What was the weather on the day you were born? Other services will charge you money for that information but you can do the same thing free of charge on your computer.

Of course, you can check ANY date, not just the date you were born.

When your Dad talked about going out in that great blizzard, just how bad was it?  Wolfram Alpha has a number of helpful tools to answer your weather questions, including historical data from weather stations located all over the world.

For example, simply enter “weather” into the search bar, and Wolfram Alpha’s geoIP capabilities identify your approximate location and produce the latest records from your nearest weather station. The “Latest recorded weather” feature will display the current temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and conditions, such as clear, thunderstorms, or fog. 

To find historical weather information, simply go to http://www.wolframalpha.com and enter the word WEATHER followed by a date and a location. For instance:

weather September 6, 1978 Hanover, New Hampshire

Wolfram Alpha then returned the following:

The information appears to cover the US, Canada, and the UK. You may not have much luck for dates before the mid-1930s, depending on location.

Warfront papers were newspapers for soldiers on the front. The National Library of Finland has, in cooperation with the library of the National Defence University, digitised a total of 144 warfront papers from 1939–1945 and made them available. 

Official warfront papers were published by the communications companies, and active soldiers on the front published unofficial troop papers. Some papers only had one published issue, and some were published nearly daily for years. Official papers may have been printed, but the papers created on the front were only available as issues of a few copies, or even as hand-written individual issues. 

The warfront paper project combined the collection of papers in the National Defence University with the National Library’s collection. This way, we were able to create a comprehensive, digital collection that sheds light on life on the front. The National Library's collection of warfront papers, which had been lacking in many parts, received a significant addition in 2020 through an agreement with the National Defence University on handing over the warfront papers in their library to the National Library. The warfront papers, previously stored in two separate libraries, are now available in the National Library’s Digital Collections (digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi(opens a new tab)), which will improve the availability of the material and put more eyes on the warfront papers.  

The collection of warfront papers is available at https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/collections?id=841 in Finnish (use Google Translate for a translation). Digitised papers up until the end of 1939 are freely available to the public. More recent papers are available to read at legal deposit workstations as well as for research at universities that have signed the Tutkain agreement. 

There's high demand by Cubans to research their ancestry with help from U.S.-based genealogy buffs. If they can tie it to Spain, it means a way off the island.

The following is extracted from an interview of Lourdes Del Pino, a Cuban American engineer, AND Brian Tosko Bello as conducted by Tim Padgett and Adrian Florido, a host at radio station WLRN in Miami:

INTRO: for Cuban Americans, it's about finding roots on the island, but for Cubans who live there, it's about finding their ticket off.

Lourdes Del Pino: People want us to help them find sacramental records or civil records in Cuba.

Tim Padgett: She's vice president of the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami. In recent years, it's grown to more than 9,000 members.

Lourdes Del Pino: It has exploded. We have members in Australia. We have members all over the world.

Brian Tosko Bello: Del Pino spends a lot of time at Florida International University poring over Cuban archives, helping people like Bryan Tosko Bello find their families' stories. Tosko Bello is a marketing professional in Washington, D.C. He caught the genealogy bug after a beloved Cuban-born grandmother passed away a few years ago in the U.S.

Brian Tosko Bello: In 2019, Tosko Bello did go to Cuba, and as he hunted down his family's past, he discovered treasure troves of data like records from church parishes and cemeteries. Back in the U.S., he partnered with another Cuban American genealogy enthusiast in Miami, historian Richard Denis. They created the website Digital Cuba and digitized all that Cuban cemetery and parish information. They also made a podcast.

Brian Tosko Bello: We are doing our first famous Cuban family tree episode, starting with Mr. Desi Arnaz.

There is a lot more to the interview which you can read on the NPR web site at: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/17/1188181249/cubans-look-to-genealogy-as-a-way-off-the-island.

