The following is for this newsletter's Plus Edition subscribers only

If you downloaded the Weekly Plus Edition newsletter earlier this week from https://eogn.com/Plus-Edition-Members, you ended up with a version without any images. That was my error. I apologize for the shortcoming.

It has been now fixed and re-uploaded.

You can now go back to https://eogn.com/Plus-Edition-Members and click on this week's version (in either the HTML version or the PDF version) and it should retrieve the new version with images.

If it retrieves the previous version (without images), you might need to reload the version that is cached in your web browser.

There is an interesting story by David Oliver about people who take DNA kits and suddenly realize they have previously-unknown brothers or sisters. You can read the article at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2023/09/19/ancestry-dna-family-secrets/70707516007/. 

The following is an announcement written by the Society of Genealogists:

Announcing “All About That Place” - the One-Place Study Challenge Event taking place Friday 22^ndSeptember to Sunday 1^st October 

Celebrating the 10^th Anniversary of the Society for One-Place Studies, this unique event is spearheaded by the Society of Genealogists, the Society for One-Place Studies, Genealogy Stories, and the British Association for Local History.

“History is like a patchwork of different perspectives, techniques, and resources. Local history helps us to weave together the past and present, families and communities, big and small histories. It helps us to understand places in the present and connects us to the past” – Joe Saunders, BALH.

Join like-minded history lovers to explore the places your ancestors lived in, all from the comfort of your own home. Inside our pop-up Facebook Group you’ll be able to enjoy over 100 free recorded talks, delivered by a wide range of expert historians, such as Nick Barratt, Janet Few, Daniel Horowitz, Jen Baldwin, Gill Thomas and more!

With event sponsors including eminent organisations like The Genealogist, Name & Place, University of Strathclyde, Pharos Tutors, The Historic Towns Trust and Family Tree magazine, you can be sure to enjoy a truly engaging educational opportunity like no other.

This one-of-a-kind event isn’t just about idly watching though! It’s specially designed to help you to take part. Alongside the wide collection of talks on research tools, analytical techniques, and place history, you’ll be provided with motivating challenge instructions to help you explore local history. You’ll be able to download a free challenge workbook to record your learning activity and complete challenge tasks.

Plus, to celebrate your amazing progress you’ll be offered the opportunity to enter a prize draw consisting of a wide range of history goodies (1-year membership to the SoG, the Curious Descendants Club, BALH, Name & Place, My Heritage and 4 Historic Towns maps)!

To learn more and jump into the Facebook Group sign up here.

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com:                                 

Elizabeth Lotts has published an article that I think should be required reading to all newcomers to genealogy... and also can be very useful to old-timers as well. 

Before you spend money on your research, check into these ten genealogy resources.

You can find the list at: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/10-ways-to-research-your-family-tree-for-free/ar-AA1gRC0Q 

The National Center for Biotechnology Information is excited to introduce Pebblescout, a pilot web service that allows you to search for sequence matches in very large nucleotide databases, such as runs in the NIH Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and assemblies for whole genome shotgun sequencing projects in Genbank – faster and more efficiently!  

Pebblescout uses short segments of your query sequences to identify database records with matches. Matches are based on the frequency of a segment’s occurrence in a database. Result produced for each query is a ranked list of matching records where the ranking utilizes informativeness of matching segments. 

You can read more at: https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2023/09/14/introducing-pebblescout/ 

How many languages do you speak? Thanks to AI, that number could be as many as seven. Los Angeles-based AI video platform HeyGen has launched a new tool that clones your voice from a video and translates what you’re saying into seven different languages. If that wasn't enough, it also syncs your lips to your new voice so the final clip looks (and sounds) as realistic as possible.

Called Video Translate, the tool allows you to upload a video of yourself speaking in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Hindi or Japanese. The requirements are pretty basic so you don’t need any fancy cameras, microphones or software. The clip has to be at least 30 seconds long and should ideally feature just one person. But other than that, you just upload your video and in a single click HeyGen can translate what you’re saying.

You can choose whether you want the output to be in Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese or English. Support for even more languages is also expected by the end of September.  

You can read more in an article by Christoph Schwaiger published in the Tom's Guide web site at: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ai-video-tool-clones-your-voice-in-7-languages-and-i-almost-tried-it 

On Wednesday, September 13, two projects were presented in the library's lecture hall by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts.

Trausti Dagsson from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies and Luke O'Brien presented Speech Analysis of the website Ismus.is and the construction of a text library for older speech that was done in collaboration with the Árni Magnússon Institute and the technology company Tíró and handled about the creation of speech that was trained with audio recordings from the Folklore Museum. The recordings have now been made searchable and accessible.

Bragi Þorgrímur Ólafsson from the National and University Library of Iceland and Unnar Ingvarsson from the National Archives of Iceland presented the Icelandic database in Transkribus. The Transkribus software is made for the purpose of creating an Icelandic base for handwritten texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. The project was carried out in collaboration with experts from the National Archives of Iceland and the National and University Library of Iceland. You can access the Icelandic base by downloading the Transkribus software.

In addition, history student Una Haraldsdóttir told about her project about the diaries of Svein Þórarinsson and the experience of using Transkribus in that project. You can learn more about Una's project (in the Icelandic language) on the website Akureyri.net.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

Another whole county’s worth of Irish parish records now bolsters the record collections of TheGenealogist! Today, one of the leading providers of family history resources has added the records of 510,007 individuals from County Laois to its site in their latest release.

[County Laois, once known as Queen's County from 1556 to 1922]

County Laois, once known as Queen's County from 1556 to 1922, is a double landlocked county in the Eastern and Midland Region of the Republic of Ireland. As the Irish diaspora has spread out across the globe, especially during the terrible events of the Great Famine of 1845–49 which devastated the county at the time, many people from across the world will be able to trace their roots back to this part of Ireland.

Searching TheGenealogist’s transcriptions provides an easy way to find records which then provides a handy link to the National Library of Ireland (NLI) in order to see the digitised image of the actual register. TheGenealogist’s transcription greatly benefits from its powerful SmartSearch that can be used to identify possible siblings, as well as parent’s potential marriage details.

To find out more about how to use these records see TheGenealogist’s article: Searching for ancestors in the Laois parish records https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/searching-for-ancestors-in-the-laois-parish-records-5099/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, which puts a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections. 

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!