Here is some interesting tidbits going on in the genealogy world:
- FamilySearch has announced its US Immigration and Naturalization community indexing project is halfway to its goal of creating a free online collection of US passenger lists, border crossing records, naturalization records, and other immigration documents. Two months into the project, 85,000 volunteers have indexed more than 15 million records.FamilySearch hopes to have 30 million records indexed by the end of the year. You can see what’s been indexed so far and register to help out at FamilySearch.org/immigration.
- According to Ancestry.com, actor George Clooney is Abraham Lincoln’s half-first cousin five times removed through Lincoln’s maternal grandmother, Nancy Hanks. The men also share a home state of Kentucky: Clooney was born in Lexington; Lincoln, in Hardin County.Most genealogists understand such connections aren’t really big news—with every generation, each of us has exponentially more cousins, and some of them are bound to be famous, others are bound to be “not so” famous.