MyHeritage is making a FREE offer that will appeal to a lot of genealogists:

We’re pleased to tell you about a very special, limited-time offer we’re launching this week: from October 1 to October 8, 2023, you can upload your DNA data to MyHeritage and get access to all advanced DNA features, including the Ethnicity Estimate, absolutely free — forever!

Uploading your DNA to MyHeritage can lead to life-changing discoveries. It led Loren McDonald to find his biological family, and receive a beautiful 7-page letter from his birth father, who he never had the opportunity to meet. Within days of uploading his DNA to MyHeritage, Rhys Williams discovered a half-brother he never knew about, and the similarities between them are uncanny. Stories like these are why we do what we do here at MyHeritage, and we want to make many more of them possible! 

Upload your data to MyHeritage now

It’s very common for people to want to try multiple DNA databases to cast a wider net in their research. Moreover, for people who are searching for family members — for example, adoptees searching for their birth parents — “fishing in multiple ponds” offers the greatest chances of finding answers, but purchasing multiple DNA kits gets expensive. That’s why we never charge users for uploading their DNA, viewing their DNA Matches, and contacting their DNA Matches. However, a one-time unlock fee of $29 (or a site subscription on MyHeritage) is usually required to access the advanced DNA features.

During this week, we are waiving the unlock fee. You can now upload your DNA data to MyHeritage and receive your Ethnicity Estimate, Genetic Groups, and access to other advanced DNA tools such as the Chromosome Browser, AutoClusters, and Theory of Family Relativity™ — absolutely free! These features will remain free forever for the DNA kits you upload during this week. MyHeritage supports DNA files from Ancestry, Family Tree DNA’s Family Finder, and 23andMe.

Why upload to MyHeritage?

Are you looking for data on someone who was a “guest of the state" at Sing Sing prison? A new crowd-sourced digital history project may have the information you seek. (No guarantees, as the database is still being built.)

From 1865 to 1925, nearly 50,000 people passed through the gates of Sing Sing prison, just 20 miles north of New York City.

Very little is known about who they were.

Shadows on Stone, a new crowd-sourced digital history project that began in a Fordham history class, seeks to fill in that gap and, in doing so, help restore the humanity of a group of people who have historically been dismissed as irredeemable.

The goal of the project is to transfer digitized records that were entered when prisoners first arrived at the prison. Since only a very small number of the inmates ever wrote about their time there, these “mini-biographies” of their lives before imprisonment offer the only glimpses of who they were.

Anyone who would like to help is welcome to try their hand at transforming the hand-written documents into legible text that will eventually be entered into a searchable database.

Analyzing Data in a Fordham History Class

The project first began in 2018, when Fordham undergraduate students in two honors history classes were tasked by now-retired professor Roger Panetta, Ph.D., to analyze some of the entries from the first set of names. The data was then uploaded to the crowd-sourcing research site Zooniverse.

The students published two reports based on their findings: The NYC Criminal and Sing Sing Penitentiary in the 19th Century and Paved with Good Intentions: Origins of the New York Penitentiary. They also created an entry that is currently on the Sing Sing Museum’s webpage.

Open to Public Volunteers

Panetta, who is writing a book about Sing Sing, decided to expand the project and open it to the public. A soft launch for the Shadows on Stone took place in August; it will fully go live in October.

Anyone who would like to help is welcome to try their hand at transforming the hand-written documents into legible text that will eventually be entered into a searchable database.

Panetta said the data on these inmates was originally collected as part of a movement in the 19th century to identify the so-called “criminal class.”

Using ‘Fragmented Biographies’ to Gain Insight

You can read more in an article by Patrick Verel published in the Fordham News web site at: https://news.fordham.edu/politics-and-society/crowd-sourced-history-project-seeks-to-humanize-the-incarcerated/

Ahead of Banned Books Week (Oct. 1-7), the Boston Public Library is joining the Book Unbanned initiative.

It was started by the Brooklyn Public Library in an attempt to fight censorship and book banning by expanding access to books for teens and young adults nationwide.

Anyone ages 13-26 who lives in the U.S. can sign up for a free e-card to access the library's entire collection of e-books and e-audiobooks.

BPL is the third library to join the network.

I wrote earlier (at https://eogn.com/page-18080/10764672?anchor=10765290#10765290 ) about my satisfaction with the Raven scanner. I use it to digitize almost all my printed documents and photocopies that I wish to save. Insert up to 50 pages at a time, press one button, and the scanner digitizes BOTH SIDES of every page inserted.

If you purchase a Raven scanner, you will want to pay attention to this notice just released by Raven:

Effective December 31, 2023, Raven Cloud will be deactivated, and users will no longer have access to Raven Cloud content.

Raven has made the difficult decision to discontinue Raven Cloud. To ensure that all customers have plenty of time to access their files and download them locally, or to another provider, Raven Cloud will be supported through December 31, 2023.

To Access and Download Your Data:

Using a web browser:

 • Navigate to https://app.raven.com

 • If prompted, login using your Raven account.

 • Review and select the folders and/or files to save. Following your selection, click the download icon from the top navigation. Repeat this process for all files and folders you would like to save.

After December 31, 2023, files stored on Raven Cloud will no longer be available to customers. We understand that content saved on Raven Cloud is very important to our customers. Customers are encouraged to sign in to https://app.raven.com/ using their Raven account to download and store all other files locally (or with another service) before December 31, 2023.

The UMass Amherst Libraries announce the acquisition of the Terri Cappucci Glass Plate Negative collection. The archive, from local photographer Terri Cappucci ’00BA,’03MFA, of 2,500-3,000 glass plate negatives that date back to the 1860s, was gifted to Cappucci in July of 2019. Cappucci donated them to the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) in July 2023. Cappucci, who received her MFA at UMass Amherst, is a documentary photographer, alternative process printer, and educator who has been producing her own nineteenth century-style photographs using the wet plate collodion process for many years.  

