From an article by André Chumko and published in the Stuff.co.nz web site:

Archives NZ is in its worst state in decades, those who use its services say, but the minister responsible for the national archive disagrees, saying the current arrangement is working “really well”.

Last week the Government’s record-keeping authority removed public access to its widely used online collections search tool – which had only been live since February – due to a potential privacy and security breach, after restricted files became visible.

Late on Tuesday Archives reinstated access to the search tool, with chief archivist Anahera Morehu saying she was satisfied there was no breach.

“These issues are not what we anticipated, or expected, from a new system when it was introduced. Collections search will continue to be monitored closely ... and we’re prepared to quickly respond to any potential future issues,” Morehu said.

You can read the full article at: https://tinyurl.com/hbff494z.

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

A new, modernized National Archives Catalog launched online today. The new Catalog’s focus on scalability will allow the agency to reach its goal to get 500 million digitized pages in the Catalog by September 2026.

The fully redesigned online public access Catalog makes accessing the agency’s holdings more intuitive for the user and improves the search experience by generating faster results.

New features, such as a mobile-first design and enhanced image viewing, allow for an improved visual experience. A full list of all the new features, as well as those to come, can be found on the National Archives website.

“We are happy to introduce a new, streamlined user experience and a modernized platform that will scale for the growth in the Catalog during the years ahead,” said Jill Reilly, Director for Digital Engagement. “The new OCR (optical character recognition) tool is a game changer for enhancing search, discovery, and access to digitized records.”

Catalog users will now be able to access their accounts and make Citizen Archivist contributions via Login.gov. All Catalog user accounts have been migrated, and users will be able to sync their preexisting Catalog accounts with Login.gov. 

The Citizen Archivist community on History Hub is available for tips on navigating these changes and is also where Citizen Archivists can ask and answer questions, or see if their question has already been answered.

The legacy Catalog will still be available until March 2023, but results of searches that yield a high number of Catalog entries may be limited.

Earlier this year, the Catalog topped 200 million digitized pages, and the latest additions are regularly updated on What’s New in the Catalog on the National Archives website.

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

A while ago I wrote an article and mentioned “search your hard drive for the file.”  A newsletter reader wrote and and suggested, "Maybe sometime you could talk about how you organize so you find all of this."

Good idea! In fact, I will suggest that how to organize and file documents and pictures is only the first part of “the problem.” The bigger question is: “Can you quickly find and retrieve files in the future?”

This article is the result of the reader's suggestion. Indeed, the "problem" of organizing your files and photographs in a computer becomes even bigger as you store more and more information. However, one thought keeps popping to my mind as I ponder this "problem."

First, a little background. Most of us who are in our forties or beyond learned about filing and organizing long before computers became available in the household. We learned a lot about organizing printed things in a logical manner so that we could easily find and retrieve filed information when needed. We often filled 3-ring notebooks and even filing cabinets with folders containing all sorts of things. When we later moved into the computer age and saw things organized in digital documents that are then saved in something called folders, our minds naturally reverted to what we already had learned about printed documents and paper file folders. I will suggest, however, that sometimes reverting to old habits can be a good thing, and at other times it might be a bad thing.

In the past, we have been taught to file everything in a logical sequence. Depending upon the documents in question, we might file alphabetically or sequentially. This works well for simple documents that are easily categorized as either alphabetical or sequential. However, that simplistic filing system tends to fall short when filing and retrieving more complex documents that serve multiple purposes.

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/13002862.

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 following is a press release from TheGenealogist:

Where did my ancestors live? Were the shops, churches and pubs nearby?

These questions and more are now easier than ever to answer using TheGenealogist. This online family history website has just linked all of its 1881 census records of England, Scotland and Wales to its powerful Map Explorer™ so that users can see the locations of houses plotted on georeferenced historic and modern map layers.

Uniquely on TheGenealogist viewing a household record from the 1881 census will now show a map pinpointing its location. Clicking on this pin opens Map Explorer™, enabling subscribers to explore the area and see the records of neighbouring properties.

With this new release family and house historians are able to research the streets, lanes and neighbourhoods in which their ancestors had lived at the time of the 1881 census. Joining earlier releases that saw the 1911, 1901 and 1891 census linked to the powerful mapping tool, researchers can easily identify with just the click of a button, where their forebears had once lived.

With properties plotted on a map researchers can see the routes their ancestors could have used to get to the shops, drop into their local pubs, worship at their nearby churches, travel to their places of work and relax with a walk in the nearby park. Historical maps make it possible to find where the nearest railway station was to their home, important for understanding how our ancestors could have travelled to other parts of the country to see relatives or visit their hometown.

Using this powerful resource, Starter, Gold and Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist can investigate their ancestors’ neighbourhood from home on their computer screens, or even access the census and the relevant maps on their mobile phone while walking down the modern streets.

The majority of the London area and other towns and cities can be viewed down to the property level, while other parts of the country will identify down to the parish, road or street.

