There are many reasons why every genealogist can use the Reimagine app for iPhones and Android phones. MyHeritage recently listed a few:

Reimagine is a photo app that allows you to harness the power of MyHeritage’s AI photo features and scan multiple photos in seconds right from your mobile device. This innovative app has really resonated with our users, who have already scanned, colorized, enhanced, restored, and animated hundreds of thousands of photos using the app.

Download Reimagine now

If you haven’t gotten in on the action yet — you’re missing out. Here are 7 reasons why you need the Reimagine app in your life:

1. To futureproof your photos (and beat procrastination)

2. To revisit your favorite memories and see them in a new way

3. To seize every opportunity to collect photos from your childhood

4. To share your memories and improved photos with family and friends

5. To declutter your living space without getting rid of important mementos

6. To organize your photos into customized albums and collections

7. To create unique and powerful gifts for loved ones

Interested? You can learn more about these features and more in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/08/7-reasons-you-need-the-reimagine-app/.

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it contains information about the FREE word processor. spreadsheet, PowerPoint replacement, and other applications that I use and prefer over the Microsoft and Apple products:

The free competitor to Microsoft Office and Apple iWork just got another update.

, especially since LibreOffice has more features and supports more file formats than many other free alternatives. The Document Foundation has now released LibreOffice 7.6 across all platforms, making the office suite even better.

LibreOffice Writer, the equivalent to Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, has a few useful improvements in LibreOffice 7.6. Adding the current page number to a document in the header or footer is now just one click, with the updated "New Page Number Wizard" option in the Insert menu. Tables of Figures can now be generated based on paragraph styles, instead of just from categories or object names, and bibliography entries can be edited more easily. The Paragraph Style dropdown menu also now gives you a list of styles used in the document, rather than the full list of available styles.

LibreOffice Calc, the Excel and Apple Numbers replacement, also has some great changes. There's a new compact layout for pivot tables, spreadsheets copied to another document don't lose their print range anymore, the autofilter can sort by color, and the Import Text feature (used for opening unformatted text or CSV files) has been improved.

Finally, there are a few new features for LibreOffice Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent) and Draw (a vector graphics tool). There's a new panel for switching slides while viewing a presentation, auto-fitting text scaling that now works more like Microsoft Office, and fonts for CJK and Arabic languages have been improved.

You can download LibreOffice 7.6 from the official website as the "Community" version, which is intended for personal home use, with Enterprise versions available for businesses and other groups who need custom features and dedicated support. The update should also roll out to Linux package repositories, the Mac App Store, and other places soon. Interestingly, LibreOffice isn't giving up on Windows 7 and 8 just yet, like we've seen from many other applications over the past year — it still works on Windows 7 SP1 or newer, as well as macOS 10.15 or later.

The Document Foundation also confirmed that this will be the last update in the LibreOffice 7.x family, as the group is moving to a new version scheme based on the year and month, like Ubuntu Linux. The next major update will be LibreOffice 2024.02 in February of next year.

You can learn more at: https://www.libreoffice.org/. 

The following was first published in the blog of the Digital Library Of Georgia:

The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) announced today the 7 recipients of its latest set of digitization service awards. These awards expand the scope of the Georgia communities documented in the Digital Library of Georgia. Among the awardees are 5 new partners. Awardee projects include documentation of the Leo Frank trial and folk pottery of Northeast Georgia.

The GALILEO-funded program increases the diversity of contributors to the DLG and its content. The Breman Museum, the DeKalb History Center, the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia, Island Ford Baptist Church, and the Suwanee First United Methodist Church are all new partners. These awards enhance the DLG’s coverage of the growth of Gwinnett and DeKalb counties and of elementary education in Clarke County. Materials covering the Leo Frank trial and its aftermath will supplement those currently available. Documentation of Georgia folk life and pottery traditions rounds out the awards.

The recipients and their projects include:

Athens-Clarke County Library

Chase Street PTO Scrapbooks

Digitization of 17 scrapbooks and one photo album of the Athens-based Chase Street Elementary School’s Parent Teacher Organization from 1926 to the early 2000s. 

