Lost Ancestors Project

NEWS

The Federation of Family History Societies and FindMyPast are joining forces for a major new transcription project to help trace missing ancestors called the Lost Ancestors Project.  FFHS/FMP would like to invite family history societies and any family historians to help with this project. It involves indexing information from a collection of UK strays, kindly donated to the FFHS by Dennis Pearce and many other collectors.  Thing is, the deadline date for volunteers is 30th January - see the FFHS site and FMP site for the full story.

Ancestry.co.uk's January newsletter is now available.  Worth a quick look for us all, I should say.

The SoG have recently made two announcements of interest.  The first concerns a little more info about the forthcoming BBC2 show which I mentioned back on 20th January, namely, The Reel History of Britain - see here.  The second is a special offer for their members for a major forthcoming conference in London on the subject of Early Modern Ancestors - see here.

And see here for reviews of the latest books of Irish interest - with plenty of history among the titles.

ON THIS DAY

Birth of...
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer, in Salzburg, in 1756;
Lewis Carroll, English author, in Daresbury, Cheshire, in 1832.

Death of...
Sir Francis Drake, English explorer, in 1596.  He died of dysentery when he was about 55, while anchored off the coast of Portobelo, Panama.  Before dying he asked to be dressed in his full armour, and was buried at sea in a lead coffin, near Portobelo.  Divers continue to search for the coffin to this day.

1944: The 900-day Siege of Leningrad ends.

1945: Auschwitz death camp liberated by the Allies - a day now known annually as Holocaust Memorial Day.  Prof Jeremy Black looks at how attitudes have changed to this central piece of European history at the BBC History Magazine website.