Dieter Macek from Austria has worked hard to build the Greek Gods’ family tree. He shows 5,639 gods and antique heroes on a 49,6 m display board. Zeus alone has more than 900 descendants, the huge family tree covers more than 1300 years and is accompanied by 10,000 pages of comments.
Macek discovered his interest in mythology at the age of 15 and started to collect and sort family trees of antique heroes. He is particularly proud of his directory of the nymphs, Zeus’ daughters.
Source: Link
Due to technical maintenance work, dynastree will be offline tomorrow (Jan 6th) from 8.30 am and 9.30 am CET. We will probably have to take the blog and the forum offline till noon (CET).
The dynastree Team
Today, we’ve got a helpful litte gadget for you that might come up with some new results for your genealogical research: a Google Gadget by Meg Baker that automatically searches the Library Of Congress "American Memory" catalogue for you. Simply type in what you’re looking for, there’s a lot to find.
If your family tree printouts go up in flames or your HDD kills your GEDCOM data or whatever happens to the genealogical world, two things will save it:
2. The "Granite Mountain" in Utah.
The Church of the Latter Day Saints has build a large vault about 600 feet into the mountain. It contains 2.4 million rolls of microfilm and 1 million microfiche of genealogical information, among these the names of 3 billion people. The environment in the vault has the perfect atmosphere and temperature for the storage of the data, the entrance door weighs 14 tons. The LDS believe that after death, everyone will meet his/her ancestors and that is why genealogy is such an important issue for the Mormonists. For more information on the vault, click here or here.
Of course, it’s Halloween on Saturday and all the kids are excited, but let’s take a step back to the past and have a look at what All Saints’ Day’s purpose really is. Here, we find a lot of information on the topic and the reminder that All Saint’s Day’s custom was to celebrate a day in honour of all the saints and the next day, All Souls’ Day to commemorate all the departed. There are several customs in different parts of Europe (and Mexico) such as bringing flowers and candles to graves of deceased relatives. So why don’t you log in on itsourtree.com, have a look at your ancestors and think about a visit to the graveyard at the weekend?
One year ago, we launched the Portuguese version of our site. Parabéns or Happy Birthday meusparentes.com.pt.
As a birthday present, we gave the portuguese site a brandnew forum including a new structure. We’ll update the English forum soon, too and add a new structure. If you’re thinking of possible categories you’d like us to add to the new forum, please write them in this post’s comments.
As previously announced, some of us were present at last weekend’s German Genealogy Fair in Bad Elster. It was a very interesting get-together with a lot of interesting presentations and lectures. It was especially thrilling to get to know experienced genealogists and exchange experiences in genealogy issues. To sum up, we definitely recommend genealogy fairs and conferences and we’re looking forward to next year’s genealogy fair in Bielefeld, Germany.
Currently, the Amazon photo servers that we rent cannot be reached, they seem to have a technical problem there. Please don’t worry about all the photos that you uploaded already. The images are safely stored and will be displayed again as soon as the connection to the server is reestablished. As itsourtree.com connects to the Amazon photo servers at login to make sure that the connection is a verified and secure one, you will have to logout and login again to be able to see the photos again.
We’ll keep you posted on the server’s status and announce it here on the blog as soon as the connection is up again.
*UPDATE*: The photo servers are back on-line, please log out and log in again to see the photos and to be able to upload new images.
In the "Independent", an Irish newspaper, Dick Eastman found an interesting quote that is quite a good thought-provoking impulse:
"Trace a line back 600 years and what you have is 16 million ancestors. Go back 80 generations and the figure rises to a trillion trillion (which is actually greater than the total number of people who’ve ever lived, but that’s maths for you).
The US National Centre for Biotechnology Information puts it as bluntly as it gets by pointing out that, if you trace the line back far enough, every single human on the planet would eventually be shown to be related."
Wouldn’t it be great to see your family relation to all your ancestors? It’ll probably take some time to add all these ancestors, and some information may be lost, but if you add as many relatives and ancestors as you can and invite all relatives you know, you’ll find out quite a lot about your ancestors (one of the largest trees in our database has more than 23,000 profiles!). 
Some people encounter difficulties when trying to upload their GEDCOM file, especially when the file is REALLY big and contains a lot of information on relatives and ancestors. If the server returns a timeout or any other error message, try to zip the GEDCOM file and choose the .zip file for the upload. The server will automatically unzip the file and continue with the GEDCOM import.
