In the first half of July 2023, MyHeritage added 11 million historical records by updating 3 existing collections and added 6 new collections from France, Scotland, and the U.S. The collections include obituary, military, and census records. All of the French census records include images.  

You can view the long, long list of newly-added online records in an article in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/07/historical-record-collections-added-and-updated-in-the-first-half-of-july-2023/.

The following is an announcement written by TheGenealogist:

TheGenealogist has just released a significant batch of The Jewish Chronicles from the First World War and The Jewish Echo (Scotland and Ireland’s only Jewish paper from the time) covering years during the build up to World War 2.

These newspapers offer the opportunity to traverse through time and witness the pivotal moments that shaped the lives of the Jewish community throughout the war. Accompanying this great resource are the seatholders for the Crosby Street Synagogue in New York, with fascinating details of how it came to be. These records join the substantial holdings of Jewish records on TheGenealogist, including Seatholders of London Synagogues between 1920 and 1939, The Jewish Year Books from 1896 to 1939 and the Jewry Book of Honour (1914-1918).

• Researchers can use these resources to find Jewish ancestors in the news

• Learn what was happening from community notifications

• Find Births, Deaths, Engagements, Marriages, Obituaries and Wills

• Unearth dates for Bar Mitzvahs 

• Track down when Tombstones were to be Set

• Discover relatives that contributed to the many charitable funds supporting victims of the War

• Learn about ancestors’ Military Promotions and listings in Casualty Lists

Read TheGenealogist’s article on how we used records in this release to set history straight and discover the truth about a WW1 Aviator, Businessman and Playboy:

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/setting-history-straight--discovering-the-truth-about-a-ww1-aviator-businessman-and-playboy-3261/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put 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!

An announcement received from the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (NYG&B):

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society’s (NYG&B) 2023 New York State Family History Conference will be held in person and virtually Nov. 2–4, 2023. This year’s conference, “Navigating New York: From Queens to the Queen City,” will feature in-person and virtual programs and events in New York City and Buffalo, alongside access to more than 20 on-demand sessions, which can be viewed until December 15, 2023. In addition, all live sessions in New York City and Buffalo will be recorded and also made available on demand until December 15, 2023.  

We will be joined by researchers, genealogists, and all those interested in family history for a deep dive on how to navigate family history in New York State. More details, including full program description and speakers can be foundhere. 

From an article by Russell Contreras published in the Axios web site:

Black Americans born in the early 1960s typically have more than 300 African and 50 European ancestors dating back to when captive Africans arrived in North America in 1619, according to a new study using computational analysis of genetic data.

Why it matters: Many Black Americans who are descended from enslaved Africans have lacked ancestral information spanning several centuries. In a broad sense, the new research by USC and Stanford University could help shed light on their lineage.

Zoom in: The study, recently published in Genetics, estimates that a random Black American born between 1960 and 1965 is descended from, on average, 314 African and 51 European ancestors dating to 1619. 

You can read more at: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/27/study-sheds-light-black-americans-ancestry

Fermanagh Parish Records 

15,629 new records have been added across four record sets, with three updated and one brand-new. 

The 7,731 new baptisms cover 1767 to 1918 for the parish of St Mary’s in Magheraculmoney, a Church of Ireland denomination. For marriages, there are 2,864 new records to explore, and 1,086 burials. Plus, there’s a brand-new collection in the form of Fermanagh Parish Registers Congregational Records, with 3,948 transcripts to delve into.  

Scotland, Poor Law & Poor Lists 

2,554 detail-rich records for Inverness have been added to this existing collection. Alongside the usual name and birth year, you may also discover other family members, occupations, addresses and more besides – perfect for discovering the stories of your working-class Inverness ancestors.  

Canadian Headstones Index 

The largest update this week sees a huge 1.8 million new records added to this set, with over 300 years of history to explore. You can typically find a name, the cemetery and a copy of the inscription from the headstone.  

Newspapers 

Two new Wiltshire titles, updates to a further 14, and over 112,000 new pages make up this week’s newspaper release. 

New titles 

·         Wiltshire County Mirror, 1852-1874, 1876-1877, 1889, 1893 

·         Wiltshire Telegraph, 1879, 1889, 1901-1916  

Updated titles 

·         Abergele & Pensarn Visitor, 1883, 1885-1886, 1891-1892 

·         Atherstone News and Herald, 1892 

·         Birmingham Journal, 1831 

·         East Kent Gazette, 1899, 1901, 1907, 1909, 1911 

·         Hamilton Advertiser, 1877-1878, 1880-1881, 1883 

·         Haverhill Echo, 1962 

·         Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 1882, 1939, 1959, 1964, 1968, 1973 

·         Kensington News and West London Times, 1872, 1877-1878, 1880-1881, 1883, 1943, 1945 

·         Middlesex County Times, 1876 

·         Newmarket Journal, 1929-1942, 1945-1949, 1956-1959, 1961-1965, 1967-1975, 1979-1981 

·         Southern Weekly News, 1889 

·         Stockport County Express, 1942 

·         Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 1873, 1885, 1890, 1899-1910, 1912-1916, 1935, 1939, 1945, 1951-1962, 1970, 1981-1983, 1987-1988 

·         West Lothian Courier, 1877-1878, 1880-1881 

Museum’s art collection now available for the public to explore online.

