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What's New (past 20 days)


Date of Last GEDCOM Import: 30 Dec 2023 17:57:19


Note that the category "Individuals" down below records the updates to names in alphabetical order, and therefore often only a partial list. Here are recent major updates to the database:

February, 2023: The site has been updated to TNG v14.

June, 2022: I have updated the von Rosenbergs and related families on the site. Many names and dates have been added and fixed. The key sources here are family histories by the von Rosenbergs and the Geschlechts Registers from the Kurland Ritterschafts Archiv. These are family trees compiled in the mid- to late-1800s about families in Kurland (Courland), now in Latvia.

December, 2018: Much of the past year on the site has been devoted to cleaning and correcting place names, sources, events, cemeteries and other data. Names on many pages (including many of the links below) were often connected to dead links, dating in many cases back to the Summer, 2012 change in the site address. These have been largely repaired. The bigger project is a book, The Pitard Family of New Orleans, which is coming near to completion. It will include much fuller narratives than are possible on the site, where stories and events that involve many people and places are often divided up among a number of pages.

June 2018: The site has been updated to TNG v12. 12.0.2 includes updates for GPDR requirements.

January 2017: Site updated to TNG v11, which provides updated mapping and charting features, among other changes. 

June, 2014: Ancestors of the immigrant Alphonse Gamard, Sr. in Ghent, Belgium and Amiens, France have been added, again with many thanks to the generous help of David Quénehérvé.

February, 2014: TNG updated to version 10, which adds a number of new features and changes to the site's use and appearance.

January, 2014: Over the past months a number of ancestors in Saint-Domingue and France have been added, found from combing through many parish records. Thank you to Margaret Herritage for her collaboration while researching the Caribbean, and to David Quénehérvé for his extensive help with finding, deciphering, and teaching me how to find and decipher many dozens of parish records in France. New additions especially include ancestors of Pitard and Mahé families, which originated in the Brittany, the DeGrange family, which originated in Savoie and Haute Savoie in the French Alps, and the Couret family, which originated in the Pyrenees.

January, 2013:  Over the past few months, two updates have been happening.  First, many pages will now feature a map to show the where events have happened in people's lives, if the events are pretty localizable.  Second, dozens of obituaries have been added across the site where they can be located.  Pages of people on which they appear have an entry for "Obituary" in the left column.

October, 2012:  Added in descendants, and some of their relations, of George Dunbar Pitard.  He seem to have had three wives, and I'm not sure these relations are all correct.  This includes Mayorga, Faget, and Wynne families, among others.

September, 2012:  Added in many descendants of immigrant ancestor Daniel Maupay Sr. and Anna Campbell who stayed in the Philadelphia area rather than moving south to New Orleans.  Sons Daniel Jr. and Edward moved to New Orleans; all of the others seem to have raised families in the north.

Summer, 2012:  Site upgraded to new site addres at ancestors.pitard.net.  Media are being re-added as time allows.

June, 2012:  The family of the earliest Pitard ancestor, Joseph, has now been pushed back several generations.  It seems that his father, Louis Francois, served on a French warship, "Le Vengeur," during the American Revolution. His ancestors can now be traced back to France.

February, 2012:  TNG software upgraded to TNG version 9.

January, 2010: Major updates have been few over the past few years. There is still a long "to do" list, and there have been many smaller additions and corrections to branches, yet several major expansions have occurred.  I continue to be astonished at and grateful for the work of so many who have been in touch and donated time and material to the trees on this site.   Thank you. 

1. The ancestors of John Mannen have been one of the major puzzles on the tree, and I think now that his mother, at least, is known.  This line has been updated to include John Mannen's mother Mary Cushman and her ancestors.  The full story of why I think this is correct is on his page.  If it's so, it connects him back to the Cushman/Howland family that immigrated on the Mayflower. 

2. A second major wall has been the parentage of Joseph Pitard.  Thanks to a researcher who got in touch with help, the family of his mother, Amelie Hacker, has now been uncovered.  And Octave Pitard can be now probably identified as Joseph's brother. 

3. The McLellans in New Orleans descend from W.H.P. McLellan.  But his younger brother James Brackett McLellan, who had stayed in Maine and (apparently) fought for the Union side during the war (against WHP's children), moved after the war to Texas.  Later several of his children moved to Arizona. Thanks to the contact of another researcher, several generations of James Brackett's descendants have now been added to the tree.

4. The families of one of the children of Joseph DeGrange, George Edward Degrange, and his wife Minerva Davis have now been added to the tree, thanks to several of his descendants who have been in touch. They had four children and many descendants. This has been growing over several years now, with images and other information still being added.  

