Stephen King and his wife, fellow novelist Tabitha King, have donated $1.25 million to the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

The Kings made the gift through their foundation.

The Boston-based organization is the nation's oldest and largest genealogical society. It says it will use the gift announced Tuesday to develop educational programming and fund a curriculum in family history for public school students.

It will also help the organization expand its headquarters.

Brenton Simons is president and CEO of the society. He says the money will have "far-reaching benefits."

The society says the Kings have deep personal interest in family and local history and their importance in education.

I have used this new feature briefly and I have already fallen in love with it!

From the MyHeritage Blog:

New: Multi-Photo Scanner on the MyHeritage Mobile App

There’s nothing like indulging that sweet sense of nostalgia when you look at old photos. We’re delighted to announce that we’ve made it even easier to scan family photos using the MyHeritage mobile app. We recently added a powerful, state-of-the art Photo Scanner that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to capture entire album pages in one tap. The new Photo Scanner uses the same technology that we use in Reimagine, our standalone app for preserving and improving your family photos that we released last year. Users were excited to efficiently scan their cherished photos and have them sync with their MyHeritage family site. We’re excited to bring the same powerful technology to the MyHeritage mobile app, so you can preserve your family photos and improve them with our suite of photo features! 

The MyHeritage mobile app is available on iOS and Android. If you aren’t using the MyHeritage app already, download it for free from the App Store or Google Play today.

How it works

Photo Scanner is a state-of-the-art feature developed by MyHeritage’s AI team. It enables quick and easy scanning of entire album pages or multiple loose photos in a single tap. The scanner then uses cutting-edge, cloud-based AI technology to automatically detect the individual photos and crop them, saving hours of work traditionally required with other scanners. Scanned photos are saved in a dedicated album on your MyHeritage family site.

Accessing Photo Scanner

Open the MyHeritage mobile app on your device. A banner appears with a quick shortcut to start scanning your photos. You can tap “Scan photos” on the banner to start scanning, or you can access Photo Scanner by tapping “Photos” on the home screen.

You can read much more about this new feature in the  MyHeritage Blog at: https://bit.ly/4bngkUc.

Here is an article that is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it describes the changing technology around us, a topic often of interest to genealogists. It also has to do with history, which IS a topic often described in this newsletter. Besides, I found it interesting and decided to share it.

2011 saw the last floppy disk produced. There are still individuals and organisations who use floppy disks even though new supplies haven't been available for more than ten years. Everybody has a different explanation for why they use technology that is basically from the 1970s.

Selling "new," that is, unopened, floppy disks for years, US businessman Tom Persky continues to make great profit from the business. He is the owner of Floppydisk.com, which sells disks for around US$1 (£0.80) each, however certain larger capacity models can cost up to US$10 (£8). Customers of Persky are found all over the world, and you could divide them about 50/50 between industrial users and hobbyists and enthusiasts such as Espen Kraft. The latter group includes those who utilize floppy disk-requiring PCs at work. They are basically stuck with a format that most of the rest of the world has since forgotten.

Still, Persky continues, "I sell thousands of floppy disks to the airline industry." He won't elaborate. Companies are unhappy when I discuss them. It is commonly known, though, that some Boeing 747s, for instance, load vital software upgrades into their avionics and navigation computers using floppy disks. Persky suggests that although these older planes may not be as common in the US or Europe these days, you might discover one in a developing nation. Other government systems, industrial equipment, and even animatronic figures still use floppy disks.

And the 1980-launched Muni Metro light train in San Francisco won't start up every morning unless the responsible personnel pick up a floppy disk and insert it into the computer that runs the Automatic Train Control System, or ATCS. "Every day the computer needs to be told what it's supposed to do," a San Francisco Municipal Transport Agency (SFMTA) spokeswoman said. "There is nowhere to permanently install software without a hard drive."

This computer has to be restarted in such a way repeatedly, he adds — it can't simply be left on, for fear of its memory degrading.

Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Gokhan Yazgi announced that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has read nearly 2,000 Hittite tablets – thousands of years old historical documents.  

The first phase of the project, which was initiated to read, scan and digitize Hittite cuneiform tablets in the inventory of the Ankara Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul Archaeological Museums and Corum Museum using artificial intelligence, was completed in recent months.

Within the framework of the project carried out in cooperation with Ankara University and the General Directorate of Museums with Cultural Assets of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, thousands of years-old tablets found in the Hittite capital Hattusa were photographed in high resolution and scanned in 3D.

Hittite tablets and digital library

The project's first stage involved learning 500 cuneiform Hittite tablets with artificial intelligence, which achieved 75.66% success. So far, artificial intelligence has read 2,000 tablets. The data obtained from the readings will be shared with the scientific world, and a study will be conducted by Hittitologists.

