Offering a historic look at one of America’s most historic cities, a new VCU Libraries digital collection reveals the Illustrated Atlas of the City of Richmond, Va.

Also known as the Beers Atlas, the resource was published in 1876, barely a decade after Richmond’s business district near the Virginia Capitol was decimated by fire as the Civil War ended. Frederick W. Beers, from a family of cartographers, was a publisher of atlases and maps, and the Richmond atlas includes a table of contents, 21 maps, seven illustrations of businesses and eight pages of advertisers’ notices.

The maps offer insight into the state of the city – residential and commercial locales, architecture and infrastructure – some 20 years before the historic Jefferson Hotel was built and three decades after the Egyptian Building, now a landmark of Virginia Commonwealth University, was constructed as a medical college.

The original copy of the Beers Atlas is available in Special Collections and Archives. Exploring the digitized version, researchers can zoom in or out to enlarge images or narrow the focus to a particular view of elements. The images, which are free of copyright restrictions, are downloadable for use in presentations and publications.

The atlas shows a variety of buildings and structures, parks and green spaces, and places of worship. Waterways are highlighted in green. Property lines are detailed and often include the names of owners of many properties.

The Beers Atlas is a companion to the 1889 Baist Atlas. These two collections provide an opportunity to explore systemic racism found in the historical record of property lines, omissions and naming conventions, according to Irina Rogova, digital initiatives librarian.

“These maps, created decades before the Virginia General Assembly authorized racial segregation ordinances in 1912, offer insight into the built environment of Richmond following the Civil War as racial demographics shifted after the abolition of enslavement,” she said. “The maps provide a lot-by-lot look at neighborhoods that were transformed by redlining and urban renewal in the 20th century. Some of these neighborhoods today are undergoing development and change that can be characterized as preservation or gentrification.”

The two digital collections now live under a new Scholars Compass collection entitled City of Richmond Atlases and Maps.

You can read more in an article in the http://news.vcu.edu/ web site at:  http://tinyurl.com/27wt9ydj.

After years of directing Jewish museums in Israel, the Project Manager of Nebraska Stories of Humanity Beth Dotan spent 13 years serving as the founding executive director of the Institute for Holocaust Education, working closely with Holocaust survivors and their families.

In her career, Dotan heard many stories of survival from Jewish refugees in Nebraska. Recognizing the impermanence of these narratives, Dotan said she felt a responsibility to ensure that these stories would not be lost.

“Whether we wanted to hear them or not. We were the witnesses of those pieces of their lives,” recounted Dotan. “I really felt like I was holding all of this material, this information, these connections.”

Today, using her wealth of experience within Jewish communities in Nebraska, and across the world, she’s creating a comprehensive educational program for Nebraska middle and high school students to learn about the Holocaust.

You can read more in an article by Grace Bellinghausen published in the omaha.com web site at: http://tinyurl.com/56ums3kx.

The following is an announcement from Strathclyde Institute:

Strathclyde Institute for Genealogical Studies will be running a series of free genealogy and family history guest speaker online talks during 2024.

The first talk in the series will be held on Wednesday the 24th of January from 18.00 to 19.00 and will feature guest speaker Dylan Goodwin, a genealogist and author of the ‘Forensic Genealogist’ fiction series (and other non-fiction and fiction books). Find out more and reserve your free place today! > https://bit.ly/sigs24talks

The following is a press release issued by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration:

