Genealogy Blog : Genealogy News

King Richard III Found in 'Untidy Lozenge-Shaped Grave'

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:15:00 +0200

An academic paper on the archaeology of the Search for Richard III reveals for the first time specific details of the grave dug for King Richard III and discovered under a car park in Leicester.

The paper reveals: Richard III was casually placed in a badly prepared grave -- suggesting gravediggers were in a hurry to bury him; he was placed in an 'odd position' and the torso crammed in; the grave was 'too short' at the bottom to receive the body conventionally; someone is likely to have stood in the grave to receive the body -- suggested by the fact the body is on one side rather than placed centrally; there is evidence to suggest Richard's hands may have been tied when he was buried.

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Library and Archives Canada and Early Exploration Photographs in Canada at the National Gallery of Canada From May 24 to September 29, 2013

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Fri, 24 May 2013 09:15:00 +0200

On Friday, May 24, the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), in partnership with Library and Archives Canada (LAC), will present Early Exploration Photographs in Canada, the first in a series of installations that will be on display at the NGC over the next three years.

Made possible by a recent agreement between the two institutions, this series is dedicated to making LAC's rich documentary heritage more accessible to the public.

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Genealogy Software Updates of the Week

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:15:00 +0200

FamilyInsight for Windows 2013.5.13.0 (Other Tools - Windows - Purchase)

• Improved handling Roots Magic 6 files.
• Improved handling of Family Tree Maker files.
• Fixed crashes.
• Improved media handling.
• Removed Separate and AncestorSplit feature because of changes on new FamilySearch.
• Added ability to save to earlier Family Tree Maker files that we open.

GRAMPS 4.0.0 (Full Featured - Linux - Freeware/Open Source)

• Conversion to GTK 3 and use of gobject introspection.
• Support for python 3.
• Code reorganization.
• Autotools is no longer used for building Gramps, distutils is used.
• Completely reworked localization handling.

MacFamilyTree 6.3.9 (Full Featured - Mac - Purchase)

• Fixed saving editable charts.
• Fixed saving editable reports.
• Stability improvements.

The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding 9.2.1 (Web Publishing - Windows, Mac, Linux - Purchase)

• Ahnentafel/Register: Child links on these pages did not go to the right place (fixed).
• Calendar: The cross icon used to indicate a death has been replaced with a headstone icon.
• Calendar: The names of living and private individuals were being displayed on the calendar when the user did not have rights to see that information (fixed).
• Cemeteries: Headstone pagination links for cemeteries were not working (fixed).
• Citations: When creating a new source while adding a new citation, the dropdown of repositories was not being restricted to the current tree (fixed).
• And much more...

1,000 Year Old African Coins Could Rewrite Australian History

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:15:00 +0200

Five copper coins and a nearly 70-year-old map with an ‘‘X’’ might lead to a discovery that could rewrite Australia’s history. Australian scientist Ian McIntosh, currently Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University in the US, plans an expedition in July that has stirred up the archaeological community.

The scientist wants to revisit the location where five coins were found in the Northern Territory in 1944 that have proven to be 1000 years old, opening up the possibility that seafarers from distant countries might have landed in Australia much earlier than what is currently believed.

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Fake Graveyard Built To Scare Away Homeless People Has Real Tombstones

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:15:00 +0200

A Texas man fed up with homeless people sleeping in his front yard set up a fake graveyard to scare them away. But the downtown Houston resident was himself shocked when told that the trio of tombstones had actually been made for real dead people.

The unnamed man put up a fence and installed the "scarecrow graveyard" around his property, which stands in the shadows of Houston's skyscrapers, last year.

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'Whodunnit' of Irish Potato Famine Solved

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:15:00 +0200

An international team of scientists reveals that a unique strain of potato blight they call HERB-1 triggered the Irish potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century.

Phytophthora infestans changed the course of history. Even today, the Irish population has still not recovered to pre-famine levels. "We have finally discovered the identity of the exact strain that caused all this havoc," says Hernán Burbano from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology.

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The Best and the Worst of Genealogy Home Offices

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:15:00 +0200

By Scott Phillips, genealogical historian and owner of Onward To Our Past genealogy services: "Many of us who love and labor over our family histories, ancestry, and genealogy do so from a home office.

