Thanks to our partner Caswell County Public Library, we now have a wealth of family history and genealogy materials accessible online from their collection. The materials which range from large family trees to family history files, to published family histories can be found on DigitalNC here. For anyone doing family genealogy research and have Caswell County relatives or ancestors, the Library’s collection is a fantastic place to start. 

One of the more fascinating items we scanned for Caswell County was a set of very very large family trees, one of them over 4 feet long! The family tree is for the Descendants of Captain Robert Blackwell (1742-1813) and wife, Zillah Rice (1746-1818) through their son Carter Blackwell (1775-1835) and wife, Isabella Bracken (1779-1835). Robert Blackwell was a captain in the Revolutionary War and was a member of the NC House of Commons from 1796-1797. He owned 1,394 acres of land which was called “Stony Fork”, on Moon’s Creek in Caswell County.

To learn more about Caswell County Public Library’s local history and genealogy collections, visit their website here. To learn more about what they hold on DigitalNC, visit their partner page here.

A list of over 800 books translated from Ukrainian is now available for viewing. It includes works by Ivan Bahryany, Ivan Kotlyarevsky, Oksana Zabuzhko, Artem Chekh, Maria Matios, and other Ukrainian authors.

Users can filter publications by language and find literature available to foreign readers in their native language.

The writer and popularizer of the Ukrainian language Natalia Mysyuk, mentor and project manager Iryna Udovenko, as well as the staff of the Ukrainian bookstore in Prague "Vusa Shevchenko" took an active part in filling the database. The catalog of publications is being updated.

The database also contains books published thanks to the Translate Ukraine program, which the UBI has been implementing since 2020 to support translations.

The new tool will be useful to cultural and educational institutions, embassies, cultural centers, organizers of international events, libraries, bookstores, teachers, and reading promoters.

Forensic genealogists in the United States have solved one of the oldest criminal cases in the country’s history. Specialists identified the murderer of a 75-year-old double homicide using DNA samples.

New and Updated

New and Updated

I received some sad news today: the death of James L. Hansen, He influenced so many of our genealogical lives with his insightful lectures. His genealogical articles and editorial services were major contributions to the genealogical community.

James L. Hansen, age 76, passed away on Sunday, June 22, 2025. He was born on October 3, 1948, the eldest son of Leonard and Theresia (St.Louis) Hansen of Turtle Lake, Wisconsin.

He acquired his BA from Marquette University in 1970 and his MLS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1974. That fall he was hired as Reference Librarian by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Jim spent a wonderful 40 years answering questions, giving lectures (all around the country), writing genealogical articles and editing for several major genealogical journals. In 1995, Jim was named a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, an organization limited to 50 members. He retired from the Wisconsin Historical Society in 2014.

He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Jane (Johnson) Hansen and 2 sons, Ron and Dave of Madison; daughter-in-law, Ginger (Field) Hansen; and granddaughter, Daphne Hansen. He is further survived by his brothers, Tom (Nancy) Hansen & Ray (Cathy) Hansen of Turtle Lake & Steven Hansen of Duluth; as well as many nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents and youngest brother, Martin Hansen.

A Celebration of Life will be held at 11:00AM on Saturday, July 12, 2025, at Ryan Funeral Home, 2418 N. Sherman Avenue, Madison. A visitation will be held from 5:00PM until 7:00PM on Friday, July 11, 2025 at the funeral home and again on Saturday from 10:00AM until time of service.

The family would like to thank Rebecca and Danielle from Agrace and Lakeisha and other staff from Cornerstone Caregivers. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be given in Jim’s name to Agrace Hospice, 5395 E. Cheryl Parkway, Madison, WI, or at agrace.org/donate, or to Wisconsin State Historical Society, attn: Joe Kollar, PO Box 260050, Madison, WI, 53726. To view and sign this guestbook, please visit: www.ryanfuneralservice.com

The following announcement was written by the folks at Findmypast:

• Delve deeper into your family story than ever before for less – but hurry, offer ends 15 September

• Enjoy half price family history for a year, with 50% off 12-month Everything subscriptions on Findmypast, down to just $12.50 per month

• Plus, get 25% off history's headlines with an offer on British Newspaper Archive subscriptions

Family history website Findmypast has announced its biggest-ever subscription sale, offering family historians the chance to explore their British & Irish roots in unprecedented depth for half the usual price.

