How many languages do you speak? Thanks to AI, that number could be as many as seven. Los Angeles-based AI video platform HeyGen has launched a new tool that clones your voice from a video and translates what you’re saying into seven different languages. If that wasn't enough, it also syncs your lips to your new voice so the final clip looks (and sounds) as realistic as possible.

Called Video Translate, the tool allows you to upload a video of yourself speaking in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Hindi or Japanese. The requirements are pretty basic so you don’t need any fancy cameras, microphones or software. The clip has to be at least 30 seconds long and should ideally feature just one person. But other than that, you just upload your video and in a single click HeyGen can translate what you’re saying.

You can choose whether you want the output to be in Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese or English. Support for even more languages is also expected by the end of September.  

You can read more in an article by Christoph Schwaiger published in the Tom's Guide web site at: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ai-video-tool-clones-your-voice-in-7-languages-and-i-almost-tried-it 

On Wednesday, September 13, two projects were presented in the library's lecture hall by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts.

Trausti Dagsson from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies and Luke O'Brien presented Speech Analysis of the website Ismus.is and the construction of a text library for older speech that was done in collaboration with the Árni Magnússon Institute and the technology company Tíró and handled about the creation of speech that was trained with audio recordings from the Folklore Museum. The recordings have now been made searchable and accessible.

Bragi Þorgrímur Ólafsson from the National and University Library of Iceland and Unnar Ingvarsson from the National Archives of Iceland presented the Icelandic database in Transkribus. The Transkribus software is made for the purpose of creating an Icelandic base for handwritten texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. The project was carried out in collaboration with experts from the National Archives of Iceland and the National and University Library of Iceland. You can access the Icelandic base by downloading the Transkribus software.

In addition, history student Una Haraldsdóttir told about her project about the diaries of Svein Þórarinsson and the experience of using Transkribus in that project. You can learn more about Una's project (in the Icelandic language) on the website Akureyri.net.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

Another whole county’s worth of Irish parish records now bolsters the record collections of TheGenealogist! Today, one of the leading providers of family history resources has added the records of 510,007 individuals from County Laois to its site in their latest release.

[County Laois, once known as Queen's County from 1556 to 1922]

County Laois, once known as Queen's County from 1556 to 1922, is a double landlocked county in the Eastern and Midland Region of the Republic of Ireland. As the Irish diaspora has spread out across the globe, especially during the terrible events of the Great Famine of 1845–49 which devastated the county at the time, many people from across the world will be able to trace their roots back to this part of Ireland.

Searching TheGenealogist’s transcriptions provides an easy way to find records which then provides a handy link to the National Library of Ireland (NLI) in order to see the digitised image of the actual register. TheGenealogist’s transcription greatly benefits from its powerful SmartSearch that can be used to identify possible siblings, as well as parent’s potential marriage details.

To find out more about how to use these records see TheGenealogist’s article: Searching for ancestors in the Laois parish records https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/searching-for-ancestors-in-the-laois-parish-records-5099/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, which puts 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!

From the "Dear Amy" column by Amy Dickinson:

Dear Amy: As an adopted person, I have found genealogy an extremely interesting way of learning about my families.

DNA directs to family histories on maternal and paternal sides.

By adoption I am connected to many different branches on many trees.

I recently connected to my grandfather, who came from Denmark at age 17.

I now am learning so much more about the beauty of his home country and the family he left behind.

Other histories take me all over the world to places and people I would not have known about.

My own outlook on my life has changed beyond measure.

The resources are almost unlimited.

– Choosing My Wholeness

Dear Choosing: Your perspective is beautiful. I’m happy for you.

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I have frequently written about the many advantages of Chromebooks. This article is about one (new) advantage:

If you want to keep using your Chromebook for as long as possible, Google has some news you’ll want to hear. The company is making a few changes that will help your Chromebook last a little longer.

Google’s Chrome OS team announced it is upping Chrome OS commitments. Currently, Chromebooks get regular automatic updates every four weeks for eight years. These updates include security and stability improvements as well as new features. But starting in 2024, any Chromebook released after 2021 will now get ten years of regular automatic updates.

Owners who have Chromebooks that were released before 2021 aren’t being left out, either. Google says those older Chromebooks will be offered the option to extend automatic updates to ten years after they receive their last update.

Another interesting part of the announcement is the mention of incoming energy-efficient features. In the coming months, Google will begin rolling out an adaptive charging feature to Chromebooks. 

Could the lives of the eight billion people currently on Earth have depended on the resilience of just 1,280 human ancestors who very nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago?

That is the finding of a recent study which used genetic analysismodeling to determine that our ancestors teetered on the brink of annihilation for nearly 120,000 years.

However, scientists not involved in the research have criticized the claim, one telling AFP there was "pretty much unanimous" agreement among population geneticists that it was not convincing.

