Did Covid-19 Cancel your Weekly Youth Activity?
Weekly Youth Activity Canceled because of Covid-19? Boys and Girls can do this Family History Scout Activity instead! (Take a Peak at "Extra Credit Activities") ScoutWiki Genealogy Merit Badge Activities for Youth
Free Irish records till March 22
See https://familypedia.wikia.org/wiki/MyHeritage#Some_free_access
Ancestry.com military records briefly free
"Ancestry® will offer free access to the world’s largest US military records collection. Find inspiring stories about heroic family members who served our country.
" Accessible November 8 at 7:00PM EST through November 17 at 11:59PM EST.
" During that time frame, go to www.ancestry.com/honor
" More than 260 million US military records"
as reported by Dick Eastman
FindMyPast free weekend
"Findmypast is free this Remembrance Weekend
"A century on from the first Armistice Day, discover how war has shaped your family’s story.
"Access Findmypast for free* from 8-11 November."
- Terms and conditions
Cheney Tutor Era
Looking for information on the Cheney family during the Tutor ear in the UK. I am trying to trce my family history back from that period
Gail Wrona
Chester Chatter
When I visit old burial grounds. I generally take lots of pictures, including many of gravestones that may not be directly related to my lines. As a result I often end up with people that I can’t tie into any of my existing lines, even though the surname may be the same. Since one of my goals is to properly identify all of these folks, it sometimes presents quite a challenge. One of these challenges come from the burial ground of New Garden Friends Meeting, where I found four Gregg graves that belong to a group of siblings but I cannot place them. The stones, which are all of a very similar style, are as follows:
Margery Gregg: 1812-1895
Isaac H. Gregg : 1816-1904
George Gregg: 1821-189x
Harmon Gregg: 1826-1895
From the 1850 Census for Kennet…
LostCousins free again - to 6 Jan
LostCousins is completely free to use until 6 January 2019. That means that you may be able to contact people who have confidentially registered the same relatives as you have. I found half a dozen of my wife's direct ancestors using LostCousins and got photos! Well worth a try if you have census records of relatives.
From Fighter Pilot to US President - Tribute to Pres GHW Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush sometimes known as Bush 41, was the forty-first President of the United States, serving from 1989 to 1993. Before his presidency, Bush was the forty-third Vice President of the United States in the administration of Ronald Reagan. He has also served as the member of the United States House of Representatives for the 7th district of Texas (1967–1971), the United States Ambassador to the United Nations (1971–1973), Chairman of the Republican National Committee (1973–1974), Chief of the United States Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China (1974–1976), and Director of Central Intelligence (1976–1977).
Bush is the son of Prescott Bush, who served in the United States Senate from 1953 to 1963, and Dorothy Walker…
Meghan married Harry
One and a half hours ago, American mixed-race actress Meghan Markle became the wife of Henry Windsor (1984), commonly known as Prince Harry. 11:40 a.m. GMT, which conveniently meant it was Saturday in nearly all the world. I've tidied up some of Meghan's ancestors' articles but there are a few more to be started!
Big question now - do we change their page names so as to mention the fact that Meghan is now Duchess of Sussex and Harry's her Duke?
- Well, we certainly don't add "Duchess of Sussex" tp her page name, because that is just a married name, not a title in its own right. Thurstan (talk) 21:47, May 19, 2018 (UTC)
- One Wikipedia contributor has stated: "On the morning of the wedding, the Queen officially conferred HRH Prince Harry of Wales …
Sick hard disk
I may be offline for a few days. If too long, ask pattersonjulie88 at gmail.com. Could someone check my recent Italian stuff?
Genealogy of Christ
I've just completed all 77 Generations of the most talked about Genealogy in the World - The Ancestry of Jesus (c6BC-c31). But have you ever wondered about the vast differences in the two tables listed in the New Testament ( Matthew 1 and Luke 3)? Both of them trace His heritage back to King David. Well we have it all answered here!
Free weekend with LostCousins
"From Good Friday until Tuesday 3rd April the LostCousins site will be completely free. This means that you will be able to initiate contact with relatives shown in the New Contacts section of your My Cousins page whether or not you have a LostCousins subscription."
Valentine's Day free access
MyHeritage is offering free access to all marriage records from now until Feb 15. See https://blog.myheritage.com/2018/02/love-is-in-the-air-free-valentines-day-access-to-marriage-records/.
14,487 page views in one day
Something good must be happening to Familypedia. A few weeks ago I noted that our daily page views had briefly jumped up about 50% from the 8,000 average. Now:
- It's time for your daily dose of activity from Familypedia.