Atlanta History Center

John Burrison Folklore Archives Collection

Digitization of oral history interviews created between Fall 1973 and Fall 1977 by Georgia State University folklore students. The interviews discuss Southern crafts, storytelling, and traditions.

The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum

Leo M. Frank Collection

Digitization and description of the materials highlighting the repercussions experienced by those who stood up for Leo Frank’s innocence.

DeKalb History Center

Digitizing DeKalb County plat map books

Digitization of DeKalb County plat map books that detail the subdivisions, streets, and property owners throughout the county from 1912 to 1936.

Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia

Folk Pottery Project

Digitization and description of the Folk Pottery Museum Collection, composed of more than 300 ceramic objects created by Georgia folk potters from the mid-19th century onwards.

Island Ford Baptist Church

Suwanee Creek Chapter, NSDAR Historic Preservation Project

Digitization and description of the records of Sugar Hill’s earliest church, Island Ford Baptist Church, dating from 1833 to 1917. The records document enslaved individuals and the early settlers of Gwinnett County.

Suwanee First United Methodist Church

Suwanee First United Methodist Church Historical Documents

Digitization and description of the records of the first church established in Suwanee, Georgia, that document the church’s marriages, baptisms, and deaths from the 1880s through the 1950s.

Notice that this presentation will be available in-person and also on Zoom. That means you can attend online from anyplace in the world (but pay attention to timezone differences!)

Location:

Irish Family History Forum

Bethpage Public Library 47 Powell Ave 
Bethpage, NY, NY (Map)

Contact Name: C. White 
Visit Website: Website.

Date & Time

10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Sat, Sep 16, 2023

Cost: Free Event

The Irish Family History Forum 

 Presents 

Getting Started in Irish Genealogy 

Genealogist Melanie McComb 

➢ New to Irish genealogy? 

➢ Need to improve your research skills? Saturday, September 16, 2023 at 10 a.m. 

This meeting is free and open to ALL! 

Attend in-person, or virtually on Zoom! 

10 – 10:45 a.m. - Meet & Greet, Refreshments, Ask the Experts 11:00 a.m. - Presentation 

In-Person: Bethpage Public Library, 47 Powell Ave. Bethpage, N.Y. 

Virtual on Zoom: Pre-registration required for Zoom. Website: www.ifhf.org for Directions and Zoom registration 

For more information email: press@ifhf.org Become a Member (Discount for Students with ID

I haven't figured out WHY this exists but it does. There's a full-scale styrofoam replica of Stonehenge located in Virginia called, appropriately enough, Foamhenge. You can find a Foamhenge web site at https://coxfarms.com/about/foamhenge/ although a more detailed description can be found on Wikipedia at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foamhenge

The new National Archives leader whose nomination was swept into the partisan furor over the criminal documents-hoarding case against ex-President Donald Trump says she is now preparing the agency that’s responsible for preserving historical records for an expected flood of digital documents.

Colleen Shogan, a political scientist with deep Washington ties, says the spotlight on the Archives during the past year shows that Americans are invested in preserving historical materials. After events in Kansas on Wednesday, she reiterated that she had no role in decisions made when the Trump investigation began and said the Archives depends upon the White House to deliver documents when a president leaves office.

“It provides an opportunity for us to discuss, quite frankly, why records are important,” Shogan said. “What we’re seeing is that Americans care about records. They want to have access to the records.”

You can read more in an article by John Hanna published in the Associated Press web site at: https://apnews.com/article/national-archives-trump-classified-documents-aba70ea2bb1c7b8ae2f24a6d7d5631c0. 

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

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

If you have a "smartphone" or a tablet computer with a camera, you already have a book and document scanner that is more than "good enough" for many purposes. All you need to do is to add some free software. The result is a device that can "scan" documents at the library or archives, can digitally save business cards, save receipts for income tax time, digitize all sorts of documents, and is useful for any other time you need to scan and save a copy for later without any fuss. In essence, your smartphone or tablet becomes a scanner that you can have with you all the time.