Hittite tablets containing historical documents will be opened to the world with the digital library established.

At the “On the Trail of the Hittites: New Information and Perspectives” symposium in Corum, Yazgi stated that they are making a great effort to use technology to understand the Hittite civilization better.

Yazgi added that the data obtained from the tablets will be shared with the public through a scientific study by Ankara University and the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

From the collection of over 5,000 historic photographs kept in the Campbell Room of local history, Salina Public Library has opened an online Digital Archive that provides the public with virtual access to images from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Visit salinapubliclibrary.org/local-history to view these photos in an online digital archive. More people can be better bonded to the history and culture of Salina/Saline County if these photos are preserved and made more easily accessible.

This project came to pass when Salina Public Library received a $3,800 Kansas Digital Access to Historic Records (KDAHR) grant from the Kansas State Historical Records Advisory Board (KSHRAB) to acquire a photo scanner. About 500 photos in the library's collection taken before 1900 were digitized using the scanner.

"It gives us great pleasure to introduce this initiative that will increase awareness of Salina's past." information services head Stefanie Knopp said.

Working with groups all around Kansas, the KSHRAB preserves and makes historical records more accessible to audiences now and in the future. The Board launched the KDAHR award program to enable groups to improve community involvement with local history and online accessibility to historical documents.

For the first time in the history of the Internet, all issues of the former Jewish magazine ‘Soviet Heimland’ have begun to be digitized.

See https://bit.ly/3UH695L for all the details.

NOTE: The article at https://bit.ly/3UH695L is published in Yiddish. You can use Google Translate or another online translation service to translate it to other languages, including to English.

The following is from Geneanet.org:

On May 24-26, 2024, take pictures of graves in a nearby cemetery.

Since cemeteries are among the most important resources for genealogists, Geneanet has launched the ‘Save our Graves’ project to capture headstones before they are lost.

On May 24-26, 2024, we will need you to photograph as many graves as possible worldwide with the Geneanet mobile app or with your camera.

If you can’t take pictures in a cemetery, you can help to index existing pictures in the Geneanet collaborative database.

How to participate?

1. You have a mobile or tablet

• Install the GeneaGraves app for Android or iOS,

 

• Go to a nearby cemetery, launch the app, select a project or create a new one, then take as many pictures as you wish,
• Once you’re back home, upload the pictures to your Geneanet account via a Wi-Fi access point. These pictures will be free for every Geneanet member.

2. You don’t have a mobile or tablet

• Go to a nearby cemetery and take pictures of graves with a camera,
• Once you’re back home, upload the pictures to your personal computer, then go to en.geneanet.org/cemetery/upload.

Please click here to see if your nearby cemetery is not already listed on Geneanet.

The Te Maeatanga Digitization program in New Zealand is coming to an end on June 30. Up until now, the program's funding was time-limited, and Archives New Zealand hasn't been able to find new funding.

Te whakamatihiko ā-tono Digitization on Demand service will therefore also be shutting down. The deadline for service order requests is May 24 in order to guarantee that all orders can be fulfilled by the program's conclusion at the end of June. We understand that you will be disappointed by this news.

Since 2017, the digitization program has been in operation.

During that period, the Government Digital Archive has digitized around 2 million significant photos for Aotearoa New Zealand, making them accessible to the public online.

Access to non-digitized records will require users to attend reading rooms. You may still use your personal cameras to take pictures of the reading room's open access records.

We are unable to provide digital government loan services, however Archives New Zealand will still be able to provide physical government loans

This choice is unrelated to the government's effort to reduce the base level of the public sector in order to achieve efficiencies. It is intended to eliminate three permanent posts from the Wellington digitizing team and not to renew Te Maeatanga kaimahi's fixed-term agreements.

The Te Maeatanga Digitization programme has improved accessibility to the collections of Archives New Zealand. We understand the value of digitization and will notify you of any updates about new services.

The following is a press release written by University College Cork (UCC) in partnership with RTÉ and the Irish Military Archives:

• Database and interactive map lists all of the combatant and civilian fatalities.
• Project shows that numbers killed were considerably less than in the War of Independence.
• Research indicates the Civil War was more violent, brutal and protracted in counties Kerry, Tipperary and Louth.

A ground-breaking new research and digital mapping project launched today (Monday, 29 April) by the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin TD, lists all of the combatant and civilian fatalities in the Irish Civil War. The project represents the first systematic attempt to investigate the number of people killed in the conflict.

