FamilyTree DNA Sale Today and Tomorrow

Today is National DNA Day, and in honor of this FamilyTreeDNA is having a sale on all its new testing kits, and many of their upgrade kits. If you've been holding of getting started with genetic genealogy, or on getting an upgrade on one of your tests, this is your chance to do it a little cheaper. To find out more about how to get started, see my discussion of the topic in an earlier post titled Thinking about trying genetic genealogy?. I also wrote a much more detailed description of Y-DNA (patrilineal) and mtDNA (matrilineal) in my post Using DNA for Genealogy: Y-DNA and mtDNA. For those of you hoping there would be a discount on the Y-DNA 111 test, or the upgrade to it, unfortunately it does not seem to be discounted. No coupons are needed, all the prices are automatically discounted until the end of the day tomorrow.

Discounts in the current sale:

New Kits

	Current Group Price	SALE PRICE
Y-DNA 12	$99	$59
mtDNA	$99	$59
Y-DNA 37	$149	$129
Y-DNA 67	$238	$199
Family Finder	$289	$199
mtFullSequence (FMS)	$299	$249
Y-DNA 12 + mtDNA	$179	$118
FF + Y-DNA 12	$339	$258
FF + mtDNA	$339	$258
FF+ Y-DNA 37	$438	$328
FF + mtDNAPlus	$438	$328
Comprehensive (FF + FMS + Y-DNA 67)	$797	$657
Upgrades
Y-DNA 12	$89	$59
mtDNA add-on	$89	$59
Y-DNA 12-37 Marker	$99	$69
Y-DNA 37-67 Marker	$99	$79
Y-DNA 12-67 Marker	$199	$148
mtFullSequence upgrade (HVR1 to Mega)	$269	$199
mtFullSequence upgrade (HVR2 to Mega)	$269	$199
mtFullSequence add-on	$289	$219
Family Finder add-on	$289	$199

So check out the sale and get started.

First 1940 Census Images are online!

1940 US Census Page from Durham, Maine

Above is a census page from the 1940 US Census. Officially the images are not supposed to be released until 9am Eastern (six hours from now) by the US NAtional Archives, so I'm not sure how this is possible. It would seem the National Archives has been sharing the images early to allow companies to get them up faster. The above image is from Ancestry.com's site, which somehow has a small number of images from DC, Maine and Nevada up already.

The 1940 US Census is being released today. The official launch is at 9:00am Eastern Time. There will be a live webcast before the launch at 8:30am. If you can get through, the official site for the census is http://1940census.archives.gov/.

Since I wrote about it last time, genealogy company MyHeritage has announced that they will also be indexing the 1940 Census images and providing free access online. They join Ancestry.com and the Archives.com/FamilySearch.org/FindMyPast.com consortium (The US Census Community Project) in indexing the census.

So now all the 1940 census record sites you should know about are:

The official National Archives site: http://1940census.archives.gov/

The US Census Community Project: https://the1940census.com/

Ancestry.com's 1940 Census: http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2442

MyHeritage: http://www.myheritage.com/1940census

and of course, Stephen Morse's Unified 1940 Census ED Finder.

One interesting thing about the 1940 census is that is was the first census to have a census time, not just a census day. In other words, in the past the census was recorded based on what the state of the population was on April 1, but in 1940 the census enumerators were instructed to base their information on midnight, April 1, so if lets say a baby was born on April 1, 1940, they won't show up in the census (since they were not born by midnight). In a strange twist of fate, I have another interesting example in my family – my great-grandmother, grandfather and great-uncle all arrived in the US by ship on April 1, 1940. If the enumerators followed the rules, they shouldn't be in the 1940 census. I'll have to wait until the images for New York are up to find out, however. Another great-uncle should, however, be in the records as he arrived earlier. Any strange stories in your family connected to the 1940 Census?