One app that may best be defined as a document management solution for mobile devices, starting from capturing information precisely to storing, sharing, annotating and managing documents for different purposes.  It not only creates images of the item you scan, but it also lets you enhance the scan result and auto-crop scanned photos. Unlike taking a simple picture of a document, one app will eliminate the unwanted "border" around a picture or document that typically shows in any image taken with a camera. You end up with just the desired document or picture, nothing more. 

The same app lets you save document scans in PDF or JPG formats. You can edit and manage documents anywhere an Internet connection is available, using a handheld device or a Windows, Macintosh, or Linux computer. Notes can be added to a document, and OCR scanning is also available free of charge. Documents saved in the cloud can be quickly searched, even if thousands of items are stored there.

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/13242830.

Forensic genetic genealogists skirted GEDmatch privacy rules by searching users who explicitly opted out of sharing DNA with law enforcement.

Form an article by Jordan Smith published in theintercept.com:

Cece Moore, an actress and director-turned-genetic genealogist, stood behind a lectern at New Jersey’s Ramapo College in late July. Propelled onto the national stage by the popular PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” Moore was delivering the keynote address for the inaugural conference of forensic genetic genealogists at Ramapo, one of only two institutions of higher education in the U.S. that offer instruction in the field. It was a new era, Moore told the audience, a turning point for solving crime, and they were in on the ground floor. “We’ve created this tool that can accomplish so much,” she said.

Genealogists like Moore hunt for relatives and build family trees just as traditional genealogists do, but with a twist: They work with law enforcement agencies and use commercial DNA databases to search for people who can help them identify unknown human remains or perpetrators who left DNA at a crime scene.

The field exploded in 2018 after the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo as the notorious Golden State Killer, responsible for more than a dozen murders across California. DNA evidence collected from a 1980 double murder was analyzed and uploaded to a commercial database; a hit to a distant relative helped a genetic genealogist build an elaborate family tree that ultimately coalesced on DeAngelo. Since then, hundreds of cold cases have been solved using the technique. Moore, among the field’s biggest evangelists, boasts of having personally helped close more than 200 cases.

The practice is not without controversy. It involves combing through the genetic information of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in search of a perpetrator. And its practitioners operate without meaningful guardrails, save for “interim” guidance published by the Department of Justice in 2019.

The last five years have been like the “Wild West,” Moore acknowledged, but she was proud to be among the founding members of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Accreditation Board, which is developing professional standards for practitioners. “With this incredibly powerful tool comes immense responsibility,” she solemnly told the audience. The practice relies on public trust to convince people not only to upload their private genetic information to commercial databases, but also to allow police to rifle through that information. If you’re doing something you wouldn’t want blasted on the front page of the New York Times, Moore said, you should probably rethink what you’re doing. “If we lose public trust, we will lose this tool.” 

You can read the full story at: https://theintercept.com/2023/08/18/gedmatch-dna-police-forensic-genetic-genealogy/. 

If you are new to genealogy, you should read this article published in the midfloridanewspapers.com web site:

Have you ever wondered where you came from? Who were your ancestors and what brought them to America?

If you’ve ever thought about your origins, then you’re going to want to enroll in a series of new beginner genealogy classes starting-up in South Lake this Fall (but available online to students anywhere  in the world).

The classes will be held virtually on three Wednesdays in the months of September and October by Pastfinders of South Lake County Genealogical Society.

There are different sessions you can enroll in and each one requires a separate registration. You are welcome to take as many of the courses as you want, free of charge. The sessions are:

Session 1: Introducing Immigration Facts, Review the Genealogy Research Plan, Exploring Features of Genealogy Search Engines. This presentation introduces immigration facts and how they in turn can spur research efforts.  A basic step-by-step genealogy research plan is shown. The features of several genealogy research engines are pointed out and one software genealogy program is presented. Participants see the purpose and benefits of various types of Family Group pedigree charts. September 6th from 1 pm to 3 pm.