The Irish Civil War Fatalities Project is a ground-breaking research and digital mapping project that covers one of the most complex periods in Ireland’s history. For decades, historians of the Irish Civil War have resorted to estimates when surveying the human cost of the conflict. Now a rigorously researched, academically contextualised database and interactive map lists all of the combatant and civilian fatalities in the thirty-two counties between the opening shots of the Civil War on 28 June 1922 and the ceasefire and dump arms order on 24 May 1923.

The project shows that numbers killed were considerably less than in the War of Independence. This is mainly due to the lack of deliberate killing of civilians, who were three times more likely to have been killed in the War of Independence than in the Civil War. It shows the Civil War was more violent, brutal and protracted in counties Kerry, Tipperary and Louth.

The research also suggests a new chronology of the Civil War, contradicting the idea that major combat was over after the first month of the war. The study of fatalities shows that deaths spiked not only in the opening ‘conventional’ phase of the war, but also in the peak of the guerrilla war in autumn 1922 and again in March 1923 with a concerted series of reprisal killings.

Led by University College Cork (UCC) in partnership with RTÉ and the Irish Military Archives, the project was made possible through funding from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Historical Strand of the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023.

The Irish Civil War Fatalities Project provides new insights into the frequency, nature and concentration of violence across Ireland during the Civil War, complementing the latest research on the military, social and political aspects of the conflict. The interactive map is a major work of public scholarship and fills a significant gap in the historical record.

Launching the project, Minister Martin said: “The Irish Civil War was a great national tragedy and left a deep wound in the newly independent State. The significant loss of life and the injury to the fabric of our communities, and many families, were felt for generations, even to this day. By exploration of the impacts and factual history of the War, UCC’s research serves to deepen our appreciation of the challenges faced and sacrifices made by the individuals and families that made those communities - and the University has done so with a very thorough, engaging, innovative & accessible new resource.”

The Minister added, “From the outset of the project my Department has supported the scope and ambition of UCC, with encouragement and significant funding to underpin the task. This output of this project is exactly the kind of accessible data that the Expert Advisory Group and Government hoped would emerge as an enduring legacy of the Programme, and it adds significantly to the body of work already produced by UCC and others over the course of the Decade. I commend all those who worked on and supported the delivery of this new and invaluable public asset, which assists us all in deepening our understanding of the complex history of the birth of the nation.”

Dr Andy Bielenberg, Principal Investigator of the Irish Civil War Fatalities Project and Senior Lecturer at UCC School of History, said: “Drawing on a wide range of sources, this project offers new insights into the spatial and temporal patterns of violence during the Civil War as well as the social profiles, ages and backgrounds of the victims of that violence. In addition to building a clearer picture of the combatant fatalities of the Irish Civil War, the new research presents a fuller picture of civilian fatalities. We can now see the impact of the conflict on civilians in large swathes of Ireland which remained entirely uncharted until now.”

“The interactive map will be an invaluable tool for researching family history, local history, and filling in gaps in our knowledge about the Civil War,” Dr Andy Bielenberg said.

John Dorney, Historian and Research Assistant, said: “Some of the most interesting findings come from the data collected about fatalities as well as the raw numbers. For instance, we can show that pro-Treaty military casualties were of a significantly lower social class than the anti-Treaty side; that both Dubliners and natives of Cork were overrepresented in the pro-Treaty casualties, while people from Kerry were twice as likely to die on the anti as on the pro Treaty side; and that while pro-Treaty deaths significantly outnumbered anti-Treaty, the latter were far more likely to executed or killed after being taken prisoner.”

The project includes:

• A searchable, interactive Civil War Fatalities map providing new insights into the frequency, nature and concentration of violence across Ireland.
• Research findings by Dr Andy Bielenberg and John Dorney, Historian and Research Assistant.
• A series of articles by invited scholars contextualising the conflict in local areas, including Dr John O’Callaghan on the Civil War in County Limerick; Owen O’Shea on the Civil War in Kerry; Dr Helene O’Keefe on child victims of political violence and Professor Pauric Travers on the Civil War in County Donegal.

View the project here on UCC’s website and on RTÉ.

The Civil War Fatalities Project is the latest in a series of outreach and engagement projects coordinated by UCC's interdisciplinary 'Atlas of the Irish Revolution Team' at UCC during the Decade of Centenaries. These include the award-winning Atlas of the Irish Revolution; the three-part documentary series ‘The Irish Civil War’ narrated by Brendan Gleeson and three, map-based digital history projects created in partnership with RTE.ie.

The following announcement was written by the Augusta (Georgia) Genealogical Society:

Limited seating to view the virtual presentation will be offered at Adamson

Library. To reserve a seat, please call (706) 722-4073

Click here to register,  Augusta Genealogical Society