This week’s news includes: NBC has purchased rights to create an American version of the popular BBC reality series, Who Do You Think You Are?; NARA recently announced the availability of nearly 9 million WWII U.S. Army enlistment records at its Web site, but be aware that there were many records that could not be scanned – and the collection is therefore incomplete; Sen. John McCain’s new book, Hard Call, indicates his descent from Scottish heroic warrior Robert the Bruce, but the claim has been termed “baloney? in the British press by professional genealogists; Jacksonville Public Library in Florida has begun an “ASK a Librarian? online chat service; I.R.I,S., Inc., (at http://www.irislink.com) has two new portable scanners of note.

Listener e-mail topics this week include: Genealogical Publishing Company’s new CD by Michael Hait, titled The Family History Research Toolkit, has PDF format forms into which you can type information or use the forms for transcription purposes ($19.95 USD); a discussion of professional research services and researchers (Board for Certification of Genealogists at http://www.bcgcertification.org/ and the Association of Professional Genealogists at http://www.apgen.org/ and the International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists at http://www.icapgen.org/) are three resources); missing census images at Ancestry.com were reported through the online Help facility and will be handled; a question about searching databases that are added to sites incrementally, and not wasting your time doing the same searches on the same data; an early pilot of the LDS’ online databases is available at http://search.labs.familysearch.org; use of Google’s My Map feature to create maps of cemeteries and other locations in a specific area; scanning photos using Google’s Picasa feature; Washington, DC, records storage repositories for that jurisdiction; and issues concerning placing one’s genealogical data online.

In this week’s news: NARA (http://www.archives.gov) posts free passenger lists online, including Russian, Italian, and German lists to east coast ports; 1871 England and Wales census images are now complete on British Origins (http://www.britishorigins.com); The Generations Network, Inc. (http://www.tgn.com), parent of Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, Genealogy.com, and other entities, announced that they will move RootsWeb onto the Ancestry.com domain, using http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com, and that there should be no changes to the online experience of users – and that RootsWeb will continue to be free; and WorldVitalRecords.com (http://www.worldvitalrecords.com) now has over 1 billion names at its site.

The Guys respond to many listener e-mail topics: the correct pronunciation of Haaretz, the largest newspaper in Israel which is beginning a new start-up genealogy social network, is ‘Hah-AH-retz’, which is Hebrew for “The Land.?; university databases and the possibility of accessing them remotely; missing census page images at Ancestry.com for Decatur County, Indiana; the availability of the 1846 Slater’s Commercial Directory of Ireland at http://failteromhat.com/slater.htm.

The Guys continue discussing listener e-mail about DNA and Drew continues his discussion of the topic to try to educate us all.

George delivers a lot of news this week: the New England Historic and Genealogical Society (http://www.newenglandancestors..org) has received a large gift of photographs from the family of Thaxter Spencer, including an unknown 1888 photo of Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan; the Library of Congress’s digital preservation program has a new e-mail newsletter and you can subscribe by clicking here; NARA is soliciting comments from the public by 9 April 2008 regarding a proposal to enter into a non-exclusive agreement with The Generations Network, Inc., owners of Ancestry.com, to digitize and expand access to record holdings in NARA’s custody (see http://www.archives.gov/comment/tgn-preamble.html); Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery’s registers are about to be placed on the Internet, and more information is available at http://www.cigo.ie; Genealogical Publishing Company (http://www.genealogical.com) has partnered with FamilyLink.com, Inc. (http://www.familylink.com) to make their databases available on WorldVitalRecords.com (http://www.worldvitalrecords.com); Haaretx, Inc. (http://www.haaretz.com/) announced with Famillion (http://www.famillion.com) the launch of a new genealogy and social network search engine aimed at connecting the Jewish people worldwide; MyGreatBigFamily.com (http://www.mygreatbigfamily.com) launches enhanced social networking websites for families; GenealogyBank (http://www.genealogybank.com) has added the first 20 Hispanic newspaper titles for 4 states to its online historic newspaper collection, covering the period from 1855 to 1956, and will add many more, ultimately covering the period 1808 to 1980; an ID thief is caught and imprisoned in New Zealand for fraud in the theft of thousands of dollars in student loans for deceased children whose birth certificates he had obtained.

The Guys read and respond to listener e-mail on many topics: George misread the URL for the multimedia presentation software called Passage Express (which should be http://www.passageexpress.com); a listener and the Web Marketing Director of NewspaperArchive.com provided information about and a free trial of their site at http://www.newspaperarchive.com; information is shared about the HP MediaSmart Server for compact file backups and extensive hard drive installation; a free site to convert files into other formats is available at http://www.youconvertit.com); the True Lover’s Knot will be featured in the May issue of Real Simple magazine (http://www.realsimple.com); Newberry Library in Chicago is working on a project to document and then digitize all state and county boundary changes in its Atlas of Historic County Boundaries Project (AHCBP) and has 23 states available online at http://www.newberry.org/ahcbp/; a listener shared the image of an 1880 census Enumerator’s Daily Report to Census Office form that he purchases on eBay; and one listener shared information about her ancestry and, in particular, shared her related photos that she has uploaded to the Shutterfly photograph file sharing site at http://www.shutterfly.com.

The Guys continued with listener e-mail on the subject of genealogical DNA testing and will continue next week again with another descriptive discussion.

This week's news includes: condolences to the family of Chuck Knuthson, a great genealogical speaker, researcher, and former board member of FGS, GSG, and other organizations; Halvor Moorshead, head of Moorshead Magazines [Family Chronicle, History Magazine, Internet Genealogy, and the new Discovering Family History] is retiring and has sold the company to staff members Ed Zapletal and Rick Cree.

Listener e-mail includes: Greek genealogical research links are available at Cyndi's List (at http://www.cyndislist.com/greece.html) and at Kimberly Powell's column at About.com (at http://genealogy.about.com/od/greece); a request for help reading an occupation on a 1920 census schedule for Flint, Michigan, draws a unanimous opinion from The Guys [Quarry]; thanks for suggestions for recording an interview with a mother who transcribed contents of a now-lost Bible; an explanation of the source for information used by a census enumerator to complete a mortality schedule in the 1880 census; and a true life story of backing up one's data.

Drew describes and discusses Mark Tucker's brilliant Genealogy Research Process map and textual description at http://www.ThinkGenealogy.com. It is derived from concepts of the Board for Certification of Genealogists and by Elizabeth Shown Mills, expert on the genealogical proof standard and author of Evidence Explained, the new and definitive book concerning citation of genealogical evidence.

Drew discusses the use of dictionaries to locate the definitions of older, more obscure terms found in historical and genealogical documents. The example he cites is the term, "Fresno," a piece of equipment once used for scraping road surfaces.

The Guys discuss databases for historical newspapers and more recent (ca. 1980 to present) newspapers. The companies discussed are LexisNexis (the Nexis portion); NewsBank's "America's Genealogy Bank" database; and ProQuest. Newspaper databases may be available through your local public library and/or your local college or university library. Drew discovered that sometimes the newspapers available in a database inside the library are greater in number than when you access the database remotely from outside the library. This can be due to differences in licensing contracts. George encourages listeners to check out all the databases available through their libraries.