GenDisasters is a genealogy site, compiling information on the historic disasters, events, and tragic accidents of Canada and the U.S. that our ancestors endured, as well as, information about their life and death. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Dec 9, 2008 - 12 comments

For decades, the LDS church microfilmed old records of genealogical interest and stashed them in the Granite Mountain Record Vault for safekeeping. Copies could be ordered and viewed at local Family History Centers. Now, through massive digitization and volunteer indexing efforts, those records are starting to come online. [more inside]
posted by Knappster on Jul 27, 2008 - 38 comments

Kindo - Web 2.0 Genealogy
posted by dash_slot- on Feb 10, 2008 - 24 comments

Can you tell this photo was taken at 4:52pm, on either May 5^th or August 10^th? Forensic Genealogy uses historical records and small clues in pictures learn as much as they can about old photographs of unknown provenance. Want to try it yourself? Check out their weekly quiz. via GAMES [more inside]
posted by Upton O'Good on Nov 20, 2007 - 44 comments

As advances in DNA testing allow us to discover our genetic origins in ever-greater detail, many people are making surprising discoveries. Especially in the melting-pot that is the USA. Of course there are always those who feel that access to such information about who we are will only lead to bad things
posted by nowonmai on Jul 15, 2007 - 46 comments

Philosophy of History is what the page is called; it's by a philosophy professor, Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., who's a libertarian and obsessed with Leonard Nelson and the Friesian School, whatever the hell that is. Never mind all that. If you scroll down past the essays and the Military History section and the calendars and the book reviews, you get to the Reference Resources. As he says, "Not all of history may be covered here, but a very extensive fragment of it certainly is." Take, as one tiny example, Margraves & Counts of Flanders. There's a longish introduction and a colored map, then there are lists of rulers and detailed genealogies accompanied by more text, then similarly for the Counts of Artois, the Kings & Dukes of Brittany, the Counts of Anjou, the Dukes of Normandy, the Counts of Blois & Champagne, the Counts of Toulouse, the Dukes of Aquitaine and Dukes of Gascony, the Lords & Counts of Foix, the Kings and Lords of Man, the Dukes of Marlborough and Earls of Spencer (including a detailed list of the Vanderbilts), the Dukes of Buccleuch, Grafton, & St. Albans, and the Dukes of Berwick & Fitzjames. That's one page. There are dozens and dozens of them. The Prime Ministers of the Dominions, the Kings of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, the Islâmic Rulers of North Africa, the Emperors of India, China, & Japan, all the way down to the Mangïts of Bukhara, 1747-1920. If you have any interest in history, This Site's For You.
posted by languagehat on Jun 23, 2007 - 48 comments

Geni. Family Tree 2.0. [via]
posted by muckster on Jan 16, 2007 - 25 comments

Where did your ancestors live in 1840? 1880? 1920? A nifty little map showing how names traveled across the US.
posted by The corpse in the library on Dec 10, 2006 - 22 comments

When Library and Archives Canada placed online images of the 1901, 1906 and 1911 census, Automated Genealogy provided opportunity for volunteers to transcribe names into a database. Now the two early documents (1901, 1906) and most of the 1911 are fully indexed and searchable with links to the original image pages. Further projects are underway to link names between the documents and to other online sources, such as The Halifax Explosion Book of Remembrance and the British Home Children.
posted by TimTypeZed on Aug 15, 2006 - 8 comments

Who's Your Grandaddy? Ancestry.com "has compiled an online database of information on 500 million people, culled from every U.S. census record from 1790 to 1930" that "includes screen shots of the handwritten forms filled out by census-takers." Usually you have to pay to access the records, but they're providing three days of free access.
posted by kirkaracha on Jun 22, 2006 - 80 comments

The Surname Profiler Project Website. A recent research project based at University College London (UCL) has investigated the distribution of surnames in Great Britain, both current and historic, in order to understand patterns of regional economic development, population movement and cultural identity. Start a search here.
posted by davehat on Feb 2, 2006 - 54 comments

An awkward resemblance to a certain eigenface might get you pulled aside in Las Vegas. Prof. Hilbert is probably spinning in his grave.
posted by Rothko on Dec 12, 2005 - 24 comments

Parallel Wales. They came from Wales, and settled in places called Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. They brought new contributions to the American fabric, but also old names that took on new meanings. Now, more than a hundred years later, what echoes remain? (via Projects)
posted by selfnoise on Nov 18, 2005 - 10 comments

Benny's Postcards "is devoted to the postcards my grandfather collected from approximately 1906-1918. The collection is comprised of 435 postcards, most of which were produced in Russia, Poland and Germany." [coral cache]
posted by strikhedonia on Nov 3, 2005 - 5 comments

The family trees of American politicians - There are those with very long blue blood pedigrees, and there are those with very short and unknown pedigrees. There are also some surprises, like a certain Democratic senator and possible '08 Veep pick being somewhat closely related to the current Veep, or that certain ex-mayors have family trees that were apparently a bit inbred back in the old country. Other fun tidbits: Newt Gingrich's father was illegitimate, John Kerry is related to the rabbi who created the Golem of Prague, Pat Buchanan is related to both FDR and Marilyn Manson, Wesley Clark's father was a Kohan, Martin Luther King was born Michael Louis King, and Gary Hart was born Gary Hartpence, which was in turn derived from an ancestor named James Eberhart Pence. (more non-politicians here)
posted by Asparagirl on Oct 3, 2005 - 18 comments

Echoes of DaVinci code? A scholar in Wales found (rediscovered?) a 400+ year old folio at Llandovery College in Wales that may shed light further light on the genealogy of Christ. Whether a hoax or not, 'tis always interesting what you may find hiding in the stacks when you're just perusing things. [via original article at Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter]
posted by PeteyStock on May 2, 2005 - 16 comments

