Ancestry and Ireland, Mainly

We'll begin with Ancestry.com and another 'freebie' offer from the genea giants - this time concerning US WWII Internment records. The best place to go for further information is probably here - and the period of free access runs until 23rd February. [My thanks to Christine Woodcock for pointing this one out].

You may care to take a look at the Ancestry updates page, too, as I see that a good few new entries have popped up on the same - the most recent being updated datasets pertaining to Irish Catholic records.

Irish news from elsewhere includes:

• Index to Ardagh Wills, 1690-1857;
• History Festival of Ireland, Co.Carlow (June);
• Call for papers, Eighteenth Century Ireland Society Conference.

Diamond subscribers to TheGenealogist will be interested to hear of the addition of new burial records covering the counties of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire - click here, then click on 'News' near the top of the page (and scroll down a tiny bit).

Time to remind Scottish researchers of the latest updates from Electric Scotland.

GENUKI, that essential port of call for genealogists, is, of course, regularly updated and is always worth a visit now and again to see if anything new has popped up. Now, not all counties have an 'updates page' which I can keep tabs on - but some do, and I see that the pages for Lincolnshire, Devon, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire have been tampered with lately. Why not check out your areas of interest, though, just in case? Home page here.

An interesting bit of tittle-tattle re. Charles Dickens has surfaced here.

And there's an extraordinary piece on fashion predictions for the 20th century (from 1893).

From Twitter:

• US 'Death Master File' controversy (from @GrowFamilyTree);
• Hitler's secret son? (from @GrowFamilyTree);
• Irish articles index (from @GenSocIreland);
• British Library Sounds (from @melissanbyrd);
• New radio sitcom set in Register Office! (from @SoGGenealogist);
• Richard Dawkins' dodgy ancestry (from @genesreunited).

Ancestry quotes:

My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because, even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions.
[Elayne Boosler, US comedian]

When our relatives are at home we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.
[George Bernard Shaw]

We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.
[Jimmy Carter]