Who are we, really?

For many, the best way to answer that question is to dig into their genealogical pasts, amassing family trees that go back generations, supported by birth certificates, immigration documents, municipal records and whatever else can be tracked down. Before the dawn of the personal computer, that task was a prodigious and labor intensive undertaking.

But it’s a personal journey that has become considerably easier in the last decade or so thanks to the widespread digitization of public records and document archives and technological advancements that have turned genealogical research into a user-friendly, plug-and-play process.

The engine behind much of that research evolution is a genealogical products and service industry that generated some $3.5 billion in revenues in 2021 is expected to grow to over $8 billion annually by 2030.

Search specialist and veteran entrepreneur Kendall Hulet knows a thing or two about genealogy and search services having spent 14 years upgrading the search functions for family history giant Ancestry.com and launching his own mobile browser, Cake, a few years back.

Now, Hulet is CEO of Storied, a newly announced rebrand of newspaper and record archive service World Archives which was acquired in 2020 by Charles Thayne Capital. Storied is looking to make stories, from relatives as well as the important people in our lives outside the family circle, an integral part of building family histories.

“Records are awesome and a lot of family history sites are really good at hosting records and making them searchable,” Hulet said. “Right now, when discussions about family history happen, people’s eyes glaze over a little because it’s not stories they’re hearing, just a list of facts and dates.

“But stories are what really matter. Telling stories around campfires has been happening throughout our history and it’s how humans are hardwired to communicate.”

Storied is getting a running start as a new genealogy service, thanks to the billions of domestic and international records already amassed by World Archives.

While Storied is continuing to build out that database, its new platform offers tools to create, document and share stories from family members and the pivotal, nonfamily members who’ve impacted life stories and whose narratives complete the richer tale of a life lived, Hulet said.

You can read more in an article by Art Raymond published in the Deseret News web site at https://tinyurl.com/2zrdnhf2

You can also watch a YouTube video that describes Storied at https://youtu.be/ESYJZGGGCbU.

The devastation of the plague pandemic left such an incredible genetic mark on humanity that it's still affecting our health nearly 700 years later.

Up to half of people died when the Black Death swept through Europe in the mid-1300s.

A pioneering study analysing the DNA of centuries-old skeletons found mutations that helped people survive the plague.

But those same mutations are linked to auto-immune diseases afflicting people today.

The Black Death is one of the most significant, deadliest and bleakest moments in human history. It is estimated that up to 200 million people died.

Researchers suspected an event of such enormity must have shaped human evolution. They analysed DNA taken from the teeth of 206 ancient skeletons and were able to precisely date the human remains to before, during or after the Black Death.

The analysis included bones from the East Smithfield plague pits which were used for mass burials in London with more samples coming from Denmark.

The standout finding, published in the journal Nature, surrounded mutations in a gene called ERAP2.

If you had the right mutations you were 40% more likely to survive the plague.

You can read more in an article by James Gallagher published in the BBC News web site at: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63316538.

If you subscribed to the DAILY (not the weekly) email messages listing new articles posted to this web site in the previous 24 hours, please pay attention to this:

The DAILY (not the weekly) email messages are sent by Mailchimp.  (It is a service I pay for.)

Mailchimp recently said in a blog post that its security team detected an intruder on January 11 accessing one of its internal tools used by Mailchimp customer support and account administration. Mailchimp said the hacker targeted its employees and contractors with a social engineering attack. The hacker then used those compromised employee passwords to gain access to data on 133 Mailchimp accounts, which the company notified of the intrusion. 

NOTE: I have not received any notification from Mailchimp so I assume (I hate the word "assume" but it is appropriate right now) that subscribers to this newsletter's DAILY (not the weekly) email messages were not part of the affected 133 Mailchimp accounts. 

Mailchimp also states that no customer passwords or other sensitive data was taken.

So while we can assume (there's that word again) that subscribers to EOGN.com's DAILY (not the weekly) email messages are not affected by this, I still want to warn subscribers that there is still a POSSIBILITY  that your email address and password were accessed.

