Britain’s Prince Harry spent the Easter weekend in the section of Romania called Transylvania. Transylvania was home to a Vlad the Impaler. Not only was Vlad the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s novel, he was also a relative of his great-great grandmother, Queen Mary. The Daily Beast reported on the visit, with the article title referencing the popular Harry Potter books.

Americans are often tracing their family history back to other countries, visiting there to find more information. We sometimes forget, however, that the reverse can also be true. People from other countries often trace their ancestry back to or through the United States. The Rochester, Minnesota, Post Bulletin recently reported on the story of Marit and Ingvil Bjorngaard who came to Minnesota to find their mysterious great-uncle, professional ski jumper Halvor Bjorngaard, who emigrated to America in 1924 and lived with his aunt and uncle who had emigrated earlier.

From London’s Daily Express newspaper comes the story of Family Constellations therapy, a New Age practice that digs around in the past for unresolved ancestral problems that can manifest themselves in the present day. While it is certainly true that behavioral patterns can be repeated, this appears to be an interesting way of dealing with those issues. Contributor Linda Harrison details her experience with Family Constellations surrounding her inability to deal with money.

This coming coming weekend is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Two days ago, the MS Balmoral left Southampton, tracing the Titanic’s route. She is carrying 1,309 passengers, the same number as the Titanic. At 2:20 A.M. GMT on Sunday, April 15, the passengers will gather for a memorial service for those who lost their lives, at the exact site where Titanic went down. Among the passengers are many with a personal connection to the tragedy. A number of descendants of Titanic passengers (family members of both survivors and those who were lost) are on board. You Read more »

Archives.com released an interesting info graphic yesterday with some statistics about the 1940 census. The images take up 1 terabyte of storage. During launch day, there were 100,000 requests per minute, which slowed to 25,000 a minute through the night. More than 190,000 people spent more than ten minutes on the site, generating more than 3 million pay views. On day 2: 40.1 million hits during then peak period. No wonder we had trouble getting through!

The story of Menorah Gardens Cemetery in West Palm Beach, Florida, is a warning to genealogists everywhere. The cemetery was involved in one of the biggest desecration scandals ever. among other things, they moved many bodies and graves, to the point that people are not certain that their loved ones are lying beneath the markers above ground. One widow’s story was told by WPTV, Channel 5. How many cemeteries got away with such things without being caught? And is your ancestor truly buried beneath the marker?

The Milstein Division of the New York Public Library has developed a great research tool for the 1940 census. If you have ancestors in New York City at the time, you will love this. They have created a three step process to allow you to find people living in any of the five boroughs.

First, select your borough. This brings you to a page with images of the 1940 telephone directory for that borough. The books are not searchable, so you must read through them the old-fashioned way. Because they are in alphabetical order, this is very easy. Select the page with Read more »

The Huffington Post alleviated some of the stress of yesterday’s 1940 census access problems by posting a humorous list of “statistical information” from the 1940 census, including: “In 1940, only 5% of the population had college degrees. Today, only 5% of the population can pay for them.”

Archives.com is continuing to work on the access problem for the official website, 1940census.archives.gov. This morning I was able to get onto the site, but the viewer was still having trouble loading images. Just getting the viewer up was an improvement over yesterday, however, so hopefully they will have all of the problems solved soon.

In the meantime, Ancestry.com was hard at work overnight and added four more states to their database: Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. FamilySearch will likely have more states online later today.