For a limited time only, researchers can enjoy 50% off a 12-month Everything subscription, now just $12.50 per month, representing a saving of $150 per year, giving them unlimited access to Findmypast’s entire collection of exclusive records, rich historical newspapers, and easy-to-use family tree tools – all designed to unlock stories that can’t be found anywhere else.

As the specialists in British & Irish family history, Findmypast is uniquely placed to help those with UK heritage trace the lives of ancestors across the globe, offering a deeper understanding of the moments that shaped their lives and the world in which they lived. 

The Everything subscription offers an access-all-areas pass to:

• Billions of records you won’t find anywhere else spanning centuries, including unique UK & Irish parish registers, military, travel and crime records, extensive non-conformist collections, and the most detailed 1939 Census data available anywhere online.

• Exclusive newspaper archives dating back to the 1700s with global reach, offering over 95 million pages to delve into for rich details and emotional discoveries. Clip and connect these to your tree and share with family and friends.

• Powerful research features to uncover, visualize, connect, and share your family story like never before, including the new Workspaces feature, allowing you to compile and organize your research projects in one place. Build your tree quickly with the simple tree builder, and use the helpful hints and storytelling features to understand more about your ancestors’ lives and the world around them.

For those wishing to concentrate their research within historical newspaper pages, Findmypast’s sister website the British Newspaper Archive is offering a 25% discount on subscriptions. From salacious scandal to family folklore and local legend, discover the past's most colourful stories within millions of newspaper pages. 

Offer details:

• 50% off 12-month Everything subscription on Findmypast ends 15 September. Code automatically applied at checkout.

• 25% off all British Newspaper Archive subscriptions ends 15 September. Use code: SEPT2525 at checkout to claim your discount.

• Ts & Cs apply.

The Sno-Isle Genealogical Society (SIGS) invites the public to uncover the personal stories that shape our shared national heritage at their September meeting. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, SIGS is launching a year-long exploration of how individual family histories — whether rooted in colonial America or shaped by recent immigration —contribute to the American story.

SIGS’s September meeting is on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, at the Wickers Building in Heritage Park in Lynnwood. The event includes a pre-meeting social hour starting at 6:30 p.m. Guests can enjoy refreshments, meet SIGS members and ask questions about how to get started with family research. Don’t worry if you’re new — no experience is needed, just curiosity. Visit the “My American Story” table to see how one member’s ancestors left a mark on history and learn how your family might have, too.

At 7:30 p.m., the evening’s main presentation begins, available both in person and via Zoom. SIGS Vice President Corey Smith will introduce this year’s new theme and upcoming programs, including the “First Footprints” and “Tapestry Talks” initiatives. If you’re just beginning your family history journey, Smith will also walk you through how to start a simple family tree.

The meeting is free and open to the public. For more details and the Zoom link, check the SIGS calendar.

The following is a press release written by the folks at: Clark Atlanta University:

Clark Atlanta University (CAU) is proud to announce its inclusion in the Getty Foundation’s prestigious Black Visual Arts Archives program. The university has been awarded $140,000 as part of Getty’s $2.6 million investment to support libraries, museums, and universities across the United States in preserving and increasing access to archival collections documenting the work of Black artists.

The grant will enable Clark Atlanta University to establish an official institutional archive for its museum, with a focus on assessing and inventorying significant records related to the Museum’s history, exhibitions, and artist and object files, which are currently stored in non-archival filing cabinets.

“This grant represents a transformative opportunity for Clark Atlanta University to properly preserve our rich artistic heritage and make these invaluable resources accessible to scholars, students, and the community for generations to come,” said Danille Taylor, Ph.D., executive director of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. “We are honored to be among the select institutions chosen for this important initiative.”

CAU Art Museum History

The CAU Museum’s core collections were built through the venerated Atlanta Art Annuals, which played a significant role in showcasing and supporting major African American artists who were often excluded from mainstream art institutions, such as Henry O. Tanner, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles White.

Clark Atlanta University joins six other institutions receiving funding in this grant cycle, including Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, California State University Los Angeles, Emory University in Atlanta, Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington D.C., and Visual AIDS in New York City.

