Efforts are underway to digitize Türkiye's National Library's vast collection, totaling 20 million pages of resources, with plans to extend accessibility beyond Ankara, announced Taner Beyoğlu, general director of Libraries and Publications at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency (AA) in commemoration of the 60th Türkiye Libraries Week, Beyoğlu highlighted the National Library's 74-year legacy as a cornerstone of Ankara's cultural landscape, serving as a hub for researchers and scholars. He emphasized the institution's commitment to enhancing accessibility through accelerated digitalization initiatives.

The move aims to make the library's extensive resources accessible to individuals beyond Ankara, fostering greater engagement with its diverse collection. As part of ongoing efforts, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism is spearheading the digitalization drive, reflecting its dedication to preserving and promoting Türkiye's rich cultural heritage.

You can read more in an article in the dailysabah.com web site at: https://bit.ly/3VOKScw.

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

This Findmypast Friday, we've added over 100,000 brand-new and exclusive car registration and company directory records from Coventry, England. If you're family has roots in Warwickshire, these unique collections are worth a look.

This week, we have been busy adding thousands of new and unique records to the site. Plus, we've released two new titles in our newspaper archive. Read on to find out more about the latest arrivals.

Warwickshire, Coventry, Vehicle Registrations 1921-1944

This brand-new collection allows you to find out more about car-owning ancestors and so much more. 

With these records, you can discover where and when your relatives worked and unknown stories about their lives. The unique collection also shines a light on fascinating historical insights. You'll find Sir William Lyons, co-founder of the Swallow Sidecar Company. After the Second World War, his brand changed to the now world-famous Jaguar due to the ‘SS’ connotations in its name.

Warwickshire, Coventry, Company Directories and Publications 1908-1966

Over 20,000 pages from various publications can help you discover what it was like to live and work in Coventry.

In these records you can find where family members worked, achievements they picked up and how they lived their lives. The collection includes publications that cover soldiers from the First World War, birth, marriage, death, and retirement notices, accounts of holidays and trips and so much more.

New newspaper pages this week

With two brand-new titles and updates to 22 others, we have been busy adding 272,091 pages to our newspaper collection.

Why not delve into stories from the royal family's very eventful week back in April 1900, in which a royal birth, an assassination attempt and a rare visit to Ireland occurred?

New Titles 

• Daventry and District Weekly Express covering 1986-1988, 1990-1991, 1993, 2001-2002
• Lincoln Leader and County Advertiser covering 1896, 1899-1911, 1913-1929

Updated Titles

• Alnwick Mercury 1965-1968, 1993-1997
• Banbury Guardian 1961-1963, 1978, 1980-1981
• Belfast News-Letter 1985
• Brighouse Echo 1986
• Cumbernauld News 1992
• Edinburgh Evening News 1947-1950
• Falkirk Herald 1863
• Fife Free Press, & Kirkcaldy Guardian 1974-1978, 1993
• Fleetwood Weekly News 1992-1993, 1995-1997
• Hemel Hempstead Gazette and West Herts Advertiser 1982
• Leamington Spa Courier 1985-1986
• Melton Mowbray Times and Vale of Belvoir Gazette 1887-1889, 1943-1960, 1994, 1996-1998
• Morecambe Visitor 1988, 1990-1991, 2001
• Morpeth Herald 1928-1934, 1955-1964, 1996-1997
• Northampton Chronicle and Echo 1992-1993
• Northampton Mercury 1989-1990, 1992-1994
• Retford, Worksop, Isle of Axholme and Gainsborough News 1992-1995, 1997-1998
• Ripon Gazette 1877, 1879, 1889, 1987, 1992-1995, 2001
• Shetland Times 1986
• Shields Daily Gazette 1988
• South Yorkshire Times and Mexborough & Swinton Times 1983
• Wolverhampton Express and Star 1966-1968

Last week, we added over 1.6 million English records - explore the full release for yourself today.

Have you made a surprising family history discovery? Whatever you've uncovered about your past, we'd love to hear about it. You can now get in touch and tell us using this handy form.

More on this topic:

Historical Newspapers English Records

A genealogy business is not for everyone, especially if you’re hoping for a lucrative income stream. “Only a very tiny percentage of us actually support ourselves full time on genealogy,” said Barbara J. Ball, certified genealogist of Copestone Resources LLC.

But it is a relatively simple business to start. You don’t need official certification to call yourself a genealogist. However, it helps if you already have some of the attributes needed to be successful in the field.

In an article for the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly, titled “Transferable Skills: You’re Quitting Your Job to Do What?!”, author and professional genealogist Pam Anderson identified five skills as key attributes that successful genealogists and business owners have. They both are:

• Self-starters
• Goal-oriented
• Analytical
• Effective communicators
• Client-centered

If this describes you, you’re off to a good start.

Launching a genealogy business

Depending on your level of experience, you may want to gather additional expertise before you embark on a career as a genealogist.

You can read the rest of this article by Chad Brooks in the business.com web site at: https://www.business.com/articles/turn-genealogy-into-business/.

