From theMyHeritage Blog:

We’re thrilled to announce the opening of registration for the 2024 Legacy Family Tree Webinars series on Legacy Family Tree Webinars. This year, we’re offering a dynamic lineup of 168 live webinars, taught by some of the most respected educators in genealogy. Our 2024 series features 112 expert speakers from 14 different countries including 30 new faces.

New and Exciting Series for 2024:

In addition to these, we have a variety of specialized series covering regions like Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Canada, and Mexico. Plus, don’t miss our exclusive MyHeritage Webinars and sessions by the Board for Certification of Genealogists.

The following is an announcement from the Montana Historical Society:

Two newspaper digitization projects will improve and expand access to historical Montana newspapers, which is one of the most used collections at the Montana Historical Society (MTHS).

This latest project through the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) makes more than 100,000 pages available online for free and includes newspapers from towns on or near reservations in Montana.

This is the fifth time the MTHS received a grant to be part of the NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to enhance access to historical American newspapers.

“The project we just completed includes newspapers from Browning, Harlem, Hot Springs, and Poplar, marking the first time that papers from these towns are accessible and searchable online,” noted Library Manager Dan Karalus, who headed the project.

Montana newspapers from all the NDNP projects, totaling more than 400,000 pages, are available on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America website www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/.

The second project, a partnership with Newspapers.com, included digitizing 5,000-plus microfilm reels of newspapers from more than 200 Montana cities and towns.

The MTHS now offers a free Public Access Portal where online users can search through nearly 2.5 million pages of historical Montana newspapers. The portal includes all the content migrated from its Montana Newspapers website, most material from Chronicling America, and some newly digitized newspapers in the public domain.

The portal replaces the Montana Newspapers website, which the MTHS plans to shut down in early 2024, saving significant costs. To access the new portal, go to mths.mt.gov/Research/collections/newspapers/mtnews and click on the Newspapers.com Public Access Portal link.

When the MTHS reopens to the public, visitors to the Library & Archives will have free access to more than 12 million newspaper pages and more than 650 titles via the Newspapers.com Onsite Portal, available in person in the Reference Room. The available papers include short-lived titles, like the Flaxville Democrat and its three issues published in 1920, and some of the longest-running papers in the state, such as The Madisonian out of Virginia City, which has 150 years of digitized issues.

Today, the MTHS can offer digital access to newspapers published in every Montana county.

“This is huge,” Karalus said. “Researchers used to visit us and spend hours scrolling through microfilm. But when we reopen in 2025, they can come here and just do a keyword search.”

Karalus adds that this improves access and preservation, as the microfilm collection will see less use. “We will still have to use microfilm for some more recent papers under copyright, but we probably won’t hear the microfilm readers rewinding as often,” he said.

As part of the MTHS agreement with Newspapers.com, the company performed the digitization work in exchange for access rights for a period of three years. After that time, digitized newspapers in the public domain will shift over to the Public Access Portal and be available online from anywhere.

Individuals with research questions may submit a research request via the MTHS website mhs.mt.gov/Research/ResearchRequests or by e-mail to mthslibrary@mt.gov.

Mahmudul has been going to the National Archives for the past five years and using the archives for his MPhil. 

"Whenever I need any information or reference, I visit the National Archives. Most of the time I get the information I need," said Mahmudul Hasan. 

Currently, Mahmudul is in pursuit of his PhD research on the political evolution of Rakhine from 1784 to 1990.

He has been collecting information on the past from the correspondence between the then-British officials posted at Chattogram and Dhaka office about the border situation. Later, Dhaka office would send the letters to the Governor-General in Delhi. 

The Department of Archives and Library in Agargaon is a repository for original documents from the past to be used by researchers and academics. The archive is massive.

Whilst it is commonly visited by researchers in Bangladesh like Mahmudul as well as foreigners –for historical documents like newspapers, maps, gazettes, government publications, political manifestos and land records of historical values – it remains almost unknown by the masses. Many people have little to no idea about the place and the documents it preserves. 

You can read more in an article by Ariful Islam Mithu published in The Business Standard at: http://tinyurl.com/mr2we7yw.

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com: 

From an article in the techdirt web site:

Join our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! »

Happy new year, everyone — and happy public domain day! That’s right: today’s the day that works from 1928 exit copyright protection and become public domain in the US, and that means it’s time for the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’re calling on designers of all stripes and all levels of experience to put this year’s newly public domain works to use in digital and analog games. 

UPDATED U.S., Find a Grave® Index, 1600s-Current 12/19/2023

UPDATED Oklahoma, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1890-1995 12/14/2023

UPDATED Prince Edward County, Virginia, U.S., Deaths, 1880-1896 12/14/2023

UPDATED Sacramento, California, U.S., California Biographical Great Books, 1867, 1872 12/14/2023

UPDATED U.S., Cemetery and Funeral Home Collection, 1847-Current 12/13/2023

UPDATED U.S., Obituary Collection, 1930-Current 12/13/2023

NEW Washington, District of Columbia, U.S., Voter Registration Records, 1929-202312/13/2023

 UPDATED U.S., Newspapers.com™ Marriage Index, 1800s-current 12/12/2023

UPDATED New York, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1847-1849, 1907-1936 12/11/2023

UPDATED Kentucky, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1783-1965 12/06/2023

Billions of years ago, as primitive lifeforms were becoming more complex, a selfish genetic component became a sort of genome colonizer. Using a copy-and-paste mechanism, this pernicious bit of code replicated and inserted itself again and again into a variety of genomes.