The expression 'a skeleton in the closet' refers to a secret source of shame, potentially ruinous if exposed, which a person or family makes efforts to conceal. The results of a recent DNA test illustrates this perfectly.

A man has been left devastated after his innocent activity ended up ruining his parents' marriage after 33 years.

Having a keen interest in genealogy at the time, he ordered two DNA kits - one for his dad and the other for himself and was overall excited to learn about his “ancestry composition”.

But things went horribly wrong when he noticed something was 'off'.

Taking to social media platform Reddit, he said: "I ordered myself and my dad a kit when they were on sale and we received our results a couple of days ago.

“My mother has never really been interested in genealogy or DNA stuff so I didn’t tell her about it. The first thing my dad and I did was compare our ancestry composition and I noticed it was a bit... off to say the least.

“He is highly British and Irish (most strongly connected to the UK) with a small bit of French and German. I am mostly Scandinavian (most strongly connected to Sweden) with over a quarter French and German and some Italian.”

The confused dad and his son ended up checking other family members but discovered a horrifying truth - they were not related.

“He didn’t pop up on mine and I didn’t pop up on his," he added. “There was a half sibling (sharing 26.3 per cent) and father match, however. I began freaking out and my dad got so angry.

“My mum came home and he confronted her about it. She lost it and admitted she knew I was some other man’s child all along and would’ve tried to stop us had she known we got the tests. They are now divorcing which sucks. He’s now wondering if my two younger siblings are his or not.”

You can read more in an article by Hannah Kane published in the mirror.co.uk web site at: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/i-dna-test-whim-within-30472626.

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

Members of Jewish community are being invited to delve into their ancestral history when genealogists from around the world descend on the UK later this month. 

Dozens of family ancestry experts will be on hand to help members of the community learn to trace their roots at an international conference on Jewish genealogy, which promises to “enhance and spread knowledge and learning” around the topic through  workshops, talks and storytelling.

This is the first time the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, now in its 43rd year, is being staged in London.

The event will run for four days between July 30 and August 3 and will feature more than 100 speakers, and over 200 sessions geared toward everyone from first timers to conference veterans.

The conference is hosted by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies  (IAJGS), an umbrella organisation of nearly 90 Jewish genealogical organisations worldwide, with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain (JGSGB) acting as the co-host.

You can read more in an article by Daniel Ben-David published in The Jewish Chronicle web site at: https://tinyurl.com/46nuafw7.

Do you have home movies or home videos that are, shall we say, less than perfect? Do these have shaky video or unstable camerawork? If so, read on:

Filmmakers may soon be able to stabilize shaky video, change viewpoints and create freeze-frame, zoom and slow-motion effects – without shooting any new footage – thanks to an algorithm developed by researchers at Cornell University and Google Research.

The software, called DynIBar, synthesizes new views using pixel information from the original video, and even works with moving objects and unstable camerawork. The work is a major advance over previous efforts, which yielded only a few seconds of video, and often rendered moving subjects as blurry or glitchy.

The code for this research effort is freely available, though the project is at an early stage and not yet integrated into commercial video editing tools.

“While this research is still in its early days, I’m really excited about potential future applications for both personal and professional use,” said Noah Snavely, a research scientist at Google Research and associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Snavely presented this work, “DynIBaR: Neural Dynamic Image-Based Rendering,” at the 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, on June 20, where it received an honorable mention for the best paper award. Zhengqi Li, Ph.D. ’21, of Google Research was the lead author on the study. 

“Over the last few years, we’ve seen major progress in view synthesis methods – algorithms that can take a collection of images capturing a scene from a discrete set of viewpoints, and can render new views of that scene,” said Snavely. “However, most of these methods fail on scenes with moving people or pets, swaying trees and so on. This is a big problem because many interesting things in the world are things that move.”

You can read more in an article published in the Cornell University web site at: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/07/software-creates-entirely-new-views-existing-video.

