Millions of names from hundreds of rolls of microfilm containing German records are coming soon to the genealogy database website WorldVitalRecords.com, thanks to a new collaboration.

FamilySearch recently announced an inaugural project in concert with FamilyLink.com, Inc., to digitize and index a valuable German genealogy collection containing over 3.5 million names from the period of 1650-1875. Read more »

Genealogists with ancestors who operated estates or plantations in the British colonies have potential discoveries in one of Ancestry.com’s latest databases. There’s also hope within for those with enslaved ancestors to find the earliest mention of them in the record books. Since great numbers of people have emigrated to the U. S. from the Caribbean, this dataset is especially valuable for many Americans.

The database is titled “Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1812-1834.” It is accessible by paid subscription to Ancestry, and includes the names of millions of slaves (some with surnames), owners, Read more »

It’s always encouraging to discover new projects that honor our ancestors. One way to make certain they are remembered is to preserve their burial data for future generations, especially when tombstones can become difficult to read over time.

Genealogy and history enthusiasts in the town of Westport, Massachusetts have done just that, and put it all into an online database called the Westport Historic Private Cemeteries. The project was years in the making and brought a number of dedicated volunteers together to make it happen. Read more »

Genealogy pursuits often give way to historical excursions as researchers try to understand the times in which their ancestors lived. If, as the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” then the website Old Pictures (old-picture.com), is worth a million or more.

The description “an educational site with a wide variety of old photographs,” simply doesn’t do this site justice, and seeing truly is believing. Categories like “Defining Moments” and “Themed Collections,” feature truly beautifully clear historical photographs. There’s everything from Native American chiefs to European American inventors, and lots more in between. Read more »

The barriers to finding ancestors with ties to slavery continue to be pushed aside. The latest example of bringing enslaved ancestors out of the shadows can be found at the Lowcountry Africana website.

To quote from this data-rich site, it serves to “document the family and cultural heritage of African Americans in the historic rice-growing areas of South Carolina, Georgia and extreme northeastern Florida, an area that scholars and preservationists have identified as a distinct culture area, home to the rich Gullah/Geechee culture.” Read more »

In just a few days, genealogy researchers will have a new online database to sample. On Wednesday, the National Archives and Footnote.com are slated to unveil a new interactive Vietnam War Memorial, complete with the largest photo of “The Wall” on the web.

According to a news release, the partnership involved extracting information from National Archives electronic records of each Vietnam casualty and linking it to each name on the Wall. Read more »

Alex Haley would be proud. More than 30 years after his successful book “Roots” soared genealogy research to new heights, Harvard professor and genealogist Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is carrying the torch and getting set to light the fire of the popular hobby again.

If you missed Dr. Gates’ PBS programs “African American Lives” in 2006, and the follow-up “Oprah’s Roots” in 2007, you won’t want to miss “African American Lives 2″, coming in February. In his previous programs, Gates revealed amazing details about the lives of ancestors who persevered through the bonds of slavery to produce descendants whose names are among the world’s most famous in their fields. Read more »

The internet’s largest genealogical resource is on another roll. Ancestry.com has added one database after another (at last count, there were 24,000) since its debut on the web, and now one of its latest projects is also growing by leaps and bounds.

This week Ancestry.com announced that more than 275 million individual profiles and more than 3 million family trees have been created on the site since it debuted new tree-building and sharing tools in July 2006. Read more »

Newspaper research is one of the most important areas of interest for genealogists, and thanks to a pair of database-rich websites, this kind of research might be made a lot easier.

On Monday, newspaper record giant NewspaperARCHIVE.com announced its partnership with World Vital Records. The agreement Read more »