A number of amateur amateur sleuths have taken it upon themselves to find names for the graves of the anonymous dead.
One such detective is Todd Matthews, of Tennessee, who began his quest with the grave marker of someone only known as “Tent Girl.”
Through researching forensic records, Internet chat rooms, the use of DNA and other records, he was able to identify this woman who had gone missing 30 years earlier.
But he is not alone. There is a nationwide group of people who have formed the Doe Network, all dedicated to giving names to the unknown dead, and in some cases, helping law enforcement identify missing-person cases.
Read more about the Doe Network here.
If you have RootsWeb bookmarked in your Web browser, you’ll have to change it. Ancestry.com will now host RootsWeb on its own servers.
The announcement came in the RootsWeb official blog. The the Web address for all RootsWeb pages will change from www.rootsweb.com to www.rootsweb.ancestry.com.
CEO Tim Sullivan said, “RootsWeb will remain a free online experience dedicated to providing you with a place where our community can find their roots together. If you have questions regarding this change please email them to feedback@rootsweb.com.”
A New Zealand man has been jailed for 14 months for assuming the identities of dead children to get college loans, and then taking that money and living it up at soccer matches across Europe.
Authorities say he was one of several people to do so, and personally netted $32,000 for himself. In all, $179,000 was ripped off from New Zealand’s Ministry of Education, which provided the loans, by the ring the man belonged to. (more…)
He is a French aristocrat who created a stir in America as a precocious teenager, and then returned decades later to the United States to be celebrated in New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Boston.The Marquis de Lafayette? Yes, of course. But that was then. This time, it is his great-great-great grandson.
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