If you subscribe only to the WEEKLY email updates (usually mailed on Mondays in the mid-day U.S. time), Mailchimp is not involved in those mailings (sent from a different mail server owned by a different company) so you can safely ignore this message.

The Clark County (Washington) Medical Examiner’s Office used forensic genealogy to confirm the identity of a man whose body was discovered 24 years ago in the Columbia River. This is the second cold case in four months that the office has closed using forensic genealogy. 

The Medical Examiner’s Office recently identified Michael E. Johnson as the unidentified person found on Oct. 26,1998 in the Columbia River in Vancouver. The Medical Examiner’s Office estimates Johnson was about 53 years old at the time of his death. 

The Medical Examiner’s Office submitted a DNA sample from the remains to Bode Technology, a forensic DNA laboratory in Virginia that provides forensic genealogy services and specializes in the extraction of DNA from challenging human remains samples. The forensic genealogist used the DNA from the remains to predict the unidentified person’s ancestry and compared it to individuals in online genealogy databases that allow searches of unidentified persons. The forensic genealogist found an ancestral link to a family from California. While there were multiple possibilities, the forensic genealogist noted that one person, a son of Chesley Johnson Jr. and Ruth Marie Hansen, appeared to have no traceable activities since 1998.

In October, Medical Examiner’s Office operations manager Nikki Costa contacted other children of the couple. Russel Johnson and Kathy Bergen indicated their brother, Michael E. Johnson, had left California over 20 years ago and had no contact with family. 

Based on the results of the forensic genealogical analysis, DNA analysis and circumstantial evidence in the case, Clark County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Martha Burt concluded that the previously unidentified man was Michael E. Johnson.

Johnson’s cause of death is a gunshot wound to the head and his manner of death is undetermined.

From the MyHeritage Blog:

What a way to cap off 2022! In November and December 2022, we added and updated 67 historical record collections with 65 million records from all over the world. The collections are from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Spain, the U.K., Ukraine, and the U.S. Many of the collections also include images. The collections consist of birth, marriage, divorce, death, obituaries, burial, wills, census, naturalization, city directories, military, voter, employee, newspapers, and more. 

Here are some highlights of the new and updated collections.

Actually, it is a very lo-o-ong list. Rather than republish the whole thing here, you can read the entire list in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/01/myheritage-publishes-65-million-records-in-november-and-december-2022/.

NOTE: This is an update to two articles I published a few months ago at https://eogn.com/page-18080/12819803: Ford Heritage Vault Opens to Public With Over 5,000 Classic Images and Brochures Online and at https://eogn.com/page-18080/13018202: Ford Heritage Vault Unlocked to Add New Digital UK Archives.

Ford Motor Co. in June unveiled for public viewing images so rare and popular that its website crashed.

Now, a batch of coveted vintage photos of the best-selling F-Series trucks has just posted online to recognize the 75th anniversary of the iconic pickup.

The company hopes to avoid drama this time by doubling computer server capacity of the Ford Heritage Vault site. Less than a year old, the online archival site has triggered an unexpected response.

Free access to some 9,000 images of classic Ford, Lincoln and Edsel vehicles and vintage sales brochures (including Mustang, Bronco and F-150) have attracted views and downloads from hundreds of thousands of car collectors and gearheads since going up, Ford archivist Ted Ryan told the Free Press.

"We expected heavy, heavy usage and then decline," Ryan said. "Instead, we're averaging 3,000 downloads a day and 3,500 users a day."

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/3ytdmmbk.

NOTE: This article is a press release about DNA, a hot topic amongst genealogists for many years now. There is only one thing to keep in mind: this article is not about humans!

