The Stockton & Darlington Railway, in England, was the first railway in the world to operate freight and passenger service with steam traction. 

In 1821 George Stephenson, who had built several steam engines to work in the Killingworth colliery, heard of Edward Pease’s intention of building an 8-mile (12.9-km) line from Stockton on the coast to Darlington to exploit a rich vein of coal. Pease intended to use horse traction. Stephenson told Pease that a steam engine could pull 50 times the load that horses could draw on iron rails. Impressed, Pease agreed to let Stephenson equip his line.

The National Railway Museum has acquired and digitised a newly-discovered archive from Leonard Raisbeck, a largely forgotten early railway pioneer.

Born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1773, solicitor Leonard Raisbeck played an important role in planning and organising the new railway. He worked closely with chief financial backer Edward Pease and famous engineer George Stephenson, but has not been remembered to the extent that his more well-known counterparts have.

The collection of 258 documents has never been available for public viewing before. Following a major project, it becomes the museum's first archive to be fully digitised, giving people free access to every page (front and back), online. It is only the second large archive in the Science Museum Group to be fully digitised, after the papers of Charles Babbage.

You can read more at: https://www.railadvent.co.uk/2023/04/stockton-and-darlington-railway-archive-available-to-the-public-online.html.

The Fionn Folklore Database hopes to make the tales of ancient Irish heroes more accessible to the public through stories, digital maps, character lists, and other resources.

The recently-launched Fionn Folklore Database aims to connect people around the world with approximately 3,500 orally-collected stories and songs about the greatest heroes of the Gaelic world, Fionn mac Cumhaill and his legendary warrior band, the Fianna. 

Stories about Fionn and the Fianna have long been held in high regard, both in their homelands and among overseas emigrants. Before this project was undertaken, however, the great extent of the corpus was entirely unknown, even among the scholarly community.

Granting the Irish heroes their long-awaited due, the Fionn Folklore Database shines new light on the vast array of tales about the Fianna, and on the talented storytellers and collectors who preserved them from the 18th century to the present day. 

You can read more in an article in the IrishCentral web site at: https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/fionn-folklore-database

First used as a public cemetery for unclaimed and unidentified bodies in 1869, New York’s Hart Island, home to the remains of over one million people and the nation’s largest public cemetery, has a long-held reputation as the final resting place for the unidentified, the poor, and victims of epidemics like the 1918 flu pandemic and the AIDS crisis. 

Unlike the other islands surrounding New York City, Hart Island has not experienced the same revitalization as its neighbors such as Roosevelt Island and Governor’s Island, which now bustle with luxury residences, festivals, and summer camp facilities. Long inaccessible to the general public, Hart Island may soon get a new life as a public park. 

You can read more in an article in the familytree.com web site at https://www.familytree.com/blog/new-yorks-hart-island-is-becoming-a-park.

NOTE: This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, the various problems with Twitter and its new CEO, Elon Musk, seem to be constantly in the news these days so I thought I would add one more article that points to a recent article that caught my eye. I would hope you will also read it.

From an article by Lance Ulanoff published in the techradar.com web site:

A Musk-free zone

Bluesky Social might be the real antidote to what ails Twitter.

It had been another caustic and demoralizing night on Twitter, a platform I once loved, but which has now devolved into a circus of sycophantic Elon Musk-adoring clowns, when I noticed a new DM from some I didn't really know, but who was offering me an invite code for Bluesky Social.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey quietly launched Bluesky Social, a decentralized social media platform, back in October of 2022. Virtually no one I knew had even seen it, but the app had recently dropped on both Android and iOS. And over the past couple of days (I'm writing this on April 25), the invite-only platform has been expanding, thanks to longer-term users gathering and distributing invite codes to friends, influencers, and even celebrities.

You can read the full article at: https://tinyurl.com/9h44yvke.

Elephind can be a great FREE resource for anyone who wishes to search old newspapers. The purpose of elephind.com is to make it possible to search all of the world's digital newspapers from one place and at one time. Elephind.com allows you to simultaneously search across thousands of articles using key words and phrases.

Elephind presently contains millions of items from thousands of newspaper titles. You can find a list of libraries that have contribute their archives on the site by clicking on "List of Titles." It is a very long list! Clicking on any library's name displays the newspapers in that collection.

Elephind.com is much like Google, Bing, or other search engines but focused only on historical, digitized newspapers. By clicking on the Elephind.com search result that interests you, you'll go directly to the newspaper collection which hosts that story.

Of course, newspapers can be a great resource of genealogy information. Birth announcements, marriage announcements, court news, and more can be searched within seconds. If your ancestor was a merchant, you probably can also find his or her advertisements placed in the newspaper. 

As I often did, I performed my first search on elephind.com looking for one of my ancestors. I simply entered his name, Washington Eastman, and was rewarded thousands of "hits" containing one or the other of those two words. Some of them were about photography and others were about Washington, D.C., or Washington State. I didn't read every article found by that simplistic search but the few I looked at did not have contain anything about the man I was seeking. 

I will say however, one article on the list from the San Francisco Call of 6 September 1891 caught my eye:  

Darling Eastman, the long-sought-for Vermont moonshiner, is under arrest in this city. Eastman's capture and escape at Corinth, Vt., last April, was the most sensational that has occurred in the State for twenty years. Orange County has been notorious for its stills. The most daring and successful operator in that section was J. Warren Eastman, who lived in an isolated quarter of Corinth. In April last a large posse of officers made a descent on the Eastman homestead. In an old blacksmith shop they discovered a still of the largest and most approved pattern in full operation. The father, Warren Eastman, his son Darling and his son-in-law were captured in their beds and heavily manacled. 

Yes, that sounds like one of my relatives! Admittedly, I have never found this family in my family tree before but they certainly sound like they might belong.

I then backed up and clicked on ADVANCED SEARCH. I got far better results by using that. Advanced Search allows the user to specify any combination of the following:

Elephind does not search all the newspapers ever published in the U.S. No online newspaper offers anywhere near that amount of information. However, it does contain 3,306 different newspapers in its database, including newspapers from the United States, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. ALSO, this collection only searches FREE newspaper sites. It does not search the for-pay sites, such as NewsBank, ProQuest, Newspapers.com, etc. Many of the smaller newspaper sites are not well known and may be difficult to find with the usual search engines but are searchable from Elephind.com.

All the text on Elephind was created by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and therefore has numerous errors whenever it encountered fuzzy text, page wrinkles, and similar problems. All OCR-created newspaper sites suffer from the same problem, although some sites seem to have worse results than do others. 

The oldest newspaper in the online collection is from 29 September 1787 while the newest is from 1 May 2020.

Elephind is not perfect but it can help a lot if your ancestor is listed in one of the newspapers in the Elephind database. Best of all is the price: FREE. There is an optional FREE registration which adds the use advanced features, including Elephind bookmarks and comments. If you do register, occasionally (less than 6 times per year) you will receive notifications or newsletters via email with information about changes and additions to Elephind.com. 

You can try Elephind at http://www.elephind.com. Make sure you read the “Search Tips” at https://tinyurl.com/mu7kzpf7.

Update: The sale has apparently ended. The price now shows as $58.98 (U.S.). That’s still a bargain in my opinion although not quite as attractive as the earlier sale price.

Here is my original article:

If you have been reading this newsletter for some time, you probably realize I am a fan of Chromebooks. One thing that amazes me is the prices of these little devices keep dropping all the time. Almost every week I exclaim, "That is the lowest price I have ever seen!"  Well, it happened again this week.  $48!

Over at Walmart, you can now buy a refurbished HP Chromebook 11 G5 for just $48 (The price was $56 but the new sale price is even cheaper).

OK, at this price you are NOT going to obtain a top-of-the-line powerhouse. This is a basic bottom-of-the-line computer. However, it will do most everything that the much more expensive devices will do.

At $48, the HP Chromebook 11 G5 has an 11-inch screen (that's rather small... if you have vision problems, you won't enjoy using that small screen). It contains a 1.60 GHz Intel Celeron processor. That probably is going to provide mediocre speed. It has 4 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM memory which is plenty for a device with a Celeron processor, and 16 gigabytes of SSD "disk" drive (which you will probably never fill up because the default of Chromebooks is to store everything in the cloud, not in a local disk drive). While Chromebooks will perform many functions without an internet connection, you will undoubtedly want to also have a wi-fi connection to the internet to obtain full use of a Chromebook.

Even with those drawbacks, you will still be able to perform probably 98% of the most common computer tasks: read and write email, surf the web, send and receive files, access social media web sites, access genealogy web sites (such as MyHeritage, FamilySearch, Ancestry.com, and many more), play lots of games (although not all of the games that require high-powered processors), create and access word processing applications, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and more.

As a $48 Chromebook, this is an ideal device for use when travling to access your email and more (why expose your $1,000 or more laptop to damage or theft?), as a first computer for a child (it has a real keyboard), or for use by a senior citizen or other non-computer-literate adult. Not bad for a fraction of the cost you’ll pay for a Windows laptop with the same level of performance!

This is a sale price and I have no idea how long the low price will be available. But even the "full price" of $56 is still attractive.

You can check it out at https://www.walmart.com/ip/HP-Chromebook-11-G5-11-Google-Chromebook-1-60-GHz-Intel-Celeron-Laptop-4GB-DDR3-RAM-16GB-SSD-Chrome-OS/784901023?athbdg=L1600&from=searchResults

Note: That is not an affiliate link. I won't be compensated in any way if you decide to purchase this Chromebook. I am simply happy with my (admittedly more expensive) Chromebook and want to share my experiences with the readers of this newsletter.

Here is a quote from https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/:

"Over 500,000 free genealogy books, family histories, maps, yearbooks, and more are available on the FamilySearch Digital Library.

"The Digital Library can connect you to the stories of your ancestors and lead you to new discoveries.

"Search this collection to find books about your family members. Discover the history of the places they lived. Read more about the events that may have changed the course of your great-great grandmother’s life. Learn more about annual traditions of your grandfather’s local church. New content is regularly added, so if you don’t find what you’re looking for, it may be there next week. The possibilities of what you might find are endless.

"The Digital Library can connect you to the stories of your ancestors and lead you to new discoveries."

Indeed, I have used the FamilySearch Digital Library a number of times and have been pleased with the results. Of course, I probably could have achieved the same results had a I purchased airline tickets to Salt Lake City, spent money on taxis or Uber, spent money in hotels and restaurants for a few days, and paid whatever other miscellaneous expenses are incurred on a multi-day trip. Besides that, such a trip also involves an "investment" of several days of my time.

The FamilySearch Digital Library is available free of charge. That's great, but the real "bottom line" financial benefit is even more impressive. Remotely accessing the Digital Library actually SAVED me hundreds, perhaps a thousand, dollars or so when compared to the traditional method of using my hard-earned money to pay for a trip to Salt Lake City to use a library there.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac, a penny saved is worth MORE than a penny earned because you don't have to pay income taxes on money that is saved. If you earn money, in most cases your earnings are taxable, leaving you with less money in your pocket or purse. (Unlike traditional sources of income, money saved does not require the payment of income taxes! A penny saved is therefore worth more than a penny earned (after taxes). 

Note: "A penny saved is a penny earned" is a quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but it appears that he never wrote those exact words. Instead, he originally wrote, "A penny saved is two pence clear." Later, he wrote a version closer to the saying we know: "A penny saved is a penny got." He never used the word "earned." However, a number of other authors have written the familiar version, "A penny saved is a penny earned."

The digital library at https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/ is a powerful resource for finding family history books and learning about families and places all over the world. Not only are the books and microfilms stored in Salt lake City, but digitization is also taking place at other major genealogy libraries, including:

Allen County Public Library

Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records

Birmingham, Alabama Public Library

BYU Family History Library

Columbus Metropolitan Library

Dallas Public Library

Family History Library

George A. Smathers Libraries at University of Florida

Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Houston Public Library

Midwest Genealogy Center

Onondaga County Public Library (with a Local History/Genealogy research department specializing in the history of Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York State, the New England States, Pennsylvania and New Jersey)

Ontario Ancestors (The largest family history society in Canada) 

St. Louis County Library

The Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Collection

The Southern California Genealogical Society and Library

Provo Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum

Searching the FamilySearch Digital Library also includes searches of all the above libraries, resulting in saving even more money: I don't have to travel to all those libraries!

There is one major downside, however: the digitization of the genealogical works at all of these libraries is still a work-in-progress effort. That is, none of the libraries have yet had all of their collections digitized. Digitizing crews are presently active in many of these libraries, and more digital documents are being added weekly to the FamilySearch Digital Library's web site. If you don't find what you seek today, come back again every month or two and search again. The information you seek may have been added since your last search.

You can find the FamilySearch Digital Library at https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/

To access the library, follow the instructions at: https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/family-history-books/

Have fun at the (digital) library!

Rick Karlin has published at article in the timesunion.com web site that should be required reading for every genealogist who has new York ancestors (even if the ancestor(s) only stayed in the state for a brief time after passing through Ellis Island). 

His article points out that the State Dept. of Health since the pandemic can take years to dig up death or birth records sought by family tree researchers:

"The popularity of TV shows like as “Finding Your Roots,” advances in DNA technology, websites like Ancestry.com and growing interest in immigration have led to a genealogy boom.

"More and more amateur genealogists are researching their family trees to trace their lineages, searches that may lead to towns in Ireland or Italy, long-lost shtetls in Eastern Europe or ancient villages in Africa or Asia.

"New York state is a ground zero for such research, given how many families can trace their roots through Ellis Island, and thanks to the state’s earlier role as one of the original 13 colonies.

"Ironically, state government is now being blamed for running in reverse of the trend, hindering work of researchers. In particular,  genealogists are roundly criticizing the Department of Health over the time they are taking to respond to record requests.

"The agency, genealogist say, has dropped what used to be an efficient system for providing key data like indexes or lists of birth, death and marriage records.

"Until a few years ago, the health department could expedite requests and even had a walk-up window at its Albany headquarters where people could ask for records in person. Now, requests have to be made online and wait times can easily run for two years or longer.

"Interviews with several genealogists and genealogy organizations suggest New York has emerged as one of the most difficult states nationally for finding vital records."

The full article is much longer and is available at: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/genealogists-say-state-hinders-research-17909381.php

Unlock the Past is an Australian genealogy company that organized 17 genealogy / history conference cruises between 2011 and 2020. In total, 1500 people joined these cruises in groups ranging from 30 to 250 people. Now the company is considering more cruises in 2024 and beyond.

Alan Phillips (the CEO of Unlock the Past) has posted a survey on the company's web site to gauge the interest of possible future cruises. If you would like to take (one or more) cruises with a group of genealogists, along with leading genealogy presenters, take a look at the survey for possible future genealogy cruises at: https://www.gouldgenealogy.com/2023/04/unlock-the-past-cruises-2024-2026/.

Past cruises attracted genealogists from all over the world!

If you are interested, fill out the survey. This sounds like a great vacation!

NOTE: This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I have written many times about the need to make backup copies of genealogy data (and lots of other data) by genealogists and others. Here is an article by Cheryl Vaughn and published in the makeuseof.com web site that adds still more information about the subject:

"With the ever-increasing amounts of information, it becomes imperative to keep back-ups of your devices and data in external cloud storage services in case of unwanted or inadvertent loss of data. To this end, Google Drive and Dropbox are two of the most popular cloud backup solutions. However, they may not be the best fit for everyone.

"There are countless alternatives out there that offer unique features, better security, and more storage options. Here, we'll explore the best cloud storage alternatives to Google Drive and Dropbox to help keep your data safe and secure at all times."

You can read Cheryl Vaughn's recommendations at: https://www.makeuseof.com/best-backup-cloud-alternatives/