According to an article in the scmuseum.org web site:

"The South Carolina State Museum's art collection is now available to explore online allowing educators, students, researchers and others to explore portions of the museum’s collection digitally for the first time. The art collection features more than 4,500 pieces of fine and folk art, historic and modern pottery and ceramics, sculptures, contemporary works, and even topiaries. 

"This project, made possible by funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services' (IMLS) Museums for America grant and the South Carolina State Legislature, has been years in the making. While the material currently available through the online database is limited to works of art, the museum’s cultural history, science and technology and natural history collections will be added in the coming months with the majority made available online in time for the museum's 35th Anniversary Celebration in November 2023.

"The online database includes high quality images enabling users to view the inscriptions of enslaved potter David Drake, or the artistry of painters such as Wenonah Bell and Brian Rutenburg – just a few of the many highlights to discover. Guests are invited to browse the collection or search for specific works by keyword, title, object name, or date range with advanced search functions also available.

"Launching the online database is an important step in the museum’s Reimagine the Experience campaign which aims to feature more of the museum’s extensive collection and eventually renew over 150,000 square feet of exhibition, programmatic and collections storage space to better highlight the many fascinating stories and people throughout South Carolina’s history."

You can read the full story at: https://www.scmuseum.org/news/south-carolina-state-museum-launches-its-first-ever-online-collection-database.

Do you have at least some Chinese ancestry? If so, you will be interested in the following article written by Huang Wei and published in the SixthTone web site:

Last fall, when the Shanghai Library opened a massive new branch in the city’s Pudong District, headlines tended to focus on two things: its size and architect Chris Hardie’s design, which included exhibition, performance, and event spaces in addition to the customary stacks.

Somewhat lost in all this was the library’s collection, one of the driving reasons for the expansion in the first place. (Full disclosure: As an employee of the library, I am responsible for some of that collection.) In particular, the Shanghai Library is home to arguably the world’s top collection of Chinese genealogies, including more than 300,000 volumes of nearly 40,000 different genealogies, totaling 456 surnames.

A genealogy is a historical document that records the lineage of a blood line descended from a single ancestor, the blood relationship between family members, and a family’s assets and customs. They can include depictions of famous family members from history, textual research on the origin of a family’s surname, clan rules and regulations, information on the construction of ancestral halls, even poems. Genealogies of famous families often contain archives of special records, including imperial edicts, orders, and letters given by emperors to officials in the family. (One thing they do not typically include are records pertaining to female members of the family.)

Last fall, when the Shanghai Library opened a massive new branch in the city’s Pudong District, headlines tended to focus on two things: its size and architect Chris Hardie’s design, which included exhibition, performance, and event spaces in addition to the customary stacks.

Comment by Dick Eastman: I visited the Shanghai Library's genealogy collection 38 years ago. That was long before the expansion to the Pudong District location. While somewhat impressive at that time, the collection has since been expanded greatly and I am hoping to make a return visit to the new location before long.

Somewhat lost in all this was the library’s collection, one of the driving reasons for the expansion in the first place. (Full disclosure: As an employee of the library, I am responsible for some of that collection.) In particular, the Shanghai Library is home to arguably the world’s top collection of Chinese genealogies, including more than 300,000 volumes of nearly 40,000 different genealogies, totaling 456 surnames.

A genealogy is a historical document that records the lineage of a blood line descended from a single ancestor, the blood relationship between family members, and a family’s assets and customs. They can include depictions of famous family members from history, textual research on the origin of a family’s surname, clan rules and regulations, information on the construction of ancestral halls, even poems. Genealogies of famous families often contain archives of special records, including imperial edicts, orders, and letters given by emperors to officials in the family. (One thing they do not typically include are records pertaining to female members of the family.)

It may seem curious, given the long history of genealogies in China, that so many would wind up in Shanghai — not a city known for its connection to traditional culture. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the collection of genealogies largely paused. Except for 1950 and 1951, when a small number of genealogies compiled before 1949 were printed, the genealogical record went blank for more than two decades. Genealogies were labeled “feudal” accomplices to the patriarchal system, those who compiled them ran the risk of being accused of nostalgia for the old China, and many volumes were sent to pulp mills.

With thousands of years of history at stake, a Shanghai librarian named Gu Tinglong took a risk and organized a team to rescue as many genealogies as they could from being chemically pulped or thrown into landfills. Their work accounts for two-fifths of the Library’s current collection, with the rest coming from acquisitions made since the 1960s.

You can read the full article by Huang Wei at: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1012694.