• The genome database will power ongoing scientific efforts worldwide and help advance individualized pet health care
• Insights from this partnership will feed into the MARS PETCARE BIOBANK™, a longitudinal study to understand pet health and disease, transforming pet care for future generations of dogs and cats
• Mars Petcare Science & Diagnostics President, Nefertiti Greene, hailed the partnership as an "important milestone" and "integral to drive scientific breakthroughs for the future of pet health"

NEW YORK, Jan. 9, 2023 -- Mars Petcare is partnering with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a world leader in the genetic and molecular analysis of diseases, to create one of the largest open access cat and dog genome databases in the world.

Genomes from 10,000 dogs and 10,000 cats enrolled in the  MARS PETCARE BIOBANK™ initiative will be sequenced over the next 10 years. Insights from the open access database can help advance individualized pet health care for future generations of dogs and cats.

The full genome sequence and variant data of the 20,000 pets will be made publicly available via the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Sequence Read Archive, enabling scientific investigation across a range of areas, such as in-depth dog- and cat-breed ancestry, new genetic mutations specific to certain dog and cat breeds and how they link to diseases, as well as pets' aging process.

Mars Petcare anticipates releasing the first raw genome sequences as soon as they become available throughout 2023, with additional, processed data to follow as pets are enrolled in the biobank study. Mars Petcare scientists will be analyzing data and publishing initial results for the scientific community throughout 2023 and beyond.

Nefertiti Greene, Mars Petcare Science & Diagnostics President, said: 

"The opportunity to better understand cat and dog genetics through specifically designed gene sequencing studies is an important milestone that will help us deliver on our Purpose: A Better World For Pets. Together with our partners at the Broad Institute we hope to find several key ways to provide clinically focused, real-world data. This is essential for developing more effective precision medicines and that lead to scientific breakthroughs for the future of pet health."

By connecting the in-depth genome sequencing data to biological samples, health and lifestyle data from 20,000 dogs and cats in the MARS PETCARE BIOBANK™ study, Mars Petcare aims to find new ways to prevent or predict a wide range of conditions so that veterinary teams can provide tailored solutions to individual pets and improve health outcomes.

Jennifer Welser, DVM, DACVO, Chief Medical Officer, Mars Veterinary Health, said:

"Our latest initiative with the Broad Institute is hugely exciting when it comes to advancing preventive pet care. This project could help us further understand how we can build individualized pet care solutions for each unique dog or cat, which has the potential to become part of routine healthcare practice.  As veterinarians, we're always looking to improve patient outcomes and for new ways to solve some of the most pressing pet healthcare challenges such as obesity, skin conditions, dental disease, infectious and zoonotic diseases, orthopedic disorders and, of course, cancer. I look forward to seeing how the open access data can enable new insights supporting individualized pet health."

Sequencing and analysis will be spearheaded by Elinor Karlsson, director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at Broad Institute and professor of bioinformatics and integrative biology at UMass Chan Medical School. The Broad Institute is a world leader in providing genetic information for biobank projects, creating the databases and tools that have made possible systematic studies of the genetic basis of disease.

Prof Elinor Karlsson, Director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group, Broad Institute, said: 
"We're excited to partner with Mars Petcare to establish an open access resource of full-genome sequences for thousands of pet cats and dogs living in homes across the United States. Making this data fully accessible to the global scientific community will provide new insight into the ancient origins of dogs and cats—who have lived by our sides for thousands of years—and support research projects focused on improving healthcare for pets living today."

The MARS PETCARE BIOBANK™ and genome sequencing initiatives are part of Mars Petcare's long-standing commitment to investing in science, technology and innovation. The company has a well-established history in driving transformative pet health innovation through the Waltham Petcare Science Institute, which has focused on pet health for over 50 years; and through Mars Veterinary Health, a network of 2,500 veterinary clinics and Antech diagnostic labs across more than 20 countries.