Charles Darwin’s home, Downe House

See TheGenealogist’s article: Darwin at Downe

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/darwin-at-downe-1637/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put 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 an article by Jim Levulis and published in the WAMC Northeast Public Radio web site:

Fort Ticonderoga has acquired a private collection of more than 3,000 objects, including over 200 rare firearms, as the historical site prepares to commemorate the 250^thanniversary of the American War for Independence.

WAMC's Jim Levulis spoke with Matthew Keagle, Fort Ticonderoga Museum Curator, and Fort President and CEO Beth Hill about the significance of the acquisition.

Keagle: The Robert Nittolo collection is perhaps the single largest, most important collection of material culture relating to the conflicts that shaped our nation really, in the 18th century, primarily the American Revolution, but the French and Indian War and other colonial conflicts as well. And so, it contains objects from almost two centuries worth of time in the 1600s and 1700s, including weaponry, muskets and swords, and that kind of thing, all the way to soldiers’ clothing, their personal equipment, their accoutrement, all the tools that they used in the field, manuscripts, books that they used to learn the art of war. It really crosses almost every object type of the things that actually saw service during the military conflicts of the 18th century.

You can read the full interview at: https://tinyurl.com/yd5wurxt

The following is a press release from the Luxembourg Ministry of Education, Children and Youth:  

Den LOD fir ënnerwee

You're on the bus and can't remember a word? You're out and about and don't know how to say Clemency in Luxembourgish? You're in a restaurant and wonder what a Ziwwi is? Just ask the LOD app !

The brand new website of the Lëtzebuerger Online Dictionnaire was introduced five months ago, with a new look and enhanced features.

Since then, more than 4 million words have been searched on the new site and about 3,5 articles have been read. More than half of the traffic came from mobile devices.

To make the dictionary's content even more accessible, the LOD is now also available as a free app (LOD.lu), which can be downloaded from Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store.

apps.apple.com
play.google.com

An intuitive design, advanced search functions, word categories and much more - all this is now available via direct access on the home screen of the tablet or smartphone: an additional way to access the 32,000 dictionary articles, 35,000 described terms, 173,000 translations, 54,000 example sentences and 10,000 synonyms.

During the development of the app, the many constructive feedback messages from LOD users were of course also taken into account.

Compared to the website, the loading times have been shortened and the display improved: The structure of the dictionary is saved on the device and unnecessary elements of the browser were removed.

The linguistic content always comes from the same database and is therefore constantly up to date, regardless of how it is accessed, whether on the website or the app.

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

Over 150,000 new records have been added to Findmypast’s collection this Findmypast Friday 

Lincolnshire Baptisms 

Over 144,000 new baptisms have been added into this existing collection, spanning 1754-1862, with most of them predating 1812. The updates bring this collection to over 2.1 million records. The new records cover over 100 Lincolnshire parishes, and could help you find an ancestor’s parents’ names to get you moving further back in your tree.  

England & Wales, Paupers In Workhouses 1860 

In 1860, the House of Commons ordered for a report to be taken of each workhouse in England and Wales. This report detailed every long-term resident of the workhouses, and the reasons for their residency. A long-term resident was an adult, above the age of 16, who had been inhabiting a workhouse for five or more years. There are over 14,000 records in this brand-new collection to explore.  

Newspapers 

Two new titles and updates to a further 17 have been added to the newspaper archive this week. 

New titles:

• • Nottingham Evening News, 1956-1958, 1960-1963
  • Weston & Worle News, 1997

Updated titles:

• • Aldershot News, 1968
  • Bracknell Times, 1989
  • Bristol Evening Post, 1965, 1974
  • Cambridge Daily News, 1970-1971
  • Chester Chronicle, 1821-1822, 1884, 1886, 1888, 1898, 1900, 1964, 1973, 1977-1978, 1980, 1982, 1984
  • Esher News and Mail, 1952, 1956-1957, 1965, 1973
  • Football Post (Nottingham), 1989
  • Galloway News and Kirkcudbrightshire Advertiser, 1994
  • Hinckley Times, 1962
  • Medway News, 1996
  • Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1922
  • Nottingham Evening Post, 1979
  • Nottingham Guardian, 1892
  • Runcorn Guardian, 1958-1959, 1964-1965, 1971, 1976, 1982
  • Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph, 1946-1948, 1953, 1955-1956, 1958, 1960, 1962-1964, 1973, 1976-1979, 1981
  • Staffordshire Sentinel, 1868
  • Sunday Sun (Newcastle), 1962

 

NOTE: This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it is a follow-up to my several previous articles about the Zello walkie-talkie app that converts your cell phone into a walkie-talkie with world-wide coverage.

The following is an excerpt from an article by Mark Jansen and Paula Beaton published in the DigitalTrends web site (it is the longest and most complete article listing walkie-talkie apps I have ever seen.)

In almost all cases, each such program can only communicate with other people using the same program.

If watching the kids in Stranger Things communicate via walkie-talkie left you wishing it was still the ’80s, we’ve