From an article by Ed O’Loughlin published in the New York Times:

In the first pitched battle of the civil war that shaped a newly independent Ireland, seven centuries of history burned.

On June 30, 1922, forces for and against an accommodation with Britain, Ireland’s former colonial ruler, had been fighting for three days around Dublin’s main court complex. The national Public Record Office was part of the complex, and that day it was caught in a colossal explosion. The blast and the resulting fire destroyed state secrets, church records, property deeds, tax receipts, legal documents, financial data, census returns and much more, dating back to the Middle Ages.

“It was a catastrophe,” said Peter Crooks, a medieval historian at Trinity College Dublin. “This happened just after the First World War, when all over Europe new states like Ireland were emerging from old empires. They were all trying to recover and celebrate their own histories and cultures, and now Ireland had just lost the heart of its own.”

But perhaps it was not lost forever. Over the past seven years, a team of historians, librarians and computer experts based at Trinity has located duplicates for a quarter of a million pages of these lost records in forgotten volumes housed at far-flung libraries and archives, including several in the United States. The team then creates digital copies of any documents that it finds for inclusion in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, an online reconstruction of the archive. Still a work in progress, the project says its website has had more than two million visits in less than two years.

Funded by the Irish government as part of its commemorations of a century of independence, the Virtual Treasury relies in part on modern technologies — virtual imaging, online networks, artificial intelligence language models and the growing digital indexes of archives around the world — but also on dusty printed catalogs and old-school human contacts. Key to the enterprise has been a book, “A Guide to the Records Deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland,” published three years before the fire by the office’s head archivist, Herbert Wood.

You can read more at: https://bit.ly/3TJaR2f.

OK, so this isn’t about human DNA, but it is  somewhat allied field of technology: DNA of dogs. I found it to be interesting and decided to share it here.

Could your dog be predisposed to a fatal disease? Is your new shelter pup part beagle or boxer? Many pet owners seek answers to these questions, and as a result, direct-to-consumer dog DNA testing is booming.

But how reliable are dog DNA tests—and are the results worth your time? As it turns out, swabbing your dog’s slobber and mailing it to a testing service is the easy part, but just how (or whether) to act on that information presents some ruff choices for scientists and pet owners alike.

Some scientists speculate that dogs separated off from wolves about 23,000 years ago while others claim it happened about 10,000 years later. Either way, humans have left an indelible impression on canines: Careful dog breeding—often tied to desired physical or behavioral characteristics—has produced nearly 400 modern breedsworldwide.

Scientists sequenced a full dog genome for the first time in 2004. Since then, we’ve learned much more about canines’ genetic predisposition to a variety of conditions such as kidney cancer, retinal atrophy, and hip dysplasia.

In one massive 2023 study of more than 1 million dogs, researchers screened for 250 genetic variants associated with diseases like bald thigh syndrome, a hair loss disorder that primarily strikes hounds, and cone-rod dystrophy, an eye disorder that can lead to blindness among pit bulls. The researchers found that 57 percent of dogs carry at least one studied disease variant, and that the less genetic variability a dog has, the more disease markers in its DNA—which increases the chance of health issues.

Most dogs are highly inbred, research suggests.

You can read more in an article by Erin Blakemore published in the nationalgeographic web site at: bit.ly/3TM73x3.

Would you like to receive daily email updates showing all the newly-added articles on this web site in the past 24 hours?

These notices are easy to add and, best of all, are available free of charge. Even better, if you later change your mind and no longer wish to receive those email messages, you can unsubscribe within a few seconds.

There was a previous service that previously sent email messages of all the newly added articles added to this web site in the past 24 hours. However, it was a bit awkward to use, it cost me money, and the third-party service that produced it recently stopped offering it.

This new service removes me from the equation completely. I like that. And the fact that it is free to newsletter readers is even better.

The new service is Blogtrottr at https://https://blogtrottr.com. (Notice there is no letter "e" in the word Blogtrottr.) The service has lots of options, including the capability to filters that enable you to include or exclude updates based on the item contents. The items you receive can be (at your option) HTML emails or plain text. Your updates can be sent as a PDF, or as plain text or HTML (with embedded images) attachments for easy offline or e-book reading. There are several more options as well (details are on the Blogtrottr web site.)

Blogtrottr will send the ENTIRE articles, not just the URL and the first line or two.

The emails sent by Blogtrottr will contain advertising, not unusual in any of the so-called "free services." I found the ads were not terribly intrusive. 

In short, you own your own subscription. You can add, delete, or change the email address at any time. Not bad for a FREE service!

To sign up for this FREE service:

1. Open up a web browser (most any web browser will do) and go to https://blogtrottr.com. 

2. Under the "Getting Started" section, enter the RSS news feed URL of this web site: https://eogn.com/page-18080/rss (you might want to copy-and-paste that for convenience but you can also enter it manually.)

3. Next, enter your own email address.

4. Finally, enter how often you wish to receive the email messages, The options are: Realtime digest, 2 hours digest, 4 hours digest, 6 Hours digest, 8 hours digest, 12 hours digest, or Daily digest. (I might suggest "Daily" unless you really don't mind lots of email messages!)