- 14,487 Pages Viewed
I wonder whether it's mostly about Doria Ragland, who has been featuring in the "More Familypedia" list quite often recently. Her now famous daughter's wedding is barely 3 months away.
Wikimedia genealogy update
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_genealogy_project discusses the project and invites registered users to indicate support or neutrality or opposition regarding the idea of creating a genealogy site as part of Wikimedia.
Familypedians who have not expressed an opinion are urged to look at that page and choose a stance. At last count there were 96 supporters. The organiser is keen to see 100.
11,238 page views in one day
Our usual page view tally is between 6,000 and 10,000, from what I vaguely recall of skimming the list I get each day. I wonder what gave us a sudden boost to 12,374 yesterday and 11,238 today. I suspect that it was nothing to do with the frequent recent winner, Eduard Einstein (1910-1965), who was in 8th place with only 340 views on the list I brought up a few minutes ago.
Top of today's list was Brahmin gotra system, with 1,952 views, but why would it be suddenly so much more popular than any other page? List of gotras was 2nd with 876.
The home page was 3rd with 761; maybe boosted by people interested in the Mayflower who had read my response to a Dick Eastman blog post about the Pilgrims. But they would surely have gone on to find a relat…
Findmypast offers free access again
Another money-saving tip from Dick Eastman's free newsletter:
'Findmypast makes entire collection of more than 80 million world military records free for five days
'All UK, Irish, Australian, Canadian and US military records free from the 8th to the 12th November 2017
'London, UK.
'Leading family history website Findmypast has today announced that they will be making their entire collection of world military records free for five days in honour of Veterans Day 2017.
'From 8th November until midnight, 12th November 2017, all 80 million records within Findmypast’s “Military, Armed Forces and Conflict” category will be completely free to search and explore, ...'
Jacinda Ardern genealogy
The world's youngest female national leader (and 13th-most-powerful female politician?) - New Zealand's new Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has ancestry traceable back to at least the 12th century. We reproduce some of it here, combining compilations from other genealogy websites and reputable news companies. But her maternal ancestry is shadowy - can you help? Or can the DNA Detectives help?
Tree of Future Princess Meghan of England
Here is a headstart on a fascinating genealogy post out of England today. Check out their cool graphic for the future Princess of England: Rachel Meghan Markle (1981).
- meet Meghan Markle's ancestors - Pioneering black professionals, Civil War soldiers, and immigrants from Prince Harry's England - meet Meghan Markle's ancestors as DailyMailTV reveals her extraordinary roots.
- DailyMailTV reveals Meghan Markle's American family tree - stretching back to before the Revolutionary War and into the pre-Civil War South
- Among her ancestors are a father and son who both fought for the Union in the Civil War, with the younger man's unit present as Confederate commander Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) surrendered, ending the war
- One document found by Dailymai…
Automatic welcome tool
- I've contacted FANDOM after noticing that automatic welcomes were being "signed" by an admin who has not edited in the past 6 weeks, whereas it is meant to use the name of the most-recently-editing admin. I also mentioned that numerous new contributors don't get the automatic welcome at all.
- Staffer George replied, saying that the welcome tool may have stuck, and asking for details. This was my response, emailed a few minutes ago:
Thanks for the reply, George.
I've looked at http://familypedia.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=newusers&user=&page=&year=&month=-1
Not many new contributors among the new registrations, but the two most recent contributors who got the automatic welcome each had AMK152 as the signatory although his last …
Brigham Young
I've just finished assembling all of the relevant family information for the Mormon Prophet Brigham Young (1801-1877). Because of his many plural marriages (55 wives and 59 children) this is probably one of the most complex personal profiles for any individual born in North America. I post this blog notice so that the Familypedia developers can have a benchmark for pushing the limits of their Semantic Media Wiki tools.
MainTour (talk) 20:58, September 28, 2017 (UTC)
Wikimedia genealogy project
See https://tools.wmflabs.org/genealogy/wiki/Main_Page - just the first page of many. Folks keen on seeing a big universal genealogy wiki (as recently discussed on Wikipedia and elsewhere) should have a look and a play. I've been telling the guys they need SMW and can copy our templates, but we will see.
In Honour of Princess of Wales
This blog was created 20 years after her death for future generations to redad an old blog written in 2017.
EDIT: 21 YEARS!
AmericanAncestors.org free for several days
AmericanAncestors.org is free to search and browse for eight days around Independence Day. As noted on a Dick Eastman blog: "The following announcement was written by the New England Historic Genealogical Society:
- June 28, 2017—Boston, Massachusetts—Family historians and genealogists—declare your independence this holiday week from an incomplete family tree! Search and browse free among 1.4 BILLION names on AmericanAncestors.org, the award-winning website of NEHGS.
