The Genealogist

Three Clicks Away!

THE GROWING interest in family history over the last few years has been remarkable. With a new series of the popular BBC programme “Who do you think you think you are?” due to start in the New Year, family history and genealogy research is becoming easier thanks to the internet. Leading the way in online genealogy is the website www.familyrelatives.org which has begun to revolutionise Family History research by making the process of locating Birth, Marriage and Death records (BMD) for England and Wales much easier, more accurate, cheaper and without the need to visit the Family Records Centre in Central London.

Familyrelatives.org has launched the complete records for the period 1837, (the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation and the year records began) to 2003. It is the first website to make available 300 million records searchable by Surname and Forename with 150 million of those records being fully searchable on any criteria from spouse name to age at death to mother’s maiden name.

This ease of use and pinpointing of family relatives has created much excitement in the Family History community as no other website allows the searching of marriages by using a marriage match or booster marriage facility.

Familyrelatives.org search capabilities allow family history enthusiasts to find an ancestor quickly and identify the exact record needed. Searches for 1866-1920 and 1984 to 2003 can be made by forename, surname, mother’s maiden name, spouse’s maiden name, approximate age at death (+/- 5 years), year of event, year range, geographical area as well as official registry districts.

In addition a unique and exciting feature has been added which allows researchers to track down spouses using the ‘Marriage Match’ search.

Now we can go to the right records almost immediately with the Marriage Match. For example we want to research Charlie Chaplin’s mother: we know his father was also called Charles Chaplin, and we know his parents were married sometime between 1870 and 1910 and his mother’s surname was Hill, although we don’t have her forename or the precise date they were married. We can search for Charles Chaplin in the period during which the marriage took place (1870 to 1910); and entering the spouse name. Once the search button is pressed it searches 150 million records and it produces one result. As we know that Charlie Chaplin’s mother was called Hill, we have established our match as Hannah Harriet Hill, St Saviour.1d, Page 325, Marriage – Quarter 2, 1885. Furthermore an important and invaluable feature is that all previous searches are automatically saved allowing researchers to pick up from where they left off.

Treequest Ltd., the company behind Familyrelatives.org, says “Genealogists across the globe are beginning to appreciate this remarkable facility in terms of reliability and user-friendliness. The new additions and the new search functions are just part of our commitment to the Family History research community, to make available as many useful UK genealogical documents as possible on our website and to make sure that they can be accessed in the quickest, most up to date and most affordable way.

We have had some very positive comments and interesting stories. One lady found out that not only did she have a Nelson in her family but she also had a Bonaparte (which no doubt they kept quiet at the time!). We also had a family history enthusiast who was tracing his roots and found he was related to Cecil Rhodes of Rhodesia or modern day Zimbabwe. So it’s very rewarding to be able to help people trace their heritage.”

MyFamily.com Changes Corporate Name to The Generations Network

MyFamily.com, Inc., the leading online network for connecting families across distance and time, has announced that it is changing its name to The Generations Network, Inc.,
effective immediately.

The company will continue to serve families online through its portfolio of leading brands and websites. Ancestry.com, Ancestry.co.uk, Rootsweb.com, and Genealogy.com together
form the No. 1 network of family history websites in both the United States and United Kingdom; Ancestry’s OneWorldTree(SM) is the world’s largest online family tree

Ancestry.ca, Ancestry.com.au, and Ancestry.de were recently launched to extend the company’s presence into Canada, Australia and Germany. Family Tree Maker(R) remains the world’s No. 1 selling family tree software

MyFamily.com, online since 1998 as a place for families to connect and share photos and news, is being overhauled and relaunched in early 2007. The company also publishes Ancestry Magazine and over 50 book and CD-ROM titles.

” The Generations Network has a powerful mission to connect families across distance and time, said Tim Sullivan, the Company’s President and CEO. Our company was founded over two decades ago as a publisher of genealogy products. Today, we are a multi-brand company focused on providing families with unique, interactive online experiences that help them research their family history, share and publish their stories, and
find and stay connected to family members throughout the world.

We felt now was a good time to establish a company identity expansive enough to encompass everything that we do, but also completely focused on the family … across the generations. Over the past year, we’ve improved Ancestry.com through the addition of millions of new records, enhanced
tree-building and family networking technologies, and by giving our members the ability to save and store their precious family photos and memories online. We’ve grown rapidly in the UK and expanded our presence into new international markets.

In 2007, we are looking forward to the upcoming relaunch of
MyFamily.com, an exciting new release of Family Tree Maker, and our plansto make Ancestry.com even more mainstream and indispensable to families around the world. And we’re thrilled to be moving forward as The Generations Network.”

Paul’s Weekly Ponderings

The exciting news this week is about The 1911 UK Census. You may (or there again may not!) remember that I set up a site for a Petition to get the 1911 UK Census released early some months ago.

Well………… I am not claiming that it is entirely down to the signatures we got but I heard the news that the information from the 1911 Census will now be available from January 2007 rather than the original date of January 2012. The aim is to have a fully searchable copy on the Internet by January 2009!

I must admit it’s given me a bit of a buzz! This for me is absolutely what we are about in terms of Marketing on The Internet - really adding value to the niches in which we operate.

If you are one of my subscribers then you will be aware that the last two weeks have been something of a challenge! This all resulted from a major outage by one of our hosting companies which lasted for some time and saw lots of data lost by them. It impacted about 50% of my business with some of our most significant sites going offline and the domain names being inaccessible to amend the DNS for!

So as you can imagine the last few weeks have seen quite a few long days getting things back up and running and I am pleased to say that of this morning almost every major site is now back on line and fully functional. It has also seen the creation of a number of new sites and the redeployment of other sites.

The good news for Genealogists is that our sites at The Amateur Genealogist, Free Genealogy Search Engine, Catholic Genealogy and Genealogy Articles are all now back online!

What have I learnt from the last few weeks? Well in summary here’s my top pieces of advice. Always make sure that you have your hosting spread around a number of major hosts so that you can always shift things around in the event of a problem; ensure that you back up your sites and any databases on a regular basis; ensure that your hosts also back up data on a regular basis. If you are serious about hosting then you need to look at getting a Reseller Account and one of the best that I hav come across is Hostgator who I have found to be excellent.

Finally in terms of my recommendations and this is a big one! Never ever, under any circumstances buy your domain names from your hosts! That way lies complete disaster if your host goes down and you then cannot access your account. If you cannot access your account with your host then you cannot amend the DNS an point your sites to an alternative host.

Now before all that happened I had been well on with my planning for 2007 and thought that I knew what we were going to do! However, the coincidence of the problems with one of our hosts and also reading an excellent report from Niche Mania’s BigMike called “Google Hiccup” set me thinking! If you haven’t taken a look at Niche Mania then you really want to - it’s one of the very few memberhips that I ever recommend for anyone interested in making money online.

The areas we will focus on in terms of our primary niches will remain as originally planned. However, our approach to those niches and the value we will be adding is going to be much mroe focussed.

One of the things that we are currently very focussed on is evolving the highly successful GenMates community and you can read more about that at GenMates Changes - this is a set of changes which is in response to the fedback from our members. I think this is going to be really exciting!

The other two major developments which have suffered a bit of a set back are my Internet Marketing Coaching Site and my Self Improvement Coaching Site - however with a few more days work on these they will be ready to go early in the new year! You can sign up for the heavy discount on the Internet Marketing one by going to Internet Business Creators!

Have a good week and if you are one of my subscribers watch out for a very useful Christmas Gift!