5. Click on "Feed Me."

To prove that you're not a robot, you will have to click on a checkbox on the next screen you see labelled "Security check."

That's It!

Finally, Blogtrottr will send you an email asking "Was that you that sent the request?" Reply in the affirmative and then sit back and wait for the email messages to roll in. If you selected the Daily digest option, your first email will be sent to you about 24 hours later. 

You might consider adding busybee@blogtrottr.com to your address book or spam whitelist to placate any overexcitable spam filters.

I have been using this service for a few days and it seems to work well. In short, you own your own subscription. You can add, delete, or change your email address at any time. Not bad for a FREE service!

Have questions about Blogtrottr? Most questions are answered at: https://blogtrottr.com/help/.

The following book review was written by Bobbi King:

African American News in the Baltimore Sun, 1870–1927
by Margaret D. Pagan. Genealogical Publishing Co., 2021. 98 pages.

Ms. Pagan has researched through and curated newspaper articles from the Baltimore Sun spanning the years 1870 to 1927 providing an overview and insight into local, national, and international events that shaped the African American communities during a time of social and political upheaval. Although published in Baltimore, the newspaper had expanded coverage to include news from all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Florida to New England, and a few other states.Each newspaper article is dated and the event described. Some examples:Aug 14, 1890   Private John Gordon of the 25th Infantry won the department gold medal as the leader of ten marksmen on the Army’s Department of Dakota team.

Apr 07, 1915    Pullman sleeping car porters went on the witness stand before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations and told of how much the tipping system meant to them. They testified that their salary of $27.50 per month could not pay expenses on the road without the tips they receive, to say nothing of paying rents and maintaining families.

Oct 06, 1924    The Colored World Series between the Negro National League champion, the Kansas City Monarchs, and the Eastern Colored League champion, the Hilldale Club, was played at the Maryland Baseball Park in Baltimore. Of the ten games played four different cities, the Monarchs won in Chicago. (The article lists the names of the players.)

There are over 800 newspaper articles cited, with an extensive index listing more than 1000 names and events. Included are articles about meetings of Baltimore’s Brotherhood of Liberty, precursor to the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, as well as coverage of the efforts to install Black teachers in the segregated schools of Baltimore.

This is an important addition to the genre of compilations that document the African American experience in the late 19th and early 10th centuries. It offers an historic portrait of communities grappling with the complexities of race, identity, and freedom in post-Civil War America.

African American News in the Baltimore Sun is available from the Genealogical Publishing Co. (the publisher) at: https://bit.ly/43GP7bZ and from amazon.com at: https://bit.ly/3TGoi2Z. 

The California State Archives has announced the release of new videos detailing African American genealogical resources available at the State Archives, coinciding with the upcoming Family History Week activities.

From April 1 to 6, the California State Archives will collaborate with the Sacramento Genealogical Society, Center for Sacramento History, California State Library, Sacramento Public Library, Yolo County Archives, FamilySearch, Placer County Museums, California State Parks and Sutter County Museum to host a free six-day series of events featuring 16 classes on genealogy-based topics. These events aim to assist participants in uncovering their ancestors’ significant life events and the stories that define them.

Multiple events highlight African American genealogical research, including “U.S. Colored Troops Pension Records of 1890” presented by Denise I. Griggs on Saturday, April 6, from 11 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. at the California State Archives.

You can read more in an article by California Secretary of State Dr. Shirley N. Weber published in the yubanet.com web site at: https://bit.ly/49i084t

The following is a press release written by the Augusta (Georgia) Genealogical Society:

When:  Saturday, April 27, 2024 Time:  11:00 am - 12:00 pm  EST 

Where:  Online 

Price:   FREE to AGS members or $10 for nonmembers

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

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

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 is a topic that is very popular these days.

A new website launched by the New York State Mesonet at the University at Albany will offer real-time access to weather data statewide around the total solar eclipse on April 8.

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between Earth and the sun, completely blocking the sun’s face. In total, 55 NYS Mesonet sites will experience totality during the eclipse, and every site will be above 90 percent at the peak of the eclipse crossing the region. 

As the eclipse traverses New York, the Mesonet will be tracking weather data from each of its network sites, including environmental variables such as wind speed, solar radiation, temperature and relative humidity. 

The Mesonet eclipse website, which is now available to the public, offers live weather information and camera images from each of its 126 standard sites, with updates every five minutes, along with additional data from its specialized networks.

The entire Mesonet network will track weather data around the total eclipse in real time, including 55 sites in the path of totality.

“This new website will offer the first interactive Mesonet tool that allows people to see a full day of data from all 126 stations all at once,” said Nathan Bain, senior software engineer at the NYS Mesonet. “When people interact with the dashboard, they will see Mesonet stations of interest highlighted across the page, starting and ending times of the eclipse for each station, and photos taken every five minutes. As the eclipse traverses the state, markers on the graphs will indicate when the eclipse is starting and ending, allowing people to easily see how the eclipse impacts the weather.”

You can read more in an article by Mike Nolan published in the University of Albany web site at: bit.ly/3VHXQbI