PROVO, Utah, PRNewswire – Ancestry.com announced today it has launched a collection of more than 1,700 recorded oral histories from immigrants who arrived in the United States through Ellis Island. This is the first time this collection of poignant recordings has been available online. To celebrate the new addition, Ancestry.com is making its entire U.S. Immigration Collection free through Labor Day.
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Ancestry.com
For awhile it was looking like Renee Zamora and I might be cousins. She descends from a Harris family in New York, and so do I. Same county, 1700′s. The odds were fair to middlin’.
A Harris cousin of mine got one of our Harris boys to take a DNA test for the paternal lineage. That wasn’t easy. He had some fear that his DNA would be used to clone him in the future. When he finally admitted it, my cousin snapped back, “Who would want to clone you? You’re 70 years old!”
So she got her sample, sent it off to the lab and got back the results which knocked out every theory we’ve held dear so far. Seems our closest match had an ancestor in South Carolina.
DNA Testing by Ancestry.com doesn’t mention cloning … hmmm … Read the fine print. They say they offer ‘complimentary’ storage but they don’t offer ‘secure’ storage. Hello?
It seems like just yesterday when FTM 2008 was the laughing stock of the genealogy world. As of today, Family Tree Maker 2009 is now released with a ream of improvements and new tools. Have they redeemed themselves? My guess would be Yes because anything less would be dumb. Many people bailed from Family Tree Maker 2008 in favor of Legacy.
After much pre-publicity, DNA Ancestry
is finally here.
Since I haven’t tried this yet myself, and it’s pretty much news for all of us, I know about this much:
You buy a kit, swab the inside of your cheek, just like in the CSI shows, send it back to Ancestry and they will process your results and mail them back to you. Your results can also be added to an Ancestry database to be compared with other people’s results or be kept totally private. DNA matches are communicated anonymously.
Please open this user-friendly pdf called DNA Ancestry and read all about the process. They say it as well as it can be said.
What DNA Ancestry Tests Can Reveal
I have now had a chance to install and try using Family Tree Maker 2008.
It started out with importing my Legacy database file directly and that really impressed me. I didn’t have to make a gedcom first. It took about 20 minutes to import almost 10,000 people and their information.
Family Tree Maker 2008 is now available for pre-order. It will be shipped to you when it is released in mid-August.
Does this look like defection from Legacy? Not really. I’m an equal opportunity promoter of all things worthwhile. I’m loyal to Legacy because when I was trying it I fell into it like an old armchair and forgot I was “just trying”. A couple weeks later I thought O rats, I missed a few, so I went back and tried those too, and still chose Legacy.
From The Generations Network:
PROVO, Utah, June 27 /PRNewswire/ — The Generations Network, parent company of Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource, today announced two new additions to the Ancestry network of sites in France and Italy — Ancestry.fr and Ancestry.it.
From The Generations Network:
PROVO, Utah, June 26 /PRNewswire/ — Ancestry.com, the world’s leading online family history resource, today launched more than 7.5 million names in U.S. Indian Censuses, the largest online collection of Native American family history records. Taken by the Bureau of Indian affairs, the censuses document some 150 years of Native American family history. These censuses create an intimate portrait of individuals living on all registered Indian reservations between 1885 and the 1940s.
The U.S. Indian Censuses are among the most important documents for tracing Native American family history — as well as the place to for anyone with Native American ancestry to begin searching for their heritage. Representing more than 250 tribes from some 275 reservations, schools and hospitals across the United States, the censuses typically recorded names, including Indian names, ages, birth dates, tribe, reservation and more.