The National Archives Building in Washington, DC, has been called a “temple to American history.” This view shows the Pennsylania Avenue entrance. (National Archives photo by Richard Schneider) WASHINGTON, December 13, 2023 - The National Archives Building, located near the National Mall and the most prominent structure in the Federal Triangle in Washington, DC, was officially designated as a National Historic Landmark, December 13. The designation was signed by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. "It is such an honor to receive the National Historic Landmark designation for the National Archives Building," Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan said. "It is a well-deserved distinction for this extraordinary building that is in its own way a treasure, surpassed only by the priceless documents held within it." On August 16, 2023, the National Park Service Advisory Board voted to recommend their approval on the National Historic Landmark nomination for the National Archives Building, along with five other nominees. The board recognized the building’s significance as the first archives built specifically for federal records in the United States and as a masterpiece work of New York–based architect John Russell Pope. The new status comes more than 50 years after the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, in 1966, as part of the Federal Triangle. It was also listed individually in 1971. Only about 2,500 of the approximately 95,000 properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places are recognized as National Historic Landmarks, meaning that less than three percent have received the designation. The status covers not only the National Archives Building but the entire 5.2-acre square and green spaces, the sculptures at both main entrances, and the small garden and monument stone to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which was dedicated in 1965. “The National Archives Building had long been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The designation as a ‘Landmark’ further underscores the building's importance as documentation of our nation's architectural history,” said Mark Smith, executive for Business Support Services. “Much like the archived records it protects, the building itself is recognized for its importance in understanding our country's history.” A series of photographs document the construction of the National Archives Building. This view of the steel framework was taken on September 5, 1933. View in National Archives Catalog The building was completed in 1935. Notable milestones over the nearly 90-year history of the building include the almost immediate change to fill the interior courtyard with additional archival stack space, the arrival of the nation’s founding documents in 1952, and a major building-wide renovation in the early 2000s. These improvements did not alter the essential features or functionality of the building, as it continues to be used for the same purposes for which it was designed and built: as a federal repository for the nation's most valuable records with public research rooms and exhibit spaces accessible to all. “In addition to marking the significance of the building's architecture, the National Historic Landmark designation highlights the property’s national importance as the permanent home of America’s founding documents,” said National Archives Historian Jessie Kratz. “It’s one of the first purpose-built archival facilities in the world, and it serves as a symbol of the permanence of the American federal government, its institutions, and democratic access to its records.” The National Archives Building joins over 2,600 other National Historic Landmarks but is the only National Archives facility with landmark status. The New York office currently occupies space in the landmarked Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, while the Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon sites are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Learn more about the National Archives Building on the new special topics page dedicated to the building. Learn more about the landmark designation on the National Archives website. FIND OUT MORE

Police are using a new type of DNA sleuthing, called genetic genealogy. Already the technique has caught murder and rape suspects in California and Washington. While solving the cases has given cause for celebration, the tactics used in catching the alleged culprits have many privacy and civil rights experts worried.

Closing the Golden State Killer case (SN Online: 4/29/18) and the previously unsolved double murder of a young Canadian couple (SN Online: 5/23/18) involved probing a public online database of people’s DNA and family-tree information called GEDmatch.

In a May 29 opinion piece published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, bioethicist Christine Grady and colleagues argue that police should be more transparent about how they use forensic DNA searches. Meanwhile, law professor Natalie Ram and colleagues go even further in an essay in the June 8 Science, writing that eroding limits on the use of crime-solving technology “threatens our collective civil liberties and opens the door to socially and politically unacceptable genetic surveillance.”

Here are a few key points in the debate:

Why are police using GEDmatch instead of DNA testing companies? 

If police wanted to use 23andMe or AncestryDNA to help solve crimes, they would need a clean saliva sample from a potential suspect to send to the company for testing and analysis. But crime scene DNA doesn’t come in that form, so police can’t send DNA to the companies for testing. That’s not the case with the DNA analysis service GEDmatch, to which customers can upload raw DNA data received from testing companies.

“That means the police or law enforcement investigators are equally able, if they have enough DNA to create a sufficiently complete genetic sequence, to upload that to GEDmatch” to find potential suspects, says Ram, of the University of Baltimore School of Law.

You can read more in an article by Tina Hesman Saey published in the sciencenews web site at: http://tinyurl.com/397mvf5r

Unsolved crimes are a burden on victims, their families and the police as they try to apprehend criminals when all leads go cold.

Amid the cold cases, one Pennsylvania Republican lawmaker is aiming to alleviate part of that burden at the federal level.

House Republican Chief Deputy Whip Guy Reschenthaler is introducing the Cold Case Modernization Act this week to expand genealogy testing at the federal level for cold case victims.

Reschenthaler's bill looks to solve cold cases by expanding Department of Justice (DOJ) criteria for grant funding toward forensic genealogy testing for unidentified human remains.

"Across the United States, investigators lack the critical resources to solve the cases of tens of thousands of unidentified human remains," Reschenthaler said.

"The Cold Case Modernization Act puts these deceased Americans and their grieving families first, using state-of-the-art DNA technology to uncover answers and find the truth," he continued.