About Mars Petcare 
Mars Petcare is part of Mars, Incorporated, a family-owned business with more than a century of history making diverse products and offering services for people and the pets people love. Our almost 100,000 Associates across 130 countries are dedicated to one purpose: A BETTER WORLD FOR PETS. With 85 years of experience, our portfolio of almost 50 brands serves the health and nutrition needs of the world's pets – including brands PEDIGREE®, WHISKAS®, ROYAL CANIN®, SHEBA®, CESAR®, GREENIES™,  IAMS™ and EUKANUBA™ as well as the WALTHAM Petcare Science Institute which has advanced research in the nutrition and health of pets for over 50 years. Mars Petcare is also a leading veterinary health provider through an international network of more than 2,500 pet hospitals and diagnostic services including AniCura, AntechAsia Veterinary Diagnosticss BANFIELD, BLUEPEARL, Linnaeus, Mount Pleasant, VCA, VES, and VSH. We're also active in innovation and technology for pets, with WISDOM PANEL™ genetic health screening and DNA testing for dogs, the WHISTLE™ GPS dog tracker, and LEAP VENTURE STUDIO accelerator and COMPANION FUND™ programs that drive innovation and disruption in the pet care industry. As a family business and guided by our principles, we are building a thriving and inclusive workforce reflective of the many pets and communities we serve, privileged with the flexibility to fight for what we believe in. And we choose to fight for our Purpose: A BETTER WORLD FOR PETS. 

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will embark this fall on a new round of sound recovery to restore some of the world’s earliest recordings. Made possible with public-private funding through an initial grant from the Save America’s Treasures program and matching support by Linda and Mike Curb and Seal Storage Technology, the work will focus on hundreds of records created by Alexander Graham Bell and his colleagues at Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and at Bell’s property in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, between 1881 and 1892. Additional support was provided by SEDDI Inc. and the Alexander and Mabel Bell Legacy Foundation.

The Volta Laboratory innovations in sound recording and playback proved foundational to the emerging music, broadcast and entertainment industries, and to the documentation of worldwide cultures and endangered languages through ethnographic fieldwork.

“Over the three-year duration of this remarkable project, ‘Hearing History: Recovering Sound from Alexander Graham Bell’s Experimental Records,’ we will preserve and make accessible for the first time about 300 recordings that have been in the museum’s collections for over a century, unheard by anyone.” said Anthea M. Hartig, the museum’s Elizabeth MacMillan Director. “We are grateful to this public-private partnership in funding this dynamic and innovative work.”

You can read more in an article published in the National Museum of American History's web site at: https://tinyurl.com/yc2n26kr.

Wow! Another year has come and gone! Where did the time go?

It seems like only yesterday that I decided to start writing a genealogy newsletter for a few of my friends and acquaintances. Well, it wasn’t yesterday… it was exactly 27 years ago!

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that 27 years would be so interesting, so much fun, and so rewarding. 

Twenty-seven years has slipped by in almost the blink of an eye. It seems like only yesterday that I sent the first e-mail newsletter to about 100 people, mostly members of CompuServe’s Genealogy Forums. (Do you remember CompuServe?) The last time I looked, this newsletter now has tens of thousands of readers tuning in every day! If you would have told me that 27 years ago, I would have never believed you.

This little newsletter started as a way for me to help friends to learn about new developments in genealogy, to learn about conferences and seminars, and to learn about new technologies that were useful to genealogists. I especially focused on what was then the newly-invented thing called the World Wide Web. In 1996 many people had never heard of the World Wide Web, and most people didn’t understand it.

None of the first recipients knew in advance that the newsletter would arrive; I simply e-mailed it to people who I thought might be interested. In 1996 nobody objected to receiving unsolicited bulk mail; the phrase “spam mail” had not yet been invented. I shudder to think if I did the same thing in today’s internet environment.

The word “blog” also had not yet been invented in 1996, so I simply called it an “electronic newsletter.” Some things never change; I still refer to it as an “electronic newsletter” although obviously it is a blog.