- From 12:00 a.m. (EDST) on Thursday, June 29th, through 12:00 p.m. midnight (EDST) on Thursday, July 6th, you’ll have complete freedom to roam through all of the online databases on AmericanAncestors.org—with only a Guest Registration. These databases include vital records (state, …
Free weekend again 2 months later
See User_blog:Robin_Patterson/Free_Findmypast_again - ends 26 June
Free Findmypast again
- "From Thursday 27th April until 1st May 2017, over 1.9 billion birth marriage, death & and census records will be completely free to search and explore at Findmypast
- "This includes 595 million UK BMDs, the largest collection available online, over 80 million exclusive parish records you won’t find anywhere else, over 13 million Catholic Sacramental Registers covering England, Ireland, Scotland & the US, and over 168 million United States Marriages"
- "From 09:00 BST, 27th April until 23:00 BST, May 1st 2017, all record matches on Findmypast Family trees and the 1.9 billion records they cover will be completely free to view and explore."
BST is an hour ahead of GMT/UTC. So we in NZ have until 10 a.m. on 2nd May. In my experience you can go on lo…
Alice Lisle was not a Lisle
http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Alice_Lisle_(1624-1696) Was not actually the daughter of John Lisle (1610-1664) and Alicia Beaconshaw (1605-1685) or at least there is no proof in this. I have been doing some reserch lately and it has been shown that was a comon misconseption. Lisle was given as a title, not a last name.
Refrence
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Unknown-356354
https://familysearch.org/tree/person/LK4D-ZR8/details
https://books.google.com/books?id=cmILAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=Alice+Lisle+Hoar&source=bl&ots=xMVvZN6PK2&sig=3Ph7VuzU2hH3SdCApNk3PH7-9Qk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwivsdjyt97SAhVJjlQKHWEuAecQ6AEIUzAJ#v=onepage&q=Alice%20Lisle%20Hoar&f=false - showing it was Bridget Lisle who married John Hoar's brother instead of Alice be…
First Place Listing for Green Harbor Monument
On February 18, (less than two weeks ago) I created a brand new article for the subject Green Harbor Monument, a semi-historic cenotaph in Old Winslow Burial Ground in Marshfield, Massachusetts. In less than two weeks this article has soared to a 1st place ranking on the Bing search engine and 2nd place on the google search engine for searching the term "Green Harbor Monument".
I feel that that this simple SEO exercise validates the magnificant potential of Familypedia to become an suberb resource of this history, especially family history and related landmarks and events. MainTour (talk) 15:24, March 1, 2017 (UTC)
Surname in a particular place
I have created and . Anyone can use them to create new articles or to add to existing "surname in place" articles. Examples are at Smith in Greater London and Forlong in New Zealand.
I can easily create matching templates for localities and for states/provinces. But before I do that, I'm calling for suggestions for improvements. Comments, please!
Ancestry UK free this weekend
Quoting from the LostCousins newsletter - "All UK & Ireland records are free at Ancestry's UK site between Saturday 18th February and Monday 20th February. There are around 2000 datasets in the offer, some big, some small..."
That's UK time, so you probably have over 16 hours left. I'm sorry I didn't notice it earlier.
Smarter userboxes
Wikipedia's userboxes are getting smarter, and we can adapt them.
See , then maybe see how I use it on my user page. Note that there are over a dozen options for indicating some link with the place, then see if you can adapt that to create a multi-option template for your favo[u]rite ancestral or 21st-century place!
Free hints till Jan 15th
Findmypast hinting records FREE until 15 January. Email message says "tree hints will do the hard work for you, searching our record collections for more information on your relatives and even unearthing ancestors you never knew you had. "
This link should take you to the search page (but you may have to log in - e.g. with Facebook - to see transcriptions):
http://www.findmypast.co.uk/start-your-journey/?utm_source=fmp&utm_medium=email
50,000 really good person-pages
Familypedia now has over 50,500 SMW-based articles about individuals. Those are articles that use the best linking and display facilities (although some are admittedly fairly rudimentary). However, we want to have one such article for every person whose existence has ever been documented. We hope all readers are inspired to add pages for their own ancestors and other people.
We have over 10,000 old-style person-articles that need upgrading. If you feel in the mood for some rather mundane but valuable contributions to the wiki, please have a look at Help:Upgrading old-style person articles.
Couple histories - new category and project page
I've created a Category:Couple histories (with a brief explanation on it) and a more explanatory project page with a suggested preload. This can save repetitious typing and amending for a slice of family history that can appropriately appear as a section of each of the articles for a married or unmarried couple and even on the page for any of their children (particularly a first child). It works with one of the lesser-known aspects of template syntax.