Specifically, Reschenthaler's bill says that any DOJ "grant awarded to States and units of local government for forensic genetic [genealogy] may be used to identify unidentified human remains without regard to whether the manner of death is determined to be a homicide."

On the evening of Dec. 10, 2021, a catastrophic EF4 tornado churned through Tennessee and Western Kentucky, carving a 165-mile path across 11 counties and claiming the lives of 74 people. 

Damage concentrated in the city of Mayfield, Kentucky, where more than 4,000 structures were impacted. A candle factory was flattened, killing nine workers, and many historic downtown buildings were destroyed, including the Graves County courthouse and eight historic churches, among which were two Black churches built shortly after the Civil War. 

Six months after the disaster, Rebecca Freihaut, Ph.D., a risk and crisis communications expert who works at the University of Central Florida and UK alumna, partnered with University of Kentucky Libraries Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History to speak with Mayfield residents about their experiences. Freihaut spoke with 22 residents in June and July 2022, then returned a year later to follow up with 18 interviewees.

The result is the Mayfield, Kentucky 2021 Oral History Project, a harrowing but hopeful collection of interviews that commemorates a tragic loss of life while also capturing stories of survival, resilience and regrowth. 

A native Kentuckian and UK alumna, Freihaut said she immediately felt a deep sense of kinship with the residents of Mayfield.

“In the weeks after the disaster, I followed the news from Mayfield and wondered what would happen after the news cameras left and they were left to pick up the pieces, both literally and figuratively,” Freihaut said. “It was at that point I decided to try to help in some way.”

In her academic work, Freihaut studies the way that narrative can lift up the voices of underserved communities and vulnerable populations in the wake of disasters. In Mayfield, she found a community close to home in which she could put her expertise into practice. 

Familiar with the Nunn Center after graduating from UK with a master’s degree in library and information science in 2014, Freihaut contacted Nunn Center Director Doug Boyd and Oral History Archivist Kopana Terry to discuss a potential oral history project. 

“When I reached out to members of the Mayfield community, I was welcomed with open arms,” said Friehaut. “That first summer, I met with 22 residents from all walks of life and heard incredible stories of survival: stories of successes and challenges, rebuilding and memorializing, and resilience and grief.”

She met participants in the Graves County Public Library, where a well-used box of Kleenex testified to the pain and heartache harbored by the community. 

“Oral history is more than a traditional interview,” said Freihaut. “It is a chance for a person to release their story. During those first interviews, nearly every participant cried, some sobbing to the point of needing to pause the interview so they could compose themselves before starting again.”

Freihaut was surprised to learn that many of the residents she interviewed had not shared their story with anyone before.

“Their tears marked the release of six months of grief, stress and loss,” she said. “But their tears were equally the tears of a proud and resilient people who were summoning the strength needed to do what had to be done to rebuild and move forward past this tragedy.”

By the time Freihaut returned about a year later, the Kleenex box sat mostly unused.

“Most participants joked that this time around the box of Kleenex was needed more for seasonal allergies than for crying,” said Friehaut. “I am hopeful that the residents of Mayfield will do as they have done for generations: pull themselves up by their bootstraps, march forward together, along with the many organizations and volunteers who have supported them, and rebuild Mayfield — not by forgetting the stories of the past, but by writing a new and beautiful chapter in their story.” 

What started as a service project resulted in a lifelong connection with the wonderful people of Mayfield, who Freihaut now considers friends.

“It is an honor to carry their stories with me,” she said.

The stories collected over those two summers have now been archived and indexed in the Nunn Center’s oral history repository, where they are accessible to the public and will be preserved for future generations both to commemorate and to learn from Mayfield’s tragedy.

Located in the Special Collections Research Center, the Nunn Center is crucial to furthering UK Libraries’ mission of preserving the history and culture of the Commonwealth in all of its dimensions.

“The work of the Nunn Center is unparalleled in its ability to capture history as it’s happening,” said Deirdre Scaggs, associate dean of research and discovery. “We are proud of our ability to facilitate projects like these, which are vital for both our partnering communities and for present and future generations of Kentuckians. They enable us to process events and remember the voices, stories, and spirit of communities across the state, and are invaluable additions to the historical record.”

