FindFamilyCrest.com

Burlington Public Library will offer a beginning genealogy class at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

I just read a thought-provoking article in The New York Times by Patricia Morrisroe.

I am searching for any information about the Clarke family who ran the Jobstown Inn, near Tallaght, Co Dublin, IRELAND.

I have this dream that one day someone will hand me the money to go on the family history trek of my choice. Not the one that takes me to Pittsburgh, to coal mines in western Pennsylvania, or to dig through a shoebox full of photos at my parents’ house in Alabama – all fantastic places, but if someone else is footing the bill, I’m going to find my Italian line. Southern Italy. Coastal. Villas. Vineyards. And Venturas – my grandfather’s surname. 

No one, however, has offered to send me there yet. You, on the other hand, may have a chance, if you’re the winner of the Ancestry.com Ultimate Family History Journey Sweepstakes.

Grand prize should cover your trip, regardless of your family’s place of origin — $20,000 in travel cash. Don’t know where they’re from? That’s covered too: you get genealogy and local experts to help you out. And if, after visiting, you tire of that family line, you can easily switch to researching another since the grand prize winner and five of his or her family members score annual World Deluxe subscriptions to Ancestry.com, gratis.

The sweepstakes is running in conjunction with the series Who Do You Think You Are? which airs Friday nights on NBC beginning March 5. And like all good contests, there are some official rules to read before tossing your cappello in the ring. Rest assured that your chances are even better since, as an employee of Ancestry.com, I can’t actually enter to win. But you can – and often: once each day now through April 30.

Enter the sweepstakes and learn more at www.ancestry.com/sweepstakes. 

Ciao!

Genealogists found out about Stanley M. Diamond from Dr. Scriver, since he mentioned Stanley M. Diamond's project in the book chapter Scriver wrote for Batsheva Bonn-Temir's book, Genetic Diversity Among Jews: Diseases and Markers at the DNA Level .

Our search has been experiencing intermittent technical issues this morning. We are working on the problem and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

You’ve been asking for better ways to control your results. Over the next couple of months, we will be launching two new sets of filters in new search. One will be a name filter, with specific options for first and last names, and the other will be a place filter.

Here’s a quick preview:

• Name filters: In new search, when you search for a name, you currently have two basic options: our default search or exact search, and you can manipulate either one with some clever use of wildcards. We are going to introduce options for soundex on last names, initials on first names, and other phonetic searches on both.
• Place filters: Also we’ve been working to give you more control over how you search places. Let’s say you choose “Rockbridge County, Virginia, USA”, but you want to search Rockbridge County and all the surrounding counties, but nothing else. You’ll be able to do that. Or maybe you want to search Virginia and adjacent states. Well, you’ll be able to do that too. I’ve been doing some testing on it, and it’s very convenient, to say the least.

To get ready for these two new filters, which will give you a lot more control over your searches, we had to make some changes to the way the search form sends queries to the actual search engine. We added in the structure for these filters and while we were at it, we ran it through a large volume of tests for relevancy, and made some improvements there as well. You won’t see much difference, but on some of your queries you may see some changes in the order of results. These changes will be seen in new search and old search without the exact option. Old exact search will not change.

The changes to the interface will launch sometime on Friday and none of this will change how you use search. But the filter changes are coming, so stay tuned.

African-American genealogy details are available online for Charlotte residents and others.

We have updated our group pages to be more useful and efficient for new and experienced members. These group pages can help you quickly find individual data collections that share a common characteristic such as census records from a single country.   For example, you can access all the US Federal Censuses from the US Federal Census Collection page.   All of the United Kingdom and Canadian censuses are organized similarly.

The forms have not changed. We only updated the content around the forms. Below is an example of the US Federal Census group page:

The group pages contain:

• A search form
• A list of data collections below the form
• Help links
• Introduction text to describe the group, explanations of typical data found in the group, and historical context
• A sample image of a famous person or place that is included in the group

From Ancestry.com, you can access the US, United Kingdom and Canada Censuses pages from the left side of the search homepage here:

You can also access them from  the left side of our Census and Voter lists page :

These pages give us the capability to group different collections together in a way that makes some topical search strategies easier.  We hope you find the improved formatting and access to these pages helps make your searches more efficient.  We are expecting to make more of these available throughout the year. 

Laura Dansbury

Forty-six years after the city of Halifax razed a historic black community to make way for a bridge, the mayor is set to apologize.