Here is some interesting tidbits going on in the genealogy world:
- The University of Indianapolis is teaming up with Ancestry.com in a first-of-its-kind initiative to encourage its students to explore and reflect on how their family history impacts their identity. All UIndy students, faculty and staff have been granted access to all Ancestry.com content available from computers and mobile devices anywhere on campus, as well as to on-campus identity workshops and seminars.
- ScotlandsPeople Media Website has released Scottish Wills & Testaments from 1902 to 1925. The newly released records—totaling 392,595—offer insight of life in Scotland during the early 20th century and reach across all social classes, from famous industrialists/philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie to the impoverished inmates of the nation’s poorhouses. Check out Facts & Figures, Famous Scots and Interesting Stories.
- Family tree building wiki site WikiTree has released MatchBot, an automated matching tool that crawls the sites database checking for high-probability matches in the trees on the site. When it finds a match, it emails the tree managers with a match proposal. They can merge the profiles, create an “unmerged match” or reject the merge. Until now, members discovered such matches using traditional searches and the not-automated FindMatches tool.
- In a new blog series on Ancestry.com, the family of Rob and Kathy Brown and their five children are embarking on a family history journey in an RV decorated with Ancestry.com branding. The Browns will travel for six to nine months and more than 10,000 miles, through 42 states and 40 major cities, discovering the stories of their ancestors and blogging along the way. Read blog posts in the Great Ancestry Adventure series here and check out photos on Facebook here.
- The National Archives of Ireland now includes a new genealogy-specific website. The following collections are freely available on the site: Census of Ireland, 1901 and 1911; Tithe Applotment Books, 1823-1837; and Soldiers’ Wills, 1914-1917. More collections will launch in the near future.
- Mocavo, a genealogy search engine and now a growing records site, has added a free collection of about 17,000 high school and college yearbooks. The collection comprises nearly 3.5 million pages and stretching over 100 years of history.