All Blogs

I really enjoyed last night's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? Emilia Fox's story was so interesting, what a talented family! Silent witness star Emilia Fox was 8 months pregnant when filming for the show. She was disappointed she knew so little about her ancestors and their lives, so wanted to delve deeper into her family history as a gift for her first born child.

Another cycle of development came to an end today with a new release for the website being deployed this afternoon. As you might imagine, the release includes a few new developments, some fixes, and a few other bits and pieces. Today's release was not announced on the boards as it was done without the site being taken down. In general, we prefer not to have any fixed interruptions and only deploy with downtime, where we need to make critical changes that require all servers to be updated at the same time. Since I last posted on 23rd August, we appear to have had quite a stable two weeks, which has been great for site development, as we have not been distracted by performance issues. So what is included in this release?

Does acting run in the family? Tomorrow's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? sees Emilia Fox discover more about the acting dynasty she belongs to. We wonder what surprises her family history research will uncover. We didn't want to give away too much before the show airs, but here's a sneak peek at what we think they'll discover.

Larry Lamb shared his family history in the fourth episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, allowing us all, how with dedicated research you can find living relatives who are willing to meet. I'm Rhoda, Head of Genes Reunited, and for me Larry's story demonstrated the power of researching your family history, and showed the amazing ‘goose bump' moments that this subject matter can provide.

This week's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? will focus on former EastEnders Actor, Larry Lamb. Born in Edmonton Middlesex in 1956 Larry Lamb is also known as evil Archie Mitchell in the popular soap.

Last night was episode three of Who Do You Think You Are? and focused on one of Britain's most successful athletes, Sebastian Cole. Sebastian won Olympic medals in 1980 and 1984 and today is best known for his role on the 2012 Olympic committee. Sebastian was keen to uncover more information on his mother's side of the family as he admitted that his knowledge only went back as far his grandmother. He grew up in Sheffield so in the opening of the programme he travels to the North of England where he meets a local historian who tells him the romantic story of how his grandparents met and even shows him a portrait of her.

I had a busy evening this evening. After a full day's work tracing clients' family trees, I was interviewed by Selina MacKenzie on Talk Radio Europe, a station that actually covers the English speaking ex-pat community in Spain and Gibraltar. I was amused that one of the many adverts on the station was about combatting alcoholism. I enthusiastically steered listeners towards Genes Reunited, both to make contact with possible relatives and also to use the many different records now available on the site. Selina commented that she wished she had asked her grandmother more questions while she was alive. I pointed out that although she did not ask questions, some other relatives out there may have done: when I was a teenager, I interviewed all sorts of elderly cousins and wrote down memories that their own children or grandchildren may not have heard. By networking with people across the world via Genes Reunited, Selina may find the equivalent of me in her family.

Today saw us eventually roll out some changes that we have be trying to deploy for a few (very stressful) weeks now. Again, I'd like to apologise for any inconvenience that this has caused anyone, and I hope in the majority of cases we should see an improvement in service. We are very carefully watching the logs that report errors that occur, and anything that can be fixed quickly will be actioned. I do have to confess that some errors do occur that are not straight-forward and we are unable to replicate. To help us, we have added additional logging of these errors that can hopefully help us to resolve these obscure issues.

The third episode of Who Do You Think You Are? will delve into the family history of Sebastian Coe, famous for his successful athletics career. This week we have some interesting findings from the experienced family historian Roy Stockdill...

J.K. Rowling, or Jo, is the multi-millionaire writer of the infamous Harry Potter books. For a long time she was a single mother working as a teacher, before she changed her life when she put pen to paper and brought Harry Potter to life.