Friday, November 2, 2012

Mundia

Mundia is the new family history site from Ancestry.com, a global platform offering access to more than 13 million family trees from all parts of the world with more than 1.4 billion profiles, and is available in multiple languages.  Basic membership to Mundia is free.
With Mundia, you can:
  • Build your family tree. Then grow it by sharing and collaborating with others.
  • Receive hints about matching ancestors and relatives in other members' trees.
  • Contact other members and find unknown living relatives.
  • Keep up to date with your family through comments, stories, and photos posted within your family circle.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Church of Ireland Records

The Church of Ireland has put online parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials for the parish of Delgany (Glendalough) and vicinity in North Wicklow. The records (together with an index of names) span the years 1666 to 1900. Access is free. The complete Delgany parish registers can also be conveniently downloaded as a pdf.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Genealogy In Time

GenealogyInTime Magazine has added 400 million new records to their two free search engines. The Genealogy Search Engine (which covers ancestral records) now searches an additional 100 million more records, while the Family Tree Search Engine (which covers genealogy forums and online family trees) searches approximately 300 million more records.
In total, the two search engines now cover 5.7 billion records across more than 1,000 different websites. The records are split between the Genealogy Search Engine (covering 1.9 billion records) and the Family Tree Search Engine (covering 3.8 billion records). There is no overlap of records between the two search engines.
GenealogyInTime Magazine now gets over 40,000 queries per month for the two search engines. This makes them one of the most popular alternatives to the FamilySearch website for people wanting to look for free ancestral records. Significant holdings exist for the United States, Canada, England/Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Europe, Australia and New Zealand with minor holdings for the Caribbean, South America and South Africa.
Some of the highlights of the latest addition to the Genealogy Search Engine include:
55 million new records for the United States and 6 million new records for Canada. These are primarily ancestral records held in digital archives of public libraries and universities across North America. Many of these new records are historic photographs.
23 million new records for England, Ireland and Scotland. These are primarily twentieth century obituaries.
14 million new records for Europe. These are primarily birth/marriage/death records from Central and Eastern Europe.
2 million more ship passenger records.
The underlying technology has also been improved:
• The search routines for both search engines have also been strengthened to provide better results.
• The number of returned records for a search query has been increased from 8 pages to 10 pages.
• Results are delivered even faster than before.
Access to both search engines is free and the underlying records are also free.

Monday, July 16, 2012

FamilySearch

Ever wondered what indexing projects FamilySearch.org is working on? In other words, is there a master list of all their projects? The answer is yes! Just follow the link to see if FamilySearch is working on anything that might be relevant to your family research.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Trove

Newspapers that tell Australia’s multicultural stories in their own language are now available online through the National Library of Australia’s Trove service.

Under the National Library’s Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program, selected German, Italian and Estonian community newspapers have now been digitised. These are:
Adelaider Deutsche Zeitung (1851 and 1860-62)
Suedaustralische Zeitung/ Südaustralische Zeitung (1850-1851)
Süd-Australische Zeitung (1860-1874)
Il Giornale Italiano (1932-1940)
Meie Kodu (1949-1954) – title funded by Estonian Archives in Australia

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

From Ireland

From Ireland has posted an amazing collection of about 14,500 photographs of Irish gravestones, making it one of the largest Irish gravestone photograph collections. The collection is arranged in albums by county. The main counties covered are Kilkenny (4,600 images) and Laois (6,800 images), with additional images from Clare, Cork, Kerry, Kildare, Limerick and Offaly. The images have been transcribed and are searchable. Access is free.

Monday, June 25, 2012

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey 1674 to 1913

The Old Bailey was the central criminal court for England and Wales, located in central London. This court heard the most serious criminal cases for London and much of the rest of the country. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey website contains a great collection of detailed records from some 200,000 criminal cases spanning roughly 240 years. This collection has been slowly increasing over time. It is a great website to check if you want to know if you had any really interesting characters in your family tree - only the most hardened criminals ended up at the Old Bailey. Access is free.