None denied that the ancestors of humans could have neared extinction at some point, in what is known as a population bottleneck.

But experts expressed doubts that the study could be so precise, given the extraordinarily complicated task of estimating population changes so long ago, and emphasized that similar methods had not spotted this massive population crash.

It is extremely difficult to extract DNA from the few fossils of human relatives dating from more than a couple of hundred thousand years ago, making it hard to know much about them.

But advances in genome sequencing mean that scientists are now able to analyze genetic mutations in modern humans, then use a computer model that works backwards in time to infer how populations changed—even in the distant past.

The study, published in the journal Science earlier this month, looked at the genomes of more than 3,150 modern-day humans.

The Chinese-led team of researchers developed a model to crunch the numbers, which found that the population of breeding human ancestors shrank to about 1,280 around 930,000 years ago.

You can read a lot more in an article by Daniel Lawler published in the phys.org web site at: https://phys.org/news/2023-09-skepticism-human-ancestors-extinct.html. 

The Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, Quebec, or the United States.
Second Edition. 
by Gary Boyd Roberts. Publ. by Genealogical Publishing Co. 2022. 1723 pages in 3 volumes.

The series is subtitled: Who Were Themselves Notable or Left Descendants Notable in American History. So the collection represents distinguished immigrants, or descendants who became notable in their own right.

Volume I contains the introduction, acknowledgements, and descents from kings or sovereigns who died after 1307.

Volume II contains descents from kings or sovereigns who died in 1307 (Edward I) or earlier, French-Canadian immigrants, an Hispanic royal descent, coda, and abbreviations.

Volume III is the index, postscript, and comments on “Toward an RD 1000.”

“Notable” as defined by the author are persons listed in the American National Biography, the Dictionary of American Biography, the Who Was Who in America, the Who’s Who in America, and the National Cyclopedia of American Biography. 

Some notables with extensive genealogies depicted are Gary Boyd Roberts (the author), Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, Dag Hammarskjöld, Sir Ferdinando Gorges (founder of Maine), and a daughter of Leo, Count Tolstoy. 

Ancestries go back to the times of barbaric chieftains, feudal kings, and families of inherited nobility. Their progeny and in-laws became landed gentry whose offspring became merchants, ministers, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and soldiers. From these prominent factions came the founders of the American colonies.

Genealogists who avidly follow the histories of royal-descended luminaries will find great satisfaction from this sterling resource put together by an exceptionally capable author.

The Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, Quebec, or the United States is available from Genealogical Publishing Co. at: https://genealogical.com/2018/04/09/announcing-the-royal-descents-of-900-immigrants/.

A Fayetteville man was arrested Wednesday after police say advancements in DNA technology connected him to a decades-old sexual assault case in the city, the Fayetteville Police Department announced.  

Linford Deamoris Moore, 55, is charged with first-degree rape, first-degree kidnapping and felony breaking and entering. He stands accused of sexually assaulting a woman in October 1997 after breaking into her Fayetteville home, waking her from her sleep and placing a bag over her face, a news release said.

Moore was arrested in Hope Mills by members of the Fayetteville Police Department’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Team and Hope Mills Police Department. 

“Due to the ongoing advancements in DNA technology, and collaboration from Parabon Nanolabs, Inc., the NC State Crime Laboratory, analysts with the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, and other members of Fayetteville Police Department’s Sexual Assault Cold Case Multidisciplinary Team, Moore was identified as a suspect,” the news release said.

You can read more in an article by F.T. Norton published in the Fayetteville Observer web site at: https://tinyurl.com/2zt2d9rm.

The Science web site has published a fascinating study of modern and ancient human genome sequences that has revealed previously unknown features of our evolutionary past. Here is the introduction:

Structured Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The characterization of modern and ancient human genome sequences has revealed previously unknown features of our evolutionary past. As genome data generation continues to accelerate—through the sequencing of population-scale biobanks and ancient samples from around the world—so does the potential to generate an increasingly detailed understanding of how populations have evolved.

However, such genomic datasets are highly heterogeneous. Samples from diverse times, geographic locations, and populations are processed, sequenced, and analyzed using a variety of techniques. The resulting datasets contain genuine variation but also complex patterns of missingness and error. This makes combining data challenging and hinders efforts to generate the most complete picture of human genomic variation.

RATIONALE

To address these challenges, we use the foundational notion that the ancestral relationships of all humans who have ever lived can be described by a single genealogy or tree sequence, so named because it encodes the sequence of trees that link individuals to one another at every point in the genome. This tree sequence of humanity is immensely complex, but estimates of the structure are a powerful means of integrating diverse datasets and gaining greater insights into human genetic diversity. In this work, we introduce statistical and computational methods to infer such a unified genealogy of modern and ancient samples, validate the methods through a mixture of computer simulation and analysis of empirical data, and apply the methods to reveal features of human diversity and evolution.