5.  The software which runs the site, TNG, has been updated to version 8.1, with lots of new features.

July, 2006: I have added in much about Maryland families, including the Bowies and the Contees, Quaker families allied with the Snowdens and the Thomases, and initial information about Delia Donovan's (apparent) ancestors from Harford County (note the query on her page). Information has been added about the Ohio family of Margaretta Lansdale and Samuel Williams. The addition of many census records about the descendants of Robert Franklin Sr. has been finished.

June, 2006: One quirk of the privacy policy for the tree was that if no birth or death date appeared for any person, that person's name would be hidden. A new functionality has been uncovered, however: if "Yes, date unknown" is inserted instead of a death date, the TNG software whose rules control the privacy will see it as a date, and unhide the person. This gets rid of the annoying problem that prevented non-registered users from seeing a 17th-century person's name just because vital dates were unknown. This update is happening across all of the trees for folks who are obviously dead; this means that many, many more names will appear in searches, and that information and queries under these names are now visible.

April 8, 2006: Added family related to James Dilworth and Ann Waln, who immigrated in 1682 to Pennsylvania on board the "Lamb" as colleagues of William Penn and his Quaker settlers to Pennsylvania. I have also been adding information from many census records across the trees.

February 3, 2006: Updated the Civil War page with fuller entries and new documents and photographs.

January 10, 2006: Added the direct ancestral lines for Mary Turner, the mother of Leonora Levensaler (wider relations and fuller stories will be added as time permits). Leonora was born in Maine and migrated to New Orleans with her husband W.H.P. McLellan. These folks are Leonora Levensaler's Puritan ancestors who immigrated to Massachusetts in the early and mid-1600s, living especially in Scituate and Hingham.

January 6, 2006: Added the direct ancestral lines for Katherina Zentner (wider relations and fuller stories will be added as time permits). All of these folks lived in Germany. These lines push the ancestors of Julie Groos, who married Johannes Carl von Rosenberg, back several generations. Also added several new people to the Civil War page.

November 13, 2005: Added a page for the Revolutionary War.

September 10, 2005: Filled out another set of Lansdales on the tree, the descendants of Charles Lansdale and Catherine Wheeler. This family includes, among others, Gen. Edward Geary Lansdale, whom Graham Greene used as his model in The Silent American. Along with this the Maryland Mysteries page has been fleshed out: how does this family related to other set of Lansdales, the descendants of Isaac and Margaret?

September 8, 2005: Added family connected to S287, One Hundred Years Ago: the Life and Times of Walter Dulany Addison, 1769-1848.

June 13, 2005: Added the bare bones of some Acadian ancestry (flesh will be added as time permits). Acadians (who become known as Cajuns when they immigrate to Louisiana in the 1750s) appear at the far ends of two branches: ancestors of the DeGrange family, and ancestors of the Tomlinson family. Jean Mouchon is a direct ancestor of the DeGranges via his daughter Isabella. Jean's son, Paul, married Adelaide Ferlot, whose ancestors were Acadian. For the Tomlinsons, Mary Leonese Theriot was a direct ancestor of Hendley Edgar Tomlinson. Her ancestry is thoroughly Acadian. (Interestingly, these two branches relate by marriage; you can trace this connection through the descendants of this family, one branch of which descends to Ferlot, another to Mary Leonese Theriot).

June 8, 2005: Added and corrected much about Gregg and Hamilton ancestors. All of these lines are direct ancestors of Minerva Hamilton. John Hamilton Sr. and his son, John Hamilton Jr. both served in the Revolutionary War; John Lansdale Jr. reached back to them to become a member of the SAR. The Greggs, who were Quakers, are a complicated bunch with many descendants; on this tree there are two different groups of them, descending from immigrant ancestors Samuel Gregg and William Gregg (which converge in Capt. Aaron Gregg, who was Minerva Hamilton's grandfather).

June 1, 2005: Added a number of Groos and related ancestors, the ancestors and relations of Julie Wilhelmine Christine Groos who married Johannes Carl von Rosenberg. Many are visible as the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation maternal Grandparents of Metta Tomlinson. (More on this family added July 30, 2005).

May 25, 2005: Added a number of McLellan relatives from Maine, esp. the descendants of Richard Edwards. Updated the Civil War page, which now includes a number of Union soldiers, esp. from Maine.

May 16, 2005: the web-page format for the site has been entirely rewritten, and TNG software has been updated to version 5, with lots of new features to access the database.

May 2, 2005: the McLellan family from Maine (beginning with immigrant ancestor Bryce) has been completely updated, including the addition of source references, documents, and images.




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