ACC Omnibus Edition: 23 May 2010

Anglo-Celtic Connections is listed as one of the 50 Best Blogs for Genealogy Geeks by OnlineUniversities.com. Read the full list at: www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/05/50-best-blogs-for-genealogy-geeks/

In this issue:
Royal Mail War Memorials
NARA Creative, LAC Boring
LAC adds Form 30As, digitized but unindexed
TNA Podcast: the story of the Jews in England, 1066 - 1290
Web Tip
Editorial - Gedcom in the Genome

Royal Mail War Memorials
Royal Mail is thought to be the second largest custodian of war memorials in Britain, behind only the Church. A database at http://catalogue.postalheritage.org.uk/dserve/bpma_docs/memorials.html lists known memorials, mostly for the Great War. It does not index names. There are images of some of the memorials where you can read names. The site is worth browsing, especially if you have a Royal Mail employee ancestor.




NARA Creative, LAC Boring
Under the heading "Jeopardy!" at the National Archives, Dick Eastman carries an article about US National Archivist David Ferriero who will "will put on his best Alex Trebek impersonation and quiz audience members on their historical knowledge. http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2010/05/jeopardy-at-the-national-archives.html

LAC adds Form 30As, digitized but unindexed
310 microfilms, T-14939 to T-15248, in series RG 76 C1j are now available for viewing on the LAC website. Form 30A relates to arrivals by ship, mostly in the timeframe 1921-1924, one per passenger:

Each Form 30A usually included the following details:

• name of ship;
• date of sailing;
• port and date of arrival;
• name;
• age;
• occupation;
• birthplace;
• race;
• citizenship;
• religion;
• destination; and
• name of the nearest relative in the country from which the immigrant came.

While there is no name search capability the entries are in quasi-alphabetical order. Refer to the help file at http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/microform-digitization/006003-130-0003-e.html?PHPSESSID=2a7k8oqp299ii26bfvnsmlpst5 to identify the film you need to search.

Ancestry.ca subscribers and those with access to Ancestry Library Edition would be advised to try Ancestry's name index.

TNA Podcast: the story of the Jews in England, 1066 - 1290
Following a long break for the UK election TNA is now posting podcasts. In Dependence, intolerance and expulsion: the story of the Jews in England, 1066 - 1290, Adrian Jobson and Sean Cunningham relate the story from William the Conqueror inviting Jews into England to the Edict of Expulsion in July 1290 under Edward I. The time period covered is too early to be of interest to most genealogists. The presentation also suffers from not having access to the visual aids. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/podcasts/

Web Tip
Want to capture information from the web for your own use, perhaps to include in a family history or a presentation? Most people know you can do a screen grab using the PrtSc button on a PC. Windowa 7 has a Snipping Tool that does a better job and allows you to capture just part of the screen. But neither of these methods allows you to capture parts of the page outside those displayed. Lifehacker has a post on how to do this. Some interesting alternative means are mentioned in the comments. Read it at: http://lifehacker.com/5540656/capture-full-page-screenshots-entire-web-pages-as-a-continuous-image

Editorial - Gedcom in the Genome
DNA is the most natural of genealogical records. Half your DNA comes from your father, half from your mother. In turn their DNA came from their parents. Although it's a genealogical record it doesn't contain names as we are accustomed to seeing in genealogical records, just unique DNA sequences.

In these days of genetic engineering that could change. You've probably read about the announcement of the creation of a new organism with a synthetic genome, capable of reproducing itself, made by a group headed by J Craig Venter. What didn't get as much mention was that he inserted a segment of DNA with the names of 46 scientists on the project and several quotations written out in a secret code and saw them reproduced in the daughter cells.

The quotations were: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life," from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; "See things not as they are but as they might be," which comes from American Prometheus, a biography of nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer; and Richard Feynman's famous words: "What I cannot build I cannot understand."

Can the day be very far in the future when science will offer the opportunity to insert a parent's name, and perhaps their whole known ancestry, into the DNA of the egg or sperm used for in-vitro fertilization?