RESULTS

We present a unified tree sequence of 3601 modern and eight high-coverage ancient human genome sequences compiled from eight datasets. This structure is a lossless and compact representation of 27 million ancestral haplotype fragments and 231 million ancestral lineages linking genomes from these datasets back in time. The tree sequence also benefits from the use of an additional 3589 ancient samples compiled from more than 100 publications to constrain and date relationships.

Using simulations and empirical analyses, we demonstrate the ability to recover relationships between individuals and populations as well as to identify descendants of ancient samples. We calculate the distribution of the time to most recent common ancestry between the 215 populations of the constituent datasets, revealing patterns consistent with substantial variation in historical population size and evidence of archaic admixture in modern humans.

The tree sequence also offers insight into patterns of recurrent mutation and sequencing error in commonly used genetic datasets. We find pervasive signals of sequencing error as well as a small subset of variant sites that appear to be erroneous.

Finally, we introduce an estimator of ancestor geographic location that recapitulates key features of human history. We observe signals of very deep ancestral lineages in Africa, the out-of-Africa event, and archaic introgression in Oceania. The method motivates improved spatiotemporal inference methods that will better elucidate the paths and timings of historic migrations.

CONCLUSION

The profusion of genetic sequencing data creates challenges for integrating diverse data sources. Our results demonstrate that whole-genome genealogies provide a powerful platform for synthesizing genetic data and investigating human history and evolution.

You can read much, much more by starting at:  https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi8264.

What Is #AskAnArchivist Day?

It’s an opportunity to:

• Break down the barriers that make archivists seem inaccessible.
• Talk directly to the public—via social media—about what you do, why it’s important and, of course, the interesting records with which you work.
• Join with archivists around the country and the world to make an impact on the public’s understanding of archives while celebrating American Archives Month!
• Interact with users, supporters, and prospective supporters about the value of archives.
• Hear directly from the public about what they’re most interested in learning about from archives and archivists. 

How Does It Work?

On October 11, archivists around the country will take to social media to respond to questions shared with the hashtag #AskAnArchivist. Take this opportunity to engage via your personal and/or institutional accounts and to respond to questions posed directly to you or more generally to all participants.

Questions will vary widely, from the silly (What do archivists talk about around the water cooler?) to the practical (What should I do to be sure that my emails won’t get lost?), but each question will be an opportunity to share more about our work and our profession with the public. 

Between now and October 11:

PROMOTE #AskAnArchivist Day among your users and constituents via your institution’s website, social media accounts, blog, newsletter, and any other mediums available to you. View the public announcement (and feel free to pick up language from it for your own promotions).

For additional inspiration on what your promotion of #AskAnArchivist Day might look like, check out what your peers have done:

• US National Archives
• Getty Research Institute
• USC Shoah Foundation
• Pennsylvania State Archives

And these great examples of museums' promotions of #AskAMuseum Day:

• Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies, ASU
• Hammer Museum, UCLA

Examples of possible social media promotion:

• Happy #AskAnArchivist Day! Our archivists are waiting for YOUR questions. Tag us at @ACCOUNTHANDLE and use #AskAnArchivist.
• Archivists at @ACCOUNTHANDLE are gearing up for #AskAnArchivist Day on October 11! Literally—documents and photo boxes stacked and waiting!

ENCOURAGE the public to use #AskAnArchivist and your institution’s social media handle (e.g., @smithsonian) when asking questions so you won’t miss any that are intended for you and so we will be able to track questions and answers to measure overall participation.

TALK to your staff and colleagues to develop a plan for responding to questions throughout the day. Will one person respond to all questions? Will you share the task? Will individuals sign up for time slots and let the public know who will be available when?

Here’s one example:

• During #AskACurator Day, one person at the Indianapolis Museum of Art was selected to monitor both the general hashtag and tweets sent directly to @imamuseum. When direct questions came in or interesting general questions were posed via the hashtag, the designated monitor sent the questions to participating curators via email. The curators (and their archivist!) replied with their answers, and the monitor posted all answers from the @imamuseum Twitter/X account. 

CREATE an institutional social account if you don’t already have one. #AskAnArchivist Day and American Archives Month are both great opportunities to start one! Get started here.

And if an institutional social media account is not an option for you, answer questions from your personal account(s)! If your institutional affiliation and job title are not already listed on your profile, be sure to add that for the duration of #AskAnArchivist Day.

SHARE and GREET! Take advantage of this opportunity to join with archivists from around the country to talk to and hear directly from the public on October 11.

If you plan to participate on Twitter/X in particular, please email SAA Marketing and Communications Specialist Julia Pillard with your Twitter/X handle so we can add you to the 2023 list of participants.