In 1990, the UN made October 1st the International Day of Older Persons. 50 years from now, the number of older persons will nearly quadruple, growing from about 600 million to almost 2 billion people. The world grows older and everyone should be aware of this fact. So, if you haven’t already done it, speak with your elderly relatives about your family. They probably know a lot about the past and past generations. If you don’t think you can invite them to your family tree, take our family questionnaire with you to take down notes and enter the data yourself. Your children will appreciate your efforts!

Of course, you can’t sit in front of your computer all day adding information to your family tree on itsourtree.com. There are lots of interesting and helpful books on genealogy out there that can be complementary tools for your genealogical research. Strolling around Amazon may be fun but specialized bookstores always add to your search’s efficiency. RootsBooks.com (RootsBooks.co.uk for all english(wo)men among us) has to offer a lot of literature and software, especially matching genealogists’ needs. Basically, it’s just a filtered Amazon that Dick Eastman has set up, but the concentration on genealogy-related topics can help to find interesting results!

You’ve got your own blog or homepage and would like to show itsourtree.com on your site and recommend it to others? Why don’t you use the banner below to show your love!

It’s really easy: simply download the .zip file below to your computer and show the world where you’re tracing your roots. In the file, you find the Wordpress-Code and the HTML code for your homepage.

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During the week from 9:00 am to 18:00 pm (Central European Time), the Itsourtree.com’s team is engaged in answering all your e-mails and providing the best costumer support you can get. We do know that e-mails can be once in a while a bit impersonal. Nevertheless, considering the modern times and given the amount requests we receive everyday, the e-mail is the only tool we have that can cope with this reality.  For those who can’t deal with the impersonality of e-mails and the cybernetic environment, we are experimenting the skype phone.  You may reach us under our contact page.  “Hear ya!!!”

The origin of names has lots to do with the genealogical research. Afterall, you can only track back a relative through it’s name, be it first or last name. Some face the problem that names develop and change their spelling throughout the centuries in a way that they are almost not identifiable anymore. It’s the case of Brilhador which the original writing was Briatore. In this case you can perhaps explain the origin and developement. More mysterious are last names such as Gotobed, Brushit and Tellme. Can you explain those or you also think it’s only the product of human creativity?

If you thought you had seen everything, I think we found something new for our users to go deep into. Have you ever heard of a project called WorldGenWeb? We haven’t either until today. This project is volunteer based and it’s goal is making available all kinds of historical and genealogical records for free in the internet. In every continent there is already a respectable database for research. Sometimes it isn’t that bad not being the first to know. Now you have enough material to go through. Enjoy!

The chinese athletes are dominating the olympic games. But can you remember the names of the male winners for the 3m springboard synchronized?

To english speakers it’s often hard to remember the names of chinese athletes.

But there is a hint:

Almost 85% of the chinese population can be listed under only 100 different surnames.

In other words, that means that there are 98 million Wangs and almost the same amount of chinese named Zhang or Li. The reason behind the small number of surnames can be found in the country’s history. The origin of surnames in the chinese culture derives from totems and tribal motives and therefore many families are named after plants or animals.  Different from western cultures, in China the surname is spoken always before the name itself.

So in order to identify one Zhang among the milions of other Zhangs, the chinese make use of their creativity to choose first names. It’s common that the parents choose the kids’ names and because of that some chinese are named Qian Quian (money, money) or also recently Aoyun (Olympic Games).

The first names are a reflection of the country’s cultural development and after 40 years of revolution, one shouldn’t be surprised to meet in the streets people named Soldier, Construction or Red!

By the way, the chinese athletes for the springboard synchronized are Wang Feng and Qin Kai

Today, we’ve got a surf tip for all those among you who are interested in learning more about genealogy. Google (known for its almost omniscient web search) recently launched a new feature: searchable book scans. Older books and pamphlets are even completely searchable, newer ones are available as previews. This powerful online library includes a lot of genealogy-related books as well and that’s what makes it interesting for us: if you type in “genealogy“, google comes up with about 43,700 results. Of course, we haven’t read all of them, but some are really worth a look.

As our goal is to bring families closer together, we’ve got a new feature for you: You can now send messages directly by clicking on the little green envelope button in an active person’s profile in the tree.

Additionally, this little marker on the profiles shows you which profiles are active and which not. The ability to send messages to all your relatives without having to know all the email addresses makes your tree a powerful communication tool. So, the more relatives you invite the better…

By the way: the button can also be found in the active person’s profile.

…you will probably want to use one of our avatars to fill the gap in your ancestor’s profile. As previously reported, we’re constantly adding new avatars to our collection and you can add them to your relatives’ profiles with a click on “Edit portrait” in the person’s detailed profile. For your convenience, you can now add an avatar picture as portrait image directly from the photo upload window in your family tree. Simply click on “Choose avatar” to get to the avatar collection directly.