I have a confession to make. My interest in Australian history has never really extended to European male explorers. Yes, they performed amazing feats to understand the world in which we live but so did many others – Rose de Freycinet, for example – who are nowhere near as lorded. But I have always had Read More
Cassie Mercer embarks on a quest to understand more about a famous cricketer in the family tree. The Aussie cricket season is here! Just like thongs and singlets, melting ice-cream and mossies, cricket represents an Australian summer. The game became all the more interesting to me when I discovered that an ancestor of mine was Read More
Sidney Reilly, the secret agent widely believed to be the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s legendary character James Bond, has been uncovered in a very un-Bondlike location: an online archive. The record (shown above) was found in the British Army WWI Medal Rolls Index Cards, 1914-1920 collection, which details medals earned by more than 4.8 million WWI Read More
For better or worse, almost all of us have been immortalised in a school photograph. Our U.S. School Yearbooks collection has over 7 million images that take you back to a time that will never be forgotten. You may recognise some famous faces in these records… This Yearbook photo may be 42 years old but Read More
Originally authored by Ancestry.com We could not wait for the release of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the second film in The Hunger Games trilogy, and thought it would be fun to map out the Districts in the movie, as if Panem actually existed, across the United States. Our beloved Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Hutcherson) both come from Read More
Nearly 100 years of Texas birth and death records now available online, including key figures who investigated the death of JFK and reported on the events in the days that followed. This week we released 6.5 million new birth and death records from the Texas Department of State Health Services. Spanning nearly a century (1890-1980), the Read More
With the immigration debate at the top of the agenda this election, would Kevin Rudd or Tony Abbott’s past deem them eligible to live in Australia by current immigration standards? No matter where your affections lie – there are some interesting and thought-provoking tales of origins that could make either Kevin Rudd or Tony Abbott Read More
George is set to be the fourth most popular baby name of 2014 in the UK, with an additional 1,400 predicted to be born next year compared with 2013. If Australia continues its trend of taking baby name inspiration from the UK Royals, there could be a sharp rise in the popularity of George locally. Read More
We’ve been doing some research into the 2013 character of the hotly anticipated film, The Great Gatsby. Through some careful digging it appears that life, or family history in this case, imitates art for some of the lead characters. Leonardo DiCaprio’s (Gatsby) great grandfather went from a street sweeper in 1900 (shown in the 1900 U.S. Read More
If Prince William and Kate Middleton decide to take baby-name inspiration from their forebears, the royal baby could be born a ‘Grissel’, ‘Boniface’ or even ‘Lancelot’. New research from Ancestry reveals that while ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘John’ are the most common boys and girls names in both family trees, there are several more unusual choices the young Read More