Genealogists with ancestors who operated estates or plantations in the British colonies have potential discoveries in one of Ancestry.com’s latest databases. There’s also hope within for those with enslaved ancestors to find the earliest mention of them in the record books. Since great numbers of people have emigrated to the U. S. from the Caribbean, this dataset is especially valuable for many Americans.

The database is titled “Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1812-1834.” It is accessible by paid subscription to Ancestry, and includes the names of millions of slaves (some with surnames), owners, Read more »

It’s always encouraging to discover new projects that honor our ancestors. One way to make certain they are remembered is to preserve their burial data for future generations, especially when tombstones can become difficult to read over time.

Genealogy and history enthusiasts in the town of Westport, Massachusetts have done just that, and put it all into an online database called the Westport Historic Private Cemeteries. The project was years in the making and brought a number of dedicated volunteers together to make it happen. Read more »

The barriers to finding ancestors with ties to slavery continue to be pushed aside. The latest example of bringing enslaved ancestors out of the shadows can be found at the Lowcountry Africana website.

To quote from this data-rich site, it serves to “document the family and cultural heritage of African Americans in the historic rice-growing areas of South Carolina, Georgia and extreme northeastern Florida, an area that scholars and preservationists have identified as a distinct culture area, home to the rich Gullah/Geechee culture.” Read more »

It took years to make it happen, but one of the newest online databases on the National Archives website contains long-awaited military records. It includes the names of nine million Americans who saw service in World War II, both in the United States Army and the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

The database can be searched on the National Archives website via its Access to Archival Databases (AAD) and documents the period 1938 - 1946. Read more »

In just a few days, genealogy researchers will have a new online database to sample. On Wednesday, the National Archives and Footnote.com are slated to unveil a new interactive Vietnam War Memorial, complete with the largest photo of “The Wall” on the web.

According to a news release, the partnership involved extracting information from National Archives electronic records of each Vietnam casualty and linking it to each name on the Wall. Read more »

Jewish genealogy is getting a boost thanks to the combined efforts of two companies in Israel. A genealogy and social network search engine is being launched by Haaretz.com and partner Famillion with the goal of uniting Jewish people all over the world.

Haaretz.com is the online edition of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, while Famillion is a start-up genealogy company seeking to build a giant digital family tree. Famillion’s focus is on the link Read more »

Finding details on the everyday lives of our ancestors is always a bonus to genealogy research. Hopefully they had more happy times than tragedies, but if tales have been passed down about bad times, the website GenDisasters.com might prove worth a visit.

With the tagline “Events That Touched Our Ancestors’ Lives,” the website is further described as “a genealogy site, compiling information on the historic disasters, events, and tragic accidents our ancestors endured, as well as, information about their life and death.” It features articles (some with photos) from disasters in the U. S. and Canada dating as far back as 1755, when an earthquake shook Read more »

Local and county histories have been published across the country for well over 100 years. Just imagine all the names they contain! Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to search through them all from one convenient location?

Say no more, because the Family History Archive has you covered. The joint effort between the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Brigham Read more »

The internet’s largest genealogical resource is on another roll. Ancestry.com has added one database after another (at last count, there were 24,000) since its debut on the web, and now one of its latest projects is also growing by leaps and bounds.

This week Ancestry.com announced that more than 275 million individual profiles and more than 3 million family trees have been created on the site since it debuted new tree-building and sharing tools in July 2006. Read more »

Genealogy networking is all the rage on the internet, and one fast-growing website in that genre is announcing its latest improvements.

The free to join FamilyLink.com is part of the even faster growing WorldVitalRecords.com family of websites.

This week FamilyLink debuted a brand new look. While it’s still in its beta phase, Read more »