The idea arose from my creation of the history of the meeting and marriage of my parents: Bill and Gretta Patterson's life together. Other similar pages had been written by other people but not incorporated in individuals' articles. I've now incorporated one of those too.
I hope one of our guru…
The Cotton Family of Combermere Abbey
Explore 50+ generations of the Cotton Family and their landmark home Combermere Abbey, an old English monastery they acquired in 1354 after it became defunct because of scandal and corruption. Famous guests, including King William III and Wellington have stayed at the home. There have been many noteworthy descendants of the family in both America and England, including the famous Stapleton Cotton, 1st Viscount Combermere (1773-1865), a hero of the Napoleonic Wars and Governor of Barbados.
And no family history is complete without a spooky ghost story based on a bizarre photo from 1891. MainTour (talk) 20:33, September 5, 2016 (UTC)
Phase I of Plymouth Colony completed
I have completed Phase I of the Familypedia:Plymouth Colony project which means completing a Semantic Media Wiki page for each of the 102 known passengers of the Mayflower (and many of their first generation descendants). I hope everyone will find this most helpful in linking their families and other famous people back to the First Families of America. MainTour (talk) 23:07, July 10, 2016 (UTC)
David Cameron and Boris Johnson
Brexit has reminded some genealogists that UK PM David Cameron and one of his challengers, Boris Johnson, are eighth cousins, each descended from an illegitimate union involving a Prince. Familypedia has an article about each of the good people in the relationship path.
Another free week for part of Findmypast
Findmypast.co.uk is offering free access to 65 million world military records and all UK and Irish census records, from 27 June to 4 July.
Robert Oliver Milner
On Robert Oilver Milners page there is info posted that is his brother Carls. Plus it said add a photo. I thought it meant for his page. I added one but don't see it
Thank you
Bob Milner
kelbrit1@yahoo.com
How do you add an offspring table?
I don't know how to add an offspring table, tree, or descendants tab, which is why I add parents, spouses, and children to the page only. Can someone help?
200,000 articles
Well done, folks! We're still comfortably in fourth position in the list of the biggest English-language wikias (which I have just updated; maybe one of you younger people should bookmark that page so as to update it when I'm no longer capable).
We get between 6,000 and 10,000 page views on average days. Definitely doing something right.
Free week of Irish records on FindMyPast
Quoting from recent email:
"Dear Robin,
" We're excited to reveal the launch of 10 million new Irish Catholic Parish Registers on Findmypast today. Covering the majority of Ireland, this incredible record set includes 40 million names, 3,500 registers and over 1,000 parishes. To celebrate, we're making all 110 million Irish records free for everyone until 7th March."
Postscript: Two days later, Ancestry.com announces:
- "We are pleased to announce 10 million historic Catholic Parish records from Ireland have been indexed and are now available online.
- “This is the largest collection of its kind available digitally, and means that Ancestry now offers access to more than 55 million Irish records – making it a significant resource for people around t…
Another free weekend on FindMyPast
22-25 January, free access to historical records. These free weekends are great!
Semantic Forms - current version
I've been adding to the smwtest wiki to try to help us understand the current versions of our SMW extensions. To see the release posting that corresponds to our current version of Semantic Forms, see http://smwtest.wikia.com/wiki/Semantic_Forms_3.3
Those of you who are really interested might "follow" its category and the SMW equivalent.
Half a million pages
We have passed the half-million mark. Just under 40% are articles, and lots of those are about places, but there are tens of thousands of articles about individuals, cleverly linked. Keep it up, folks! -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:06, November 4, 2015 (UTC)
Edit summaries and "minor edit"
Some familypedians are very good at marking edits as "Minor" or giving brief edit summaries. Some of you are less diligent. To minimise the amount of scrolling needed for browsing "Recent Changes", please:
- Check the "Minor edit" box whenever you're creating a standard subpage (sensor, tree, etc), so that we can "Hide minor edits" and thus see more real edits listed.
- Give an edit summary, so as not to have your edit record spread over three lines. One word is often enough - such as "new" or "parents" or "spg" - and if you're copying from Wikipedia you can achieve it in one click with the green button.
-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 07:18, September 29, 2015 (UTC)
More problems with person-pages
Another software change, over which we users have no control, has caused problems with renaming pages and maybe with other things. Please read the notes at the top of Help:Renaming pages.
In 2013 staff remained "committed to keeping [SMW] active and useable on wikis that already had the tool". Let's hope they continue to help with Familypedia, one their biggest wikis.