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

Do you have a document or even a full-length book that you would like to enter into a computer's database or word processor? You could re-type the entire thing. If your typing ability is as bad as mine, that will be a very lengthy task. Of course, you could hire a professional typist to do the same, but that is also expensive.

We all have computers, so why not use a high-quality scanner? You will also need optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

OCR is the technology long used by libraries and government agencies to make lengthy documents available electronically. As OCR technology has improved, it has been adopted by commercial firms, including Ancestry.com, ProQuest, and other genealogy-related companies.

For many purposes, OCR is the most cost-effective and speedy method available. OCR is much better and cheaper than hiring an army of clerk typists.

OCR is actually the second step in the conversion process. The first step is to scan the document or book in question, much the same as you would scan a photograph. The scanner converts each printed page to a bitmap file, a pattern of dots that actually comprise an electronic image of the page. Software that comes with the scanner stores the file on the computer's hard drive in TIFF, JPG, or some other image format. 

Next, specialized optical character recognition (OCR) software is used to scan the image and convert it to text. Older OCR software would compare the individual letters in a stored image against stored bitmaps of specific fonts. These pattern-recognition systems worked well with high-quality scanned images of text that used exactly the same fonts as those expected by the software. In other words, it rarely worked very well. It was rare that the scanned images exactly matched the stored bitmap images of individual characters. Only a few years ago, OCR had a reputation for inaccuracy.

Today's OCR programs have added multiple algorithms of neural network technology to analyze the stroke edge, the line of discontinuity between the text characters, and the background. Allowing for irregularities of printed ink on paper, each algorithm averages the light and dark along the side of a stroke, matches it to known characters, and makes a best guess as to which character it is. The OCR software then averages or polls the results from all the algorithms to obtain a single reading. 

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/13228017.

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077. 

The Fairfield Public Library is undertaking a project to upload all newspapers in Jefferson County’s history so that they will be searchable online.

The ambitious project involves digitizing newspapers from as long ago as 1847, and covers newspapers such as The Fairfield Ledger as well as newspapers that have not published for decades such as The Fairfield Tribune, The Lockridge Times and The Batavia News.

The library is relying on the services of Advantage Archives in Cedar Rapids, which scans microfilm and uploads the scan to the internet. It converts the scan into a searchable document, so that a person doing research on a subject can enter certain keywords and discover all instances where those words appear in a newspaper article going back more than 150 years.

Fairfield Public Library Director Alecs Schmidt Mickunas said that this service will be free, and can be accessed through the library’s website under the “Digital Library” tab and then clicking on “Electronic Resources.

The project is already underway, and about 15 percent of the library’s microfilm collection has been uploaded to the website. The initial round of funding came from a $10,000 gift from the Fairfield Public Library Foundation. Schmidt Mickunas said the library will need to raise $53,000 to upload its entire microfilm collection, which it hopes to do gradually over the next five years as donations or grants come in.

You can read more in an article by Andy Hallman published in the southeastiowaunion.com web site at: https://www.southeastiowaunion.com/news/fairfield-librarys-newspaper-archives-being-uploaded-to-internet/

With the assistance of investigative genetic genealogy, the Toronto Police Service said they have been able to identify a man found deceased in the city’s downtown core nearly four years ago.

The body of an unidentified man was found at 901 King Street West in Toronto on July 18, 2019.

Investigators released a description to the public in an effort to identify him and Ontario Provincial Police later created an artist’s rendition of the man.The police service’s missing persons unit issued a video appeal to encourage anyone with any information to come forward.

Attempts to identify the man were unsuccessful until the police service turned to investigative genetic genealogy (IGG) for assistance last year.

“In the fall of 2022, the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service provided a biological sample to Othram Inc., where a DNA profile was developed. That DNA profile was then compared to public databases,” according to a news release issued by Toronto police on Friday.

You can read more in an article by Codi Wilson and published in the cp24.com web site at: https://tinyurl.com/mr23y66a.