Who Do You Think You Are? | SBS
Good news for Australian fans of the TV program Who Do You Are? The Australian Television Station SBS has scheduled new episodes of the hugely popular genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are? beginning April 11th 2010.
The new episodes are from the 2009, Series 6 of the UK program Who Do You Think You Are? SBS has only 3 shows listed at present:
April 11th Rick Stein – Celebrated foodie.
April 18th Zoë Wanamaker – Actor.
April 25th Kevin Whately – Actor, famous for playing working-class character Detective Sergeant Lewis in Inspector Morse.
Other episodes in Series 6 of UK genealogy TV show, Who Do You Think You Are? include Fiona Bruce and Rory Bremner, which hopefully SBS will broadcast.
Palaeography | The National Archives Tutorial
For many Australians, it is more than likely that you have English ancestors and a great source of information can be retrieved from English census and church records. But the older the records we find, the more challenging they can be to read and decipher.
While this can be frustrating to most of us, it also can be down right off putting. Your research will undoubtedly uncover some of these documents at some point, and some understanding of paleography is required.
What is Palaeography?
Palaeography, is the study of ancient writings and inscriptions. If you are studying old English documents, you will encounter not only the Old English script but, going further back in time, ecclesiastical records written in Latin.
Interested in palaeograpgy? The UK National Archives palaeography web tutorial will help you learn to read the handwriting found in documents written in English between 1500 and 1800. This is a brilliant interactive tutorial about paleography.
By reading the practical tips and working through the documents in the tutorial, you will find that it becomes much easier to read older documents. The National Archives palaeography tutorial contains 10 documents supplied in order of difficulty. Each document is offered alongside an historical background, a glossary, notes on the palaeography, a sample alphabet taken from each document and a full transcript.
For a bit of fun, The National Archives has a palaeography game. A 17th century woman has been accused of a crime and as her punishment she faces the ducking stool. To free her from the ducking stool, you must correctly transcribe certain text. Will you be the one to free the maiden from this horrible punishment?
Free Family Tree Maker
When I first started compiling my family tree, it was the old way, with pen and paper. While this might be a good way to begin, after a while I needed to use a family tree maker program to create a GED file. I could then upload the GED file to genealogy sites like Ancestry.com or RootsWeb for all the world to see and hopefully get in touch with unknown relatives.
Being the old scrooge that I am, it not only had to be easy to use, it also had to be a free family tree maker. After trying a number of free family tree maker downloads, I could not decide on a winner, so I use two different free family tree maker programs.
Free Family Tree Maker Starter Edition The Family Tree Maker Starter Edition has limited features, but it has everything to help you create a GED file for you to upload. This was the easiest free family tree maker to use.
MyHeritage Family Tree Builder A bit more advanced but some of the free features really blew me away. Creates great PDF books, reports and charts.
Other free family tree makers available are Legacy 7.4 Family Tree and Gramps.
Another nice free program I came across was UncleGED. This is a free GEDCOM-to-HTML conversion tool that will allow you create web pages to show off the family history data that you have collected and exported to GEDCOM files.
You can see a example of UncleGED pages here
Sponsors
Genealogy Links
Communities