“We need a fuller understanding of the influence of Black artists, architects, and cultural institutions to tell a more complete history of American art and culture, and we can work towards achieving this by investing in Black archives,” said Miguel de Baca, senior program officer at the Getty Foundation. “Black Visual Arts Archives delivers critical support to make these archives and the stories of creativity, resiliency, and community they hold more accessible to researchers and the general public.”

The Black Visual Arts Archives program is designed to increase access to archival collections across the country that hold vital information about work created by Black artists. A major goal of the program is to increase visibility of archives to the public through exhibitions, community programming, and digital projects.

Results from the pilot phase of Black Visual Arts Archives will be presented during the annual Society of American Archivists conference, taking place in Anaheim, California, from August 24-27, 2025.

About Clark Atlanta University

Clark Atlanta University was formed with the consolidation of Atlanta University and Clark College. Atlanta University, established in 1865 by the American Missionary Association, was the nation’s first institution to award graduate degrees to African Americans. Clark College, established four years later in 1869, was the nation’s first four-year liberal arts college to serve a primarily African American student population. Today, with nearly 4,000 students, CAU is the largest of the four institutions (CAU, Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Morehouse School of Medicine) that comprise the Atlanta University Center Consortium. It is also the largest of the 37-member UNCF institutions. CAU offers a wide range of bachelor, master and doctorate degree programs in business, education, public administration, and social work and in innovative fields such as cyber-physical systems. Notable alumni include: James Weldon Johnson, poet, and songwriter of Lift Every Voice and Sing “The Black National Anthem”; Ralph David Abernathy Sr., American civil rights activist; Congressman Hank Johnson, Georgia District 4; Kenya Barris, American award-winning television and movie producer; Kenny Leon, Tony Award-winning Broadway Director; and Jacque Reid, Emmy Award-winning Television Personality and Journalist. To learn more about Clark Atlanta University, visit www.cau.edu.

The following is an announcement written by the folks at Reclaim the Records:

www.ReclaimTheRecords.orgView this e-mail in your browser our fifty-fourth what happens when a car salesman fires the FOIA workers newsletter NOW ONLINE: 1.5 million NEW names in the BIRLS database of deceased US veterans! SUDDENLY NOT IN YOUR MAILBOX: their files! COMING SOON: probably another lawsuit! Hello again from your excited and very annoyed records reclaimers at Reclaim The Records. Today we're simultaneously announcing a big new free database update, about 1.5 million new names and more basic biographical information about deceased American veterans from the 2020-2023 period! It's the first public update to our big BIRLS database, a dataset that we originally released late last year, bringing the new grand total to over nineteen and a half million names of US veterans, the largest dataset of its kind that we know of. And we're also discussing how the very same government agency we won these records from in a multi-year FOIA lawsuit, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA), is now, as of just a few weeks ago, suddenly refusing to process thousands of FOIA requests from the public for these exact kind of amazing files -- including, very likely, many of your own FOIA requests!  A quick recap about BIRLS If you've been using our new BIRLS.org website over the past year to make free FOIA requests for copies of the C-Files (benefits claims files) for your relatives or research interests, you may have gotten to see some incredible never-before-available records, scanned for the very first time, and sent right to your house. People have gotten C-Files for everyone from barely-known relatives to Hollywood movie stars to Hall of Fame baseball players to WWII POWs in the Pacific and everyone in between. Many of these benefits claims files really should have been moved out of the VA warehouses and over to the National Archives (NARA) years ago, but they were not. And for years it was also almost impossible to get the VA to properly respond to a FOIA request for the materials -- unless, as we discovered, you sent in your FOIA request by fax. So we at Reclaim the Records built the BIRLS.org website so you could file a FOIA request and fax it to the VA right from your web browser, all for free. And boy oh boy, did people like that! In the past nine months, since the website went live, we're proud to say that we've enabled more than 8,000 researchers to submit more than 20,000 FOIA requests to the VA for these amazing but barely-known and previously-unavailable files!  Dude, where's my (grandpa's) file? Well, the government giveth and the government taketh away -- or is trying to. In late July, suddenly the envelopes of amazing DVDs stopped showing up at people's houses. Instead, researchers have suddenly been getting different response letters, ones now saying that only bare bones textual genealogical information will be released, not actual scanned files! These new genealogy forms, as paltry as they are, are usually mostly blank in the first place, or filled with errors. Basically, the VA has decided it doesn't want to fulfill our FOIA requests at all! We suspect that the limited information they are deciding to give us is not even being properly transcribed from the underlying file, and we even wonder if it’s being created by artificial intelligence scanning the file. We've created a new page at BIRLS.org/updates where we are sharing everything we know (so far) about this new FOIA-denying policy change by the VA, including samples of the new "genealogical" form letters they have started sending out to researchers. We're actively working with our attorneys to explore our options for fighting back against this sudden change to a policy of providing these files for genealogy research that started in 1948. And we have to say it: there is probably another pressing reason for the VA to suddenly want to find a way to stop responding to FOIA requests now, in mid-2025. We know that thousands of employees of the VA have been fired, laid off, or pressured into early retirement in just the past few months, through the work of a certain car salesman and his friends. And that reduction in workforce has been hitting the agency at the exact same time that they have been receiving over 20,000 FOIA requests (so far!) from our new website. It would certainly be easier for the agency to simply avoid the tedious process of finding and scanning and sending all these records if it did not want to, or if it could no longer provide the manpower to do so... So what are we doing about it? Well, we want our records back. We're working with our legal team on other ways to reinstate our right, and your right, to access these amazing files without new and unnecessary "genealogical" redactions that strip all the good stuff out. We’re scoping our next steps, but this is going to likely be a long, complicated, and expensive venture. In the meantime, we’ll keep publishing guidance at BIRLS.org/updates and tracking any further VA policy shifts. Stay tuned for updates... And what can YOU do about it? While we're making our game plans, and even though the VA is still being ridiculous about all this, you should definitely keep searching and keep making FOIA requests for new C-Files, especially from the newest batch of 1.5 million more names that we just posted online this week. Because all of these veterans are deceased, you will likely find recent information in there that simply isn't available anywhere else, including in state death indices, death certificates, or the somewhat-outdated public version of the Social Security Death Master File. And also in the meantime, if you did happen to get a disappointing "genealogy letter" from the VA instead of an awesome DVD with a PDF, YOU SHOULD APPEAL IT. The VA seems to have classified all recent requests submitted through BIRLS.org as "genealogy" requests. However, we suspect that a large share of these requests were submitted for immediate relatives’ files. If this is you, you may have even more options! If you are the widow(er), child, or legal next-of-kin of the veteran, appeal the response! 38 C.F.R. § 1.504, a different section of the regulation, provides for disclosure to next-of-kin. You have ninety days to appeal the VA’s denial letter to ogcfoiaappeals@va.gov . Cite 38 C.F.R. § 1.504, include your denial letter, proof of death, and proof of your relationship. And if you’re not a next-of-kin of the person whose file you sought, you should still appeal, too -- but you may want to hold off a little longer for our "model arguments", which we are still working out with our lawyers. You have ninety days from your letter date to appeal (or not), and we’ll share recommended language on our website as soon as it’s ready, hopefully by mid-September. We hope that the VA will at least provide full files to close relatives, but frankly, we suspect they are making up new policies in response to our every move, so we have no idea what will happen. However, even if your appeal is denied, you’ll preserve a six-year window to litigate the issue. And whatever happens,we will keep fighting.  Help Us Keep Fighting – Donate Today! The VA is trying to close the door on public copies of millions of cubic feet of unique historical material; we’re going to pry it back open. If you can, please help us pay for the crowbar. Turning this around will, at best, take a lot of work from our lawyers. None of this is going to be cheap. If you can, please make a tax deductible gift today to underwrite our efforts. Otherwise, these records may languish in warehouses for decades, and the stories they hold will remain unknown. Reclaim The Records is a small but mighty organization that fights for public access to historical records. We don’t take government funding — we rely on grassroots support from people like you. If you believe in open records, transparency, and genealogical rights, please make a donation today. Every dollar goes directly toward legal efforts, public awareness campaigns, and the fight against record closures — and the fight forawesome new records acquisitions, like this one! Here’s how you can support us, and our work. Thank you! Because history should never be padlocked, your annoyed but determined friends at Reclaim The Records