In my case, early in my career I worked for decades in many different corporate offices for various companies and organizations. Now, for the last dozen or so years, I have found myself working from a home office. I can easily see that each has its own merits and sets of 'pros' and 'cons'."

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Brazil, China To Cooperate on Digitalization of Historical Archives

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:15:00 +0200

Brazil and China will exchange information on the digital preservation of historical archives, state news agency Agencia Brasil said on Monday.

Jaime Antunes, director-general of Brazil's National Archive, and Rong Hua, chief of the Tianjin Municipal Archive, reached an agreement Monday on the matter, the agency said.

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Plague Helped Bring Down Roman Empire

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 07:15:00 +0200

To help solve this mystery, scientists investigated ancient DNA from the teeth of 19 different sixth-century skeletons from a medieval graveyard in Bavaria, Germany, of people who apparently succumbed to the Justinianic Plague.

They unambiguously found the plague bacterium Y. pestis there.

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Medieval Church Found Beneath Lincoln Castle in England

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 06:15:00 +0200

A previously undiscovered church, thought to be at least 1,000 years old, has been found beneath Lincoln Castle. It is believed the stone church was built in the Anglo-Saxon period, after the Romans left Britain and before the Norman conquest of 1066.

Lincolnshire County Council said the find was unexpected and will increase its knowledge of uphill Lincoln. Human skeletons were also found in the same area three metres (9.8 ft) below the surface.

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Eight Generations of Farming and Family History

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:15:00 +0200

One of Australia's oldest farming families welcomed a new member to their clan this week, marking eight generations of farming and family history. The Otton's were one of the very first families to settle in south-east NSW, at Popes Hole, in Bega.

The Otton dynasty dates back to the early 1800s, when the first Otton, John Thomas Otton, was shipped out to Australia as a convict in 1837. Richard Otton, from the 5th generation, is now one of the country's newest great granddads.

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Romanov's Final Days Seen in Recovered Photos

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 04:15:00 +0200

Anastasia Romanov, the youngest daughter of the last Russian Tsar, was already smoking at the age of 15, encouraged by her proud father Nicholas II.

The anecdote about the Grand Duchess, a key figure in the conspiracy theories that followed the gunshot and bayonet murders of the Romanovs, has been revealed by a series of photographs found in a remote museum in the Urals.

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Mysterious Minoans Were European, DNA Finds

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 03:15:00 +0200

The Minoans, the builders of Europe's first advanced civilization, really were European, new research suggests.

The conclusion, published today (May 14) in the journal Nature Communications, was drawn by comparing DNA from 4,000-year-old Minoan skeletons with genetic material from people living throughout Europe and Africa in the past and today.

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Reading the Unreadable: 'Unopenable' Scrolls Will Yield Their Secrets to New X-Ray System

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 02:15:00 +0200

Pioneering X-ray technology is making it possible to read fragile rolled-up historical documents for the first time in centuries. Old parchment is often extremely dry and liable to crack and crumble if any attempt is made to physically unroll or unfold it.

The new technology, however, eliminates the need to do so by enabling parchment to be unrolled or unfolded 'virtually' and the contents displayed on a computer screen.

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The National Archives of the UK: Fifth Tranche of Colonial Administration Records Released

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:15:00 +0200

The fifth tranche of colonial administration records is now available to view in the reading rooms at The National Archives. This release contains records from Ceylon, Kenya, Malta, Mauritius, New Hebrides, Nigeria, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Palestine, Sierra Leone and Singapore.

Also contained within the records on Mauritius are papers relating to Princess Margaret's visit to Mauritius, September to October 1956 (catalogue reference: FCO 141/12043).

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All Europeans Are Related If You Go Back Just 1,000 Years, Scientists Say

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:15:00 +0200

A genetic survey concludes that all Europeans living today are related to the same set of ancestors who lived 1,000 years ago. And you wouldn't have to go back much further to find that everyone in the world is related to each other.

"We find it remarkable because it's counterintuitive to us," Graham Coop, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Davis, told NBC News. "But it's not totally unexpected, based on genetic analysis."

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Opening The Mystery of 250 WWII Letters Found in Old Hat Box

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Mon, 20 May 2013 23:15:00 +0200

Purchased for just $1 at an Oklahoma estate sale 15 years ago, an old hatbox contained a mystery decades in the making: an estimated 250 letters from two brothers during their time as soldiers in WWII.

