Prospective students can pay and enroll via the Pharos website – www.pharostutors.com at a price of £23.99 or a discounted price of £19.99 for members of the Society of Genealogists. 
 
The course is suitable for genealogists who have had some experience in family history research in England & Wales but who have found they have been unable to identify where their ancestor might have come from.

The Irish Times Digital Archives is FREE from March 27/09 to April 5/09. It covers the years 1859 to 2009.

London Metropolitan Archives

Now you can explore London’s rich history through the lives of your ancestors with the launch of these fascinating historical records at Ancestry.co.uk

The records range from the early 1900s all the way back to the 1500s – around 300 years before Civil Registration. So they can help you go beyond Census, Birth, Marriage & Death records.  Currently released is Board of Guardians Deaths and Burials collection 1834-1906; and Births and Baptisms 1834-1934.

There are more than 77 million records in total, which will be released regularly over the next year or so. You’ll be able to see records first-hand such as parish records, non-conformist registers, electoral registers, parish poor records, boards of guardians, wills, transportation sessions – and much more. Watch out for more releases soon.

About LMA

London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) is the archive repository for many London-wide organisations and is the largest local authority record office in the UK.

The archives of the City of London Corporation (COL) and the former Greater London Council (GLC), London County Council (LCC), Middlesex County Council (MCC) and their predecessors are held there. LMA also holds records for many religious, public, business, local authority and other organisations based in London. The dates of items that can be found there range from medieval to the present day, and their collections are constantly expanding. At the moment, there are documents to fill around 72 km worth of archives – an enormous amount of information about the capital and its people. This material dates from 1067 to 2006 and is an important part of London life, its past, present and future.

The U.S. version of Who Do You Think You Are? will be broadcast in a few weeks. The genealogy-based television program has been scheduled to start  on April 20 on NBC. 

From producer Lisa Kudrow comes a new series that is unlike anything on U.S. television. Based on the popular BBC documentary series, Who Do You Think You Are? takes viewers on an inspiring and personal journey into the past of America’s best-known celebrities, sharing their emotion and surprise as they uncover stories of heroism, tragedy, love and betrayal that lie at the heart of their family story. At the same time, the series celebrates the making of our great nation and the people who traveled here in search of freedom and opportunity.

The program will explore the family histories of celebrities including Lisa Kudrow, Sarah Jessica Parker and Susan Sarandon.

I wonder whether we’ll be able to see it over here in the UK in due course?

A British historian has stumbled across records from World War One that have been virtually untouched for 90 years.

The records contain the personal details of soldiers who died in the war and may reveal the final resting places of many of them.

You can watch an interview on the BBC website in which Peter Barton shows Robert Hall some of his findings at the Red Cross archive in Geneva at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7940569.stm.

RootsMagic, Inc. announced RootsMagic 4 public beta, the latest version of the award-winning genealogy software which makes researching, organizing, and sharing your family history easy and enjoyable. During the public beta period, all are invited to download and experience the software, free of charge.

RootsMagic 4 beta is available now for free at http://www.rootsmagic.com/preview.

“RootsMagic 4 is the biggest release in our 20-year history of making genealogy software,” said Bruce Buzbee, president.  “We’ve updated RootsMagic to work with the latest genealogical technologies available today, while staying true to our mission to make family history easy, accessible, and fun.

RootsMagic 4 boasts an impressive list of new features including integrated web search, improved SourceWizard for citing sources, sharing events among multiple persons, creating pre-defined groups of persons, person and place mapping, recording DNA tests, and improved navigation and data entry. RootsMagic 4 is also one of the only desktop genealogy programs certified to work with “New FamilySearch”.

From Ancestry.com

At the end of January Ancestry.com made 134 million General Records Office (GRO) UK birth records for England and Wales dating from 1837 to 2005 available online for the first time, fully searchable by name, registration date and district. This was done as an update to the existing England & Wales Birth Index collection.

Many of you may be familiar with the previous GRO Birth Index that was indexed by surname range only. A search would produce a list of all pages on which the searched name might appear, but referenced by the first and last name on those pages only. Now, every name in the GRO Birth Index is individually searchable. 

The newly updated Birth Index is comprised of only two separate collections instead of the three collections that existed previously. The England & Wales, FreeBMD Birth Index, 1837-1915 includes births registered from 1837 to 1915 and was keyed by FreeBMD, a group of independent volunteers dedicated to transcribing civil registration indexes of birth, marriage and death records for England and Wales.

The second, England & Wales, Birth Index, 1916-2005, includes the birth index from 1916 to 1983, which has been transcribed by Ancestry.com, and the GRO published index from 1984 to 2005. Images of the index are only available up to 1983.

We are currently working to also fully index the GRO Marriage and Death indexes. When complete, more than 250 million individual birth, marriage and death (BMD) records will be searchable. As ‘core’ record sets, this major enhancement to Ancestry’s BMD collection will be of great benefit to all UK family history researchers.

Royal Marines records available online and free at SoG Library. TNA announced on 8 January 2009 that the service registers of some 110,000 seamen who joined the Royal Marines between 1842 and 1936 are now available to search and download from Documents Online which can be searched and downloaded free at the SOG. You can search under surname, forename, register number and date of enlistment, and may uncover the names of ships and shore stations served on, details of conduct, medal entitlement and much more.

The new series of Who Do You Think You Are? will now begin at 9pm on BBC One on Monday 2 February, the BBC has announced. The series was originally reported to start on Wednesday 4 February, but the BBC has since announced changes to the schedule. The impressionist Rory Bremner will kick-off the much-anticipated new series by delving into his family’s fascinating military past. Newsreader Fiona Bruce will trace her Scottish roots a week later. The series will also feature chef Rick Stein, actress Zoë Wanamaker, and actor Kevin Whately.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/whodoyouthinkyouare/

If you’ve got Irish ancestors, you might be interested in knowing that the Irish Civil Registration Indexes from 1845-1958 are now online at Family Search.