Here is a quote from that first newsletter published on January 15, 1996:

“Well, it’s started. This newsletter is something that I have been considering for a long time, but I finally decided to “take the plunge.” I’ve subscribed to several other electronic newsletters for some time now and have found them to be valuable. On many occasions I have said to myself, “Someone ought to do a weekly newsletter for genealogy news.” One day the light bulb went on, and I decided that perhaps I was that someone.

“I hope to collect various bits of information that cross my desk and appear on my screen every week. Some of these items may be considered ‘news items’ concerning events and happenings of interest to computer-owning genealogists. Some other items will be mini press releases about new genealogy software or other products and services that have just become available. I may write a few articles about things that are not genealogy-related but still seem to be of interest to me and probably to the readers. This may include articles about online systems, operating systems or other things that affect many of us.

“You will also find editorials and my personal opinions weaving in and out of this newsletter. Hopefully I will be able to clearly identify the information that is a personal opinion.

“The expected audience of this newsletter includes anyone in the genealogy business, any genealogy society officers and anyone with an interest in applying computers to help in the research of one’s ancestors

“I chose to distribute in electronic format for two reasons: (1.) it’s easy, and (2.) it’s cheap. In years past I have been an editor of other newsletters that were printed on paper and mailed in the normal manner. The ‘overhead’ associated with that effort was excessive; I spent more time dealing with printers, maintaining addresses of subscribers, handling finances, stuffing envelopes and running to the post office than I did in the actual writing. Today’s technology allows for a much faster distribution, and it is done at almost no expense to either the producer or the subscribers. I want to spend my time writing, not running a ‘newsletter business.’

“Since the expected readers all own computers and almost all of them use modems regularly, electronic distribution seems to be the most cost-effective route to use. It also is much lower cost than any other distribution mechanism that I know of.”

The original plan has been followed rather closely in the 27 years since I wrote those words. The newsletter still consists of “events and happenings of interest to computer-owning genealogists,” “mini press releases about new genealogy software or other products and services,” and “a few articles about things that are not genealogy-related but still seem to be of interest to me.” I have also frequently featured “editorials and my personal opinions.”

One thing that has changed is that the newsletter was converted from a weekly publication to a daily effort about 22 years ago. I now send both daily and weekly summations of all the articles by e-mail.

I am delighted with the change to a daily format. There is a lot more flexibility when publishing daily and, of course, I can get the news out faster.

Another thing that has changed is the delivery method. In 1996, this newsletter was delivered to readers only by email. The reason was simple: most computer owners in those days didn’t use the World Wide Web. In fact, most of them didn’t even know what the World Wide Web was.

Tim Berners-Lee proposed a new service of hypertext inter-connected pages on different computers in 1991, when Web servers were unknown. By January 1993 there were fifty Web servers across the world. A web browser was available at that time, but only for the NeXT operating system, a version of UNIX. Web browsers for Windows and Macintosh systems were not available until June 1993. Even then, the World Wide Web did not become popular with the general public until the dot-com boom of 1999 to 2001.

Prior to the dot-com boom of 1999 to 2001, email was the best method of sending information to others.

One feature that I like about the current daily web-based publication is that each article has an attached discussion board where readers can offer comments, corrections, and supplemental information. The result is a much more interactive newsletter that benefits from readers’ expertise. The newsletter originally was a one-way publication: I pushed the data out. Today’s version is a two-way publication with immediate feedback from readers.

The 2023 newsletter does differ from one statement I wrote 27 years ago:

“Today’s technology allows for a much faster distribution, and it is done at almost no expense to either the producer or the subscribers.”

If I were to re-write that sentence today, I wouldn’t use the phrase, “at almost no expense.” I would write, “…at lower expense than publishing on paper.”

Since I wrote the original words 27 years ago, I have received an education in the financial implications of sending bulk e-mails and maintaining web sites, complete with controls of who can access which documents. I now know that it costs thousands of dollars a year to send thousands of e-mail messages every week. There are technical problems as well. Someday I may write an article about “how to get your account canceled when you repeatedly crash your Internet Service Provider’s mail server.”