A DNA sample contains a person’s entire genetic makeup. This genetic information is deeply private. It can reveal intensely sensitive information about us, including our propensities for certain medical conditions, our ancestry, and our biological familial relationships. Raising the specter of eugenics and other discredited theories, some researchers have theorized that genetics could help explain human behaviors such as aggression, addiction, criminal tendencies, and even political views. Private companies claim they can use our DNA to predict whether we are introverted or extroverted, averse to cilantro, excel at running, or are afraid of public speaking. One company, regularly used by law enforcement in cold case investigations, even claims it can predict a person’s physical facial appearance from their DNA, including “skin color, eye color, hair color, freckles, ancestry and face shape.”

DNA has been used in criminal cases since the late 1980s, but DNA technology and research have advanced significantly since then. Where once, a useful forensic sample could only be obtained from blood, semen, or other bodily fluids, today, forensic investigators can detect, collect, and analyze trace amounts of DNA from objects merely touched by a person. DNA collection is now mandatory from those convicted of or arrested for many crimes, and the national CODIS DNA database, maintained by the FBI, contains nearly 16 million offender profiles and 5 million arrestee profiles.

Despite these technological advances, some crimes continue to have no suspects. In an increasing number of these cases, police are turning to a relatively new investigative technique: forensic genetic genealogy (FGG). Through FGG, police access consumer-facing genetic genealogy websites to try to identify the source of crime scene DNA samples. These consumer sites allow people to upload their own genetic information and use the sites’ proprietary algorithms to search through other users’ data to identify long lost relatives and build a family tree. Several of these sites also allow police to search through the same data to try to find suspects. FGG has been gaining interest after one site, GEDmatch, was used to find the “Golden State Killer,” a man responsible for a series of brutal rapes and murders that plagued California in the 1970s and 80s. By the end of 2021, FGG had been used in well over 500 criminal cases.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, has worked on several cases where law enforcement used FGG, and now the Foundation has published a "Primer For Defense Attorneys And Policymakers" based on that work. This article discusses how genetic genealogy works, law enforcement’s use of FGG, and how FGG can both misidentify suspects and, in rare cases, help to clear wrongful prosecutions and exonerate wrongfully-convicted individuals. It will also discuss new statutory restrictions on the use of FGG and what policymakers need to know to place appropriate guardrails on these searches. Finally, it will discuss what defense attorneys should look for if FGG is used in their cases and how to challenge FGG as an unconstitutional search.

While written for "Defense Attorneys And Policymakers," I suspect the article will also be of interest to many genealogists working on their own family trees. The article may be found at: https://www.eff.org/document/forensic-genetic-genealogy-searches

On Shamshu Deen’s desk in his home office are notebooks, documents stacked one on top the next, a flash drive and, of course, his trusted laptop. To see Deen at his desk is to see a detective at work, except that he is not inves­tigating crimes but helping families trace their roots and reunite with long-lost blood relatives.

For a quarter of a century, the genealogist has helped hundreds of descendants of indentured labourers find their loved ones, and at 77, he has no plans of retiring anytime soon.

“If I’ve contributed to genealogy in Trini­dad, especially East Indian genealogy, then Munradin has to take a lot of the credit,” said Deen.

Munradin was Deen’s great-great-grandfather who left India for Trinidad in 1858. He was also the reason why Deen, whose extraordinary story was recently featured on BBC Outlook, became a genealogist.

You can read the full story in an article by Kimberly Wallace published in the Trinidad Express web site at: https://tinyurl.com/ynmcdfux.

Selected by statewide cultural heritage stakeholders and funded by the DLG’s competitive digitization grant program, this collection is the Walter J. Brown Media Archives’s fourth collaboration with the DLG and is available here: https://dlg.usg.edu/collection/ugabma_wwlaw.

The content for this project consists of oral history interview videos with W. W. Law and other Savannah, Georgia, community members involved in the Civil Rights movement. The tapes were shot just prior to Mr. Law’s death and are the longest and most detailed interviews he did on his life and career as a Civil Rights activist.

The footage was shot in 2001 by Lisa Friedman with the help of the late oral historian Cliff Kuhn for the purpose of creating a documentary on the life of W. W. Law. Although that project never came to completion, it still managed to yield important historical content about Savannah civil rights workers and community leaders, including Aaron Buschbaum, Dr. Clyde W. Hall, Edna Branch Jackson, Ida Mae Bryant, Rev. Edward Lambrellis, Richard Shinholster, Tessie Rosanna Law, Dr. Amos C. Brown, Mercedes Arnold Wright, Carolyn Coleman, E.J. Josey, Walter J. Leonard, and Judge H. Sol Clark.

W. W. Law was fired from his job working for the post office in 1961 because of his civil rights work but was reinstated after an intervention by NAACP leaders and U.S. President John F. Kennedy. As with all civil rights movements in American towns and cities, stories of lesser-known activists in the Civil Rights Movement and the historical impact made by community leaders like Law and the others interviewed in this project are invaluable for researchers interested in the history of civil rights in Georgia.

You can read more in an article by Mandy Mastrovita published in the Digital Library of Georgia web site at: https://blog.dlg.galileo.usg.edu/?p=8557.