A Texas museum hopes a document found in its archives turns out to be an authentic government copy of Abraham Lincoln's eloquent letter consoling a mother thought to have lost five sons in the Civil War. The famed Bixby Letter, which the Dallas Historical Society is getting appraised as it prays for a potential windfall, has a fascinating history. The original has never been found. Historians debate whether Lincoln wrote it. Its recipient, Lydia Bixby, was no fan of the president. And not all her sons died in the war. The letter, written with "the best of intentions" 144 years ...

The oldest genetically identifiable nuclear family met a violent death, according to analysis of remains from 4,600-year-old burials in Germany. Writing in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), researchers say the broken bones of these stone age people show they were killed in a struggle. Comparisons of DNA from one grave confirm it contained a mother, father, and their two children. The son and daughter were buried in the arms of their parents. Dr Wolfgang Haak, from The Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, in Adelaide, conducted the DNA analysis. He ...

Heritage Collector Suite 5.1 has been released.

Changes:

• Create and share PDFs. Select from several image and information options. • Use the duplicate search tool to find and remove duplicate images to save hard drive space. • Batch convert and enhance old negative images to positives. • Share images and collections via e-mail. • Enlarge or zoom in on an image using the mouse wheel. • Drag and drop photos and images into collections. • Use the e-mail request system to receive files from others using Heritage ...

Shrubs 1.2 has been released.

Changes:

• Improved GEDCOM parsing code. • Fixed an issue when dealing with single parent (or parent-less) family records. • ASCII character set is now properly recognized. • Minor user interface improvements.

MacFamilyTree 5.3.3 has been released.

Changes:

• Improved Timeline Chart including a new time bar. • More Generations supported in the Ancestor Chart. • Improved GEDCOM Importer. • Bug fixes in the Date Parser. • Search function improved. • Localization fixes. • Many smaller improvements.

Brother’s Keeper 6.3.2 has been released.

Changes:

• Two more changes for the Individual Timeline report. The name of the file for editing has been changed from TIME4.DTA to BKTIME4.TXT so that your editor knows it is a text file. (See 6.3.1 below for more information.) Also a new item on the File menu that will let you edit the file directly using Notepad.

The awards, which were announced in Your Family Tree 71 (out now), highlighted the best products released in the genealogy world this year, from software and data CDs, to books and services.

Among the winners, Your Old Books & Maps, The Genealogist  and David Waddell have shown their delight at winning General Data CD, Census and BMD Website, and Fiction Book of the Year respectively, by announcing their victories on their websites.

PhpGedView 4.1.6 has been released.

Changes:

• Autocomplete on name/place/record entry. • Handling of international names. • Tree-navigator view. • Installation/configuration wizard. • Multimedia support. • Better theme customisation. • Translation into more languages (Romanian, Portuguese). • Broswer/server compatibility improvements.

Second Site 2.2 has been released.

Enhancements:

• Added the Map User Item for adding maps to a site, including support for the Google Maps, MapQuest, Virtual Earth, and Yahoo! Maps mapping services. • Added Map Link options to the Place Index User Item. • Added the Calendar User Item. • Added the [] button to the Edit Picture window that opens a file dialog to select an image file, and changed the Picture User Item to allow Pictures to be stored in SubFolders of the Input (-i) folder. • Added support for image maps ...

Family Historian 3, the highest rated family tree software in the U.K. is now available in the United States and Canada. This top rated software is initially being distributed in the nearly 1,500 Target stores nation-wide.

"Enteractive is thrilled to be bringing what is simply the best genealogy software product in the world to the U.S. and Canadian consumer," Howard Luxenberg, president of Enteractive, stated. Due to its easy to use features and product quality, Family Historian 3 has won major awards and recognition from the top reviewers including Windows XP ...

One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor’s house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps. He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges — snapshots from an annihilated ...

FamilyTreeFactory 6.0.1.2 has been released.

Changes:

• If text was entered in the Occupation, Note and Sources data fields in the Personal Data of a Group dialog, every word was in a new line. The bug has been corrected. • In the Create Relatives Tree dialog the max. number of generations for searching for ancestors of the primary person could be adjusted only to 50. However, the program can process up to 60 generations. The bug has been corrected. • While creating a Free Geo Object Background in ancestor trees with siblings these ...

Brother’s Keeper 6.3.1 has been released.

Changes:

• Three changes so far for the Individual Timeline report. Duplicate events are removed.(caused by relationships such as having step-parents.) The lines can be longer now. (needed if also printing location names.) Note: for very long lines, you may need to print Landscape. And the user can make changes to the report before printing. To do that, first Preview the report. Then use WordPad to edit the TIME4.DTA file in your data folder. Then return to the Individual Timeline screen and pick ...

FamilyInsight 2008.11.14.0 has been released.

Changes:

• First Release of FamilyInsight.

GEDitCOM II 1.0b2 has been released.

Changes:

• No release notes.