The Mathematics Genealogy Project. A service of the Department of Mathematics at North Dakota State University, the project intends to "compile information about ALL the mathematicians of the world. [...] It is our goal to list all individuals who have received a doctorate in mathematics." Seven generations from one of my recent professors back to Gauss, six back to Felix Klein (of Erlangen Program and bottle fame), eight back to Jacobi, and nine back to Poisson and Fourier, then Lagrange, then Euler, then the Bernoulli brothers, then Leibniz, and then it blew up at infinity.
posted by gramschmidt on Dec 21, 2004 - 5 comments

Today, the National Archive made over 5 million records of World War I Medal Cards available online. Search for an ancestor, or an historical name. As an example, here's Winston Churchill's record [pdf]. It costs £3.50 to download an image such as this, but the search function is thorough. I tracked down a relative from a general search of my surname.
posted by davehat on Nov 13, 2004 - 2 comments

Disney Character Family Trees
posted by Orange Goblin on Nov 30, 2003 - 6 comments

The Best-Kept Data-Superpower Secret on the Web RootsWeb is one of the older sites on the Net, and has one of the densest data collections, but it gets very few props. Almost all of the (we're talking terabytes here) data is a.) free; b.) user-contributed. It was open-source and public domain when Linus Torvalds, bless his soul, was still muddling through high school. Sugar-daddy site Ancestry.com does a lot of advertising, but you hardly ever heard about homely, brilliant RootsWeb. RootsWeb hosts many of sites that make up the WorldGenWeb Project, a loose network of genealogical and historical data repositories organized by locality, from the AfghanistanGenWeb through the USGenWeb all the way to the ZimbabweGenWeb. Rootsweb's Social Security Death Index UI is excellent--use it to search for a record amongst 70 million available. The WorldConnect database offers up the family trees of 298,212,965 people. Remember the domain, because after this when you Google, you'll be impressed (I believe) by how many content-heavy sites are hosted by RootsWeb. Any other RootsWeb-hosted sites that MeFites enjoy?
posted by jengod on Oct 7, 2003 - 12 comments

Got roots? The American Family Immigration History Center has made available online the passenger manifests for all the ships that docked at Ellis Island from 1892 to 1924. It's searchable by name, and you can look at a photostat of the actual page of the manifest. I found my great-uncle (Demetrios Calisperis, from Samos, Greece, debarked Ellis Island Nov 1907, at age 11 -- hiya, Uncle Jim!). Free to register and search. Paid membership lets you build a family scrapbook about your ancestor that can be searched by other researchers.
posted by BitterOldPunk on Jul 14, 2003 - 9 comments

There's One In Every Family: You know that uncle whose name can't be mentioned at table, without loud swallowing, dark looks and deathly silence ensuing? The shady New Orleans grandmother whose photographs have been hastily removed from the family album, though the red stain from one of her garters remains? Call them black sheep or family skeletons, the Internet keeps making it easier and easier to dig them up and out. Outing your forebears and close family members has become an up and coming thing. In other words: I'll show you my black sheep if you show me yours.
posted by MiguelCardoso on Feb 23, 2003 - 31 comments

Don't say nobody told you. Here is NARA's Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, showing every comment, every bill signing, every communication, executive order, and interview the president has made: everything that goes into the history books...
posted by swift on Aug 15, 2002 - 6 comments

I am descended from Charlemagne! And you are too. I found tantalizing ideas in this Atlantic Interview of Steve Olson. Unfortunately, his Atlantic article is not available (for free, anyways). He mentioned, in the interview, the work of Humphrys and Chang. A fwe Google searches later, among a labyrinth of pages about Royal descents, I FOUND! what I was looking for [More inside]
posted by vacapinta on May 11, 2002 - 13 comments

Muhammad O' Ali. Geneologists have uncovered his Irish roots. His great grandfather was an Irish emigree who married an African American woman in Kentucky.
posted by Lanternjmk on Feb 8, 2002 - 12 comments

"Mr. Dyson, I'm pleased to inform you that your grandmother didn't sleep around."
posted by lagado on Jun 10, 2001 - 8 comments

I come from a long line of inbreeders. No more laughing at them there bills from the hills! It seems all us white folk are related to only 50 frisky ancestors!
posted by srboisvert on May 10, 2001 - 14 comments

hitler's secret? - i wonder. take note of the nationality. a search for that name (Czarne Hitler) on google yielded lots of mostly polish discussions. any ideas?
posted by subpixel on May 2, 2001 - 9 comments

Gendex: A Family History Database For some time, I have been casually researching ways to store and query complex kin relations. I may have found just the model I want, developed by none other than the CJC-LDS (Mormons!) Specifically by the family history department.
The FAMily record is used to record ... family unions caused by two people becoming the parents of a child. There can be no more than one HUSB/father and one WIFE/mother listed in each FAM_RECORD. If, for example, a man participated in more than one family union, then he would appear in more than one FAM_RECORD.
And thank God they thought of a bigamy data model! Now, will it export XML?
posted by rschram on Apr 25, 2001 - 6 comments

The American Family Immigration History Center™ will use state-of-the-art interactive computer technology to bring the immigration records on ancestors who came to the USA as long as a century ago to one's fingertips. The data is being taken directly from the ships' passenger manifests, which are currently on microfilm at the National Archives and Records Administration. To be completed in Spring 2001.
posted by frednorman on Apr 17, 2001 - 6 comments

A rather interesting article on how scientists how found that people with the same surname usually share some common DNA. This could soon be used to track down the original founder of your last name.
posted by Mark on Apr 5, 2000 - 3 comments