Thursday, January 04, 2007

genealogy in Iceland

Íslendingabók

A few years ago the Icelandic nation-wide genealogy database
http://www.islendingabok.is went online. It includes almost all
available Icelandic genealogical information from the earliest times until the present - including all currently living Icelanders, with automatic monthly updates of newborn children and the newly deceased.

Access to this database is free of charge and more than half of the
entire population of the country has by now registered as users of the database.

Users can look at trees like this:
http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k109/Adinos/tree.jpg browse through their ancestry and relatives or check how they are related to anyone else in the database. On the average, the trees are fairly complete for the last 10 generations or so, but become somewhat sparse earlier - although everyone can trace some branches back to the 9th century.

The original plan was to open the database to people of Icelandic ancestry, in particular descendants of the Icelanders that went to Canada and the US in the 1874-1914 period and to provide an English language interface to the dtabase. Unfortunately, however, due to recent cutbacks in our funding, those plans have been cancelled."

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