Pamela Gilliland, who was unaware of the letters when she first bought the hatbox, just last week enlisted the help of a history buff, Doug Eaton, to find out more about them.

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Records Show Japanese Slaves Crossed the Pacific to Mexico in 16th Century

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:15:00 +0200

The first documentation of Japanese people crossing the Pacific Ocean has been discovered by researchers amongst the Inquisition records in the General Archives of the Nation in Mexico. Three names were found in the document, not written in Japanese but with the word “xapon” (Japan) written after their names.

Lucio de Sousa, a special researcher at University of Evora in Portugal, and Mihoko Oka, an assistant professor at the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo found the rare document showing that the three, believed to be slaves owned by a Portuguese merchant named Perez.

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10 European Colonies in America That Failed Before Jamestown

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:15:00 +0200

The Jamestown settlement in Virginia, which officially was started on May 14, 1607, was one of the first European colonies to last in North America, and was historically significant for hosting the first parliamentary assembly in America.

But Jamestown barely survived, as recent headlines about the confirmation of cannibalism at the colony confirm. The adaption to the North American continent by the early Europeans was extremely problematic.

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UK Announces Search for Families of 74,000 Indian Soldiers Who Died Fighting in World War I

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:15:00 +0200

Families of Indian soldiers, who sacrificed their lives fighting for Britain in the first World War, will finally get the recognition they deserve.

The UK foreign office has announced an open plea to help them identify families of Indian soldiers who died fighting for England so that they could be brought to London and felicitated for their sacrifice as part of the government's plan to commemorate the forthcoming centenary of the 1914 to 1918 conflict.

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Horse Thief's Gravestone Recovered in Glasgow, Montana

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:15:00 +0200

It’s a story right out of an old Western movie. A stolen horse, a chase, a shootout and a death. The story fairly leaps off the crisp, folded pages of the coroner’s inquest, stored for nearly 100 years in a narrow metal box in the depths of the District Court vault.

But the story would not have come to light again if Clem Lemieux hadn’t torn down a storage shed on May 5. The shed was attached to a garage on his property on Division Street on the south side of U.S. 2. When he removed a corner post, he discovered the cornerstone it was standing on was actually a gravestone.

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World War I Sacrifices of the 'Swansea Pals' Recalled in Newly Digitised Archive Records

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:15:00 +0200

Officially, they were men from Swansea and surrounding towns including Neath and Port Talbot who made up the 14th (Service Battalion), The Welsh Regiment, part of the Welsh 38th Division during World War I.

And the 1,200-strong “Swansea Pals” battalion found itself in one of the deadliest battles of the war, Mametz Wood, in which almost 100 of them were killed and 300 more injured.

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Code in Letters Sent Home By British PoW in WWII To Help Allies Is Revealed After 70 Years

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:15:00 +0200

The letters sent back home by Sub-Lieutenant John Pryor from a German prison camp seemed innocent enough. They often started with 'My Dear Mummy & Daddy' and talked about mundane things such as gardening and a 'vegetable patch'.

But the British wartime letters actually contained hidden messages, which have only now been deciphered by academics. It is also the first time the captured serviceman's family has been able to understand the secret messages.

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Love Letters From Wartime Affair Published By Daughter

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:15:00 +0200

Hundreds of love letters revealing a passionate wartime affair between a doctor and a nurse have been published by their daughter. Swansea-born Brian Thomas, 34, fell in love with Katie Walker, 23, in Austria at the end of World War II.

When Dr Thomas returned to Britain, the pair wrote ardent love letters to each other every day. Publishing the letters, Loraine Fergusson said it was "wonderful to hear their voices again".

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Historic New Zealand Images Sold To US

Jean-Yves BAXTER — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:15:00 +0200

Fairfax Media - which owns The Whangarei Leader, The Bay Chronicle, The Northern News and The Dargaville and Districts News as well as national and regional newspapers - plans to start shipping its old photos to Rogers Photo Archive next week. Prints will go first with negatives to follow later this year.

The company, based in Little Rock, Arkansas, specialises is restoring, scanning and ''monetising'' photo archives. It will send digital versions of the photos back to New Zealand but will retain the originals.

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