Over time, all eukaryotic organisms inherited the code—including us. In fact, this ancient genetic element wrote about one-third of the human genome—and was considered junk DNA until relatively recently.

This genetic component is known as LINE-1, and its aggressive intrusion into the genome can wreak havoc, leading to disease-causing mutations. A key protein called ORF2p enables its success—meaning understanding ORF2p's structure and mechanics could illuminate new potential therapeutic targets for a variety of diseases.

Now, in collaboration with more than a dozen academic and industry groups, Rockefeller scientists have rendered the protein's core structure in high resolution for the first time, revealing a host of new insights about LINE-1's key disease-causing mechanisms. The results were published in Nature.

"The work will facilitate rational drug design targeting LINE-1 and may lead to novel therapies and strategies to combat cancer, autoimmune disease, neurodegeneration, and other diseases of aging," says senior author John LaCava, a research associate professor at The Rockefeller University.

You can read more in an article in the medicalxpress web site at: http://tinyurl.com/2hypfdf3.

The New York Public Library is the latest organization to publish an article about the myth of "the family name was changed at Ellis Island" and then describes exactly one exception. Almost every genealogy writer in the US, including myself, has written about the myth before. It is nice to see someone with the authority and credentials of the New York Public Library write about it. Perhaps this fairy tale will now be put to rest.

 Immigrants undergoing medical examination at Ellis Island 

The article by Philip Sutton says many things, including:

"There is a myth that persists in the field of genealogy, or more accurately, in family lore, that family names were changed there. They were not. Numerous blogs, essays, and books have proven this. Yet the myth persists; a story in a recent issue of The New Yorker suggests that it happened. This post will explore how and why names were not changed."

The article then humorously goes on to describe one exception. Despite the clarification of the name change myth, there was one person's whose name actually was changed at Ellis Island. Harry Zarief, "the assistant concert master for Morton Gould," and famously a father of quadruplets, had his name changed at Ellis Island from Zarief to Friedman. The man now named Harry Friedman apparently was not happy with the name change. 

In 1944, went to court and obtained a legal change of name, BACK TO ZARIEF.

You can find the article, Why Your Family Name Was Not Changed at Ellis Island, at http://tinyurl.com/2whr5hmn.

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

Storing information "in the cloud" seems to have fewer security issues than storing data on your own hard drive or in a flash drive but that doesn’t mean that you can ignore the security issues involved. security issues, although not as many. Luckily, those issues are also easily solved. Let's start first with a definition of the cloud.

What is The Cloud?

The word "cloud" is a collective term. The cloud is not a single thing. Rather, it is a collection of hardware, software, data, and networks. It exists in thousands of data centers located around the world. No one company or government controls the cloud; it is a collection of many things owned and operated by thousands of different corporations and non-profit organizations.

The cloud also may be envisioned as the next evolution beyond the World Wide Web. While the original World Wide Web delivered information one-way to the user, the cloud does all that and more. The cloud provides two-way data as well as multi-user and even collaborative applications. Do you use Google Docs? If so, you are already using the cloud. Do you use Find-A-Grave? If so, you are already using the cloud. Do you pay bills online? If so, you are already using the cloud. The same is true for Facebook, Flickr, Shutterfly, Twitter, Carbonite, Gmail, and thousands of other cloud-based services.

On thing that is radically different with using the cloud is that applications may be stored in remote servers located around the world, not in your own computer’s hard drive. However, the use of remote applications, or “apps,” stored in the cloud is optional; you can still continue to use the appliucations stored in your own computer or use the apps in the cloud or, in some cases, even use a combination of both.

Gmail is a good example of using software in the cloud. Unlike a few years ago, there is no need to install an email program in your computer. Gmail (and a number of other online email services) provides both the software and the email messages without installing any software in your computer. It works on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Chromebooks, iPads, iPhones, Android devices, and probably other kinds of computers as well. That is a perfect example of cloud computing.

In fact, the cloud also is an assortment of redundant servers that provide advanced computer applications to corporations, governments, and the general public alike. If any server or if an entire data center goes offline due to hardware failure, a disaster or a simple power failure, other servers in other data centers in other locations usually step in and take over the load within seconds. Of course, the data also has been previously copied (or “replicated”) to the other data centers as well. The end user typically doesn’t even realize there has been a problem in the server(s) he or she has been using. From the end user’s viewpoint, everything continues to function as expected.

Cloud computing offers many benefits. Not too long ago, many of us worried about losing our documents, photos, and files if something bad happened to our computers, such as a hard drive crash or a virus. Today, our data can migrate beyond the boundaries of our personal computers. Instead, we’re moving our data online, into “the cloud”. If you upload your photos, store critical files online, and use a web-based email service like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, an 18-wheel truck could run over your laptop, and yet all your data would still remain safely stored in the cloud, accessible from any Internet-connected computer, anywhere in the world.

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/13295245.