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the Nunn Center is internationally recognized for its work in collecting and preserving oral histories. With over 18,000 oral history interviews, Nunn Center collections span an incredible breadth of topics and provide an invaluable resource to researchers across Kentucky and around the world. 

Find out more about the Nunn Center’s collections and collaborations, or learn how to support the Nunn Center as it pursues its mission of engaging communities, creating connections and life-changing learning experiences, increasing access to oral histories the world over, and collecting and preserving Kentucky’s story.

Casper native Steven Dacus has done a lot of cool things — cruised through Casper streets with lights and siren as a firefighter, led horse-mounted cavalry at Gettysburg, and this summer helped launch a new website for Civil War historians that saves them a lot of time and money.

Casper native Steven Dacus has done a lot of cool things — cruised through Casper streets with lights and siren as a firefighter, led horse-mounted cavalry at Gettysburg, and this summer helped launch a new website for Civil War historians that saves them a lot of time and money.

Dacus is one of the driving forces behind the new website ResearchArsenal.com. The website allows historians — amateur and professional — to dig into the nitty gritty of Civil War regiments, weapons and uniforms, or just to see how that great-great-great uncle lived on the battlefields from 1861-1865.

“The whole premise is to have a one-stop spot for researching mid-19th century history,” Dacus said. “We have been working on it for about five years. We just made it public on June 2, and the vast majority of what we have is from private collections. We have 30,000 pages of letters that people can keyword search.”

There are also 10,000 photographs that can be keyword searched: for weapons, uniform, place or even hairstyle.

You can read more in an article by Dale Killingbeck published in the http://cowboystatedaily.com/ at  https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/12/10/casper-based-database-revolutionizes-virtual-access-for-civil-war-buffs/.

The following is from an article written by Ricardo Henrique Lowe, Jr and obviously lists some of his (biased) personal opinions and published in the news.utexas.edu web site:

Two months ago, I left my career as a statistician with the U.S. Census Bureau. I had become agitated with the agency’s proposed direction for race and ethnic measurement and felt my scholarly expertise on the matter was undervalued.

My beef with the bureau mainly involved its persistent promotion of a combined race and ethnicity question. The bureau believes that lumping all race and ethnicity categories into one question will improve data quality, particularly for Latinos and persons of Middle Eastern and North African descent. Both groups do not see themselves represented in the current separate question format. 

As a demographer and former analyst with the bureau, I support the desire to achieve accurate data for these populations. But the combined question is riddled with too many ethical and methodological flaws to be considered a viable solution. 

As it stands, the question conflates race and ethnicity by making both concepts co-equal and relies on a coding infrastructure that forcibly reassigns people to race groups they did not initially identify with.

A 2016 Westat study conducted for the agency found that Afro-Puerto Ricans were less likely to select the black category in a combined question. The study found that participants would have marked both Black and Latino if the question had not limited “Puerto Rico” to an example only for the Latino category.

This research confirms that some Latinos find it hard to distinguish whether the combined question is asking about race, ethnicity, nationality, or ancestry. The combined question treats these concepts as synonymous despite evidence that they are analytically distinct. 

Census research also shows that the Middle Eastern and North African category reduces the number of people who identify as black or white in the combined question. But the bureau has yet to address feedback from the community that the category should be tested as an ethnicity as opposed to a race. The failure to do so ignores the fact that people of Middle Eastern and North African origin can be of any race — just like Latinos. 

This is just scratching the surface.

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/4w58sv2b.

The following is from the ScotlandsPeople web site:

We are pleased to announce that the records of almost 10,000 women who served with the Scottish Women’s Land Army (SWLA) and Women’s Timber Corps (WTC) from 1939 to 1950 have been digitised and are now available online to search and view on ScotlandsPeople. These records are a valuable source for tracing an individual's service and gaining a wider perspective on the work of the SWLA and WTC.

Replacing men who had joined the forces during the Second World War, these women played a vital role in the war effort. They contributed to the production of food and kept vital industries supplied with timber during the war and its immediate aftermath.

The records of the SWLA and WTC will be of particular interest to family historians hoping to learn more about the role their relatives played in the Second World War. Each card can give insight into the training given to new recruits, where they worked and reveal why they left their post. The records can be searched by name, year of birth and service branch.

You can read more at: https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/article/news-article-scottish-womens-land-army-records-released.