The truth is I did crash mail servers a number of times in the early days of this newsletter. And, yes, I got my account canceled one day by an irate internet service provider. I was abruptly left with no e-mail service at all. The internet service provider discovered that their mail server crashed every week when I e-mailed this newsletter, so they canceled my account with no warning. I now use a (paid) professional bulk email service to send those messages. I also hope that internet service provider has since improved the company’s email server(s)!

In the third issue of this newsletter, I answered questions that a number of people had asked. I wrote:

“I hope to issue this [newsletter] every week. … I reserve the right to change my mind at any time without notice. Also, the first three issues have all been much longer than I originally envisioned. I expect that the average size of the newsletter within a few weeks will be about one half what the first three issues have been. Do not be surprised when you see it shrink in size.”

Well, I was wrong. The first three issues averaged about 19,000 bytes of text. The newsletter never did shrink. Instead, the average size of the newsletters continued to grow. The weekly e-mail Plus Edition newsletters of the past few years have averaged more than 500,000 bytes each, more than twenty-five times the average size of the first three issues. In fact, each weekly newsletter today is bigger than the first ten weekly issues combined!

So much for my prognostication!

In fact, you receive more genealogy-related articles in this newsletter than in any printed magazine. Subscriptions for the Plus Edition of this newsletter also remain less expensive than subscriptions to any of the leading printed genealogy magazines. Also, there aren’t as many printed genealogy magazines today as there were 27 years ago.

In 27 years I have missed only twelve weekly editions for vacations, genealogy cruises, 2 broken arms, multiple hospital stays, one airplane accident (yes, I was the pilot), and family emergencies.

I broke both arms one day by slipping on an icy walkway and still missed only one newsletter as a result! I found typing on a keyboard to be difficult with two arms in casts. (There were a number of other things that proved to be difficult to accomplish with two arms in casts!) The following week I wrote an article about speech input devices as I dictated that week’s newsletter into a microphone connected to my PC.

Several months later, I suffered bruises and wrenched my neck severely when I had an engine failure in my tiny, single-seat, open cockpit airplane. The plane and I landed in a treetop and then fell to the ground about eighty feet below, bouncing off tree limbs as the wreckage of airplane and pilot fell to the ground together. I landed upside down with the wreckage of the airplane on top of me. (Landing upside down in an open cockpit airplane is not the recommended landing procedure!) Yet I missed only one issue as a result of that mishap even though the following issue was written while wearing a neck brace and swallowing pain pills that made me higher than that airplane ever flew.

Nine years ago, an emergency appendectomy caused me to miss one weekly mailing of the newsletter. I have rarely taken time off for vacations.

Over the years I hopefully have become more cautious: I stopped flying tiny airplanes, and I have now moved to Florida in order to avoid the ice. I also have published more than 75,000 newsletter articles. Someday I really do have to learn how to touch type.

Because of this newsletter, in the past 27 years I have traveled all over the U.S. as well as to Singapore, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, and Ireland, and have made multiple trips each to Canada, England, Scotland, Mexico, China, and to several Caribbean islands.

Because of this newsletter, I have met many enthusiastic genealogists. Because of this newsletter, I have had the opportunity to use great software, to view many excellent web sites, and to use lots of new gadgets. Because of this newsletter, I have discovered a number of ancestors. I am indeed fortunate and have truly been blessed.

I’ve always tried to make this newsletter REAL and from the heart. I don’t pull any punches. I write about whatever is on my mind. And if that offends some people, then so be it. I don’t expect everyone to agree with all of my opinions. There is plenty of room in this world for disagreements and differing viewpoints amongst friends. There are too many watered-down, politically correct newsletters and blogs out there already. I plan to continue to write whatever is on my mind. If you disagree with me, please feel free to say so.

To each person reading today’s edition, I want to say one thing: From the bottom of my heart, thank you for tuning in each day and reading what I have to say.

Also, one other sentence I wrote 27 years ago still stands: suggestions about this newsletter are always welcome.