web content."

For museum staff, once it solved the problem of creating and compiling the digital artifacts, the focus shifted toward how to manage the content.

"Our artifacts, images and archival material already have databases," Lyons said. "It’s how the content is managed – both in-house for us and for researchers who want to go through our catalogues."

Source: itWorldCanada