Most of the negatives in the collection are undated and have little to no information about where they were taken or who the photographer was. To address this, Cappucci created the “Somebody Photographed This” website and Facebook group. She also utilized her expertise to determine that the photographs in the overall collection were taken by several different photographers. While most of the collection is from Western Massachusetts, specifically Franklin County, there are also images from the coastal towns of Massachusetts. She then cleaned and digitized some of the most compelling images from the collection and posted them to the “Somebody Photographed This” Facebook page during the pandemic. Followers left comments to share locations, dates, and additional information about the photos. This led to Cappucci receiving additional glass plate negative collections from people from around the world, as well as articles about the project in the Boston Globe, Greenfield Recorder, Montague Reporter, and UMass Magazine, along with a televised segment on NEPM. Cappucci started a GoFundMe campaign and raised funds for the preservation supplies. 

In 2023, Cappucci approached SCUA to permanently house the collection amongst their vast holdings of photograph and manuscript collections that document life in New England from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. SCUA will make Cappucci’s scans available via Credo, their repository of digitized archival materials as well as continue Cappucci’s meticulous work of cataloging, preserving, and storing the photos, which will be available to the citizens of Massachusetts, and beyond, for decades to come.  

If you use LibreOffice (as I do... almost all articles in this newsletter are composed in LibreOffice), you need to update your copy NOW.

Earlier this month, a security vulnerability in the popular libwebp software library was discovered, affecting everything from web browsers to email clients. The Document Foundation, the developers behind the free and open-source LibreOffice suite, has now released an emergency update for LibreOffice that includes the fix. You should update as soon as possible if you have LibreOffice installed.

The blog post explains, "The Document Foundation is releasing LibreOffice 7.6.2 Community and LibreOffice 7.5.7 Community ahead of schedule to address a security issue known as CVE 2023-4863, which originates in a widely used code library known as libwebp, created by Google more than a decade ago to render the then-new WebP graphics format. [...] All users of LibreOffice are encouraged to update their current version as soon as possible."  

Details, and the update, may be found at: https://www.howtogeek.com/update-libreoffice-now-to-fix-a-security-flaw/

NOTE: I updated my copy and found it was a simple process. I suggest you update NOW.

Yesterday was the first day of the month. That is a good time to back up your genealogy files. Then test your backups!

I normally post a message about all this on the first day of every month. However, yesterday was the first and also was a Sunday. I normally don’t post new articles on weekends so this month's message is being posted one day late.

Your backups aren't worth much unless you make a quick test by restoring a small file or two after the backup is completed.

Actually, you can make backups at any time. However, it is easier and safer if you have a specific schedule. The first day of the month is easy to remember, so I would suggest you back up your genealogy files at least on the first day of every month, if not more often. (My computers automatically make off-site backups of all new files every few minutes.)

Given the events of the past few months with genealogy websites laying off employees and cutting back on services, you now need backup copies of everything more than ever. What happens if the company that holds your online data either goes off line or simply deletes the service where your data is held? If you have copies of everything stored either in your own computer, what happens if you have a hard drive crash or other disaster? If you have one or more recent backup copies, such a loss would be inconvenient but not a disaster.

Of course, you might want to back up more than your genealogy files. Family photographs, your checkbook register, all sorts of word processing documents, email messages, and much more need to be backed up regularly. Why not do that on the first day of each month? or even more often?

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

This is Part #2 of a 2-part series. Part #1 is still available at https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/13258099. 

Part #1 of this article described two reasons why we might want to archive all our email messages, both sent and received. One reason is genealogy-related, the other is not. The second part of this article describes some of the methods that can be used to save your email messages for years, possibly for decades.

Of course, if you use Gmail, as described in Part #1 of this article, you already have the capability to save messages for several years. Gmail offers 1a large amount of free storage across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos for new users and even that limit can easily be increased with various offers that Google offers from time to time.

However, saving old email messages on Gmail is dependent upon Google's policies to keep preserving those messages. While Google has proven to be very reliable in the past, there is nothing to guarantee that messages will be preserved forever. Other email services typically store much less than Google, and they also offer no guarantees how long the messages will be available to you.

Most computer professionals will tell you that any important information you wish to preserve needs to have at least two copies (and even more than two is better), and the copies need to be saved in at least two different locations. Saving the messages at Gmail.com or another email service counts as one copy, and that copy is saved in the cloud. However, you should also store a second copy of every message, either stored in your local computer's hard drive or perhaps at a different location in the cloud. Either you can adapt several email programs to accomplish that, or you can use a product designed especially for archiving email messages.

Google provides great cloud-based services, but it is important to keep a local copy of your data. This ensures that you have your data even if your account is compromised, if Google has an outage, or if data goes missing from your account. The same is true for Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and most all other email services. You have a number of email archiving products to choose from, all of which will preserve thousands of messages on your local hard drive or to any other location you specify. 

I find it easier and more efficient to use a program that is designed strictly for archival purposes, not a program that originally was designed as a general-purpose email program and then “force fit” for use as an archival program. I will first describe using standard email programs since they are more popular and many email users are already familiar with them. However, I will follow that with my preferred method: using a product that is designed primarily as an archival program.

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/13261172

When:  October 28, 2023

Time:  11:00 am - 12:00 pm  EST

Where: Online

Price:  FREE  to AGS members and $10.00 for nonmembers 

Click here to register:  https://www.augustagensociety.org/

The registration deadline is October 26, 2023

Limited seating to view the virtual presentation will be offered at the Adamson Library. To reserve a seat, please call (706) 722-4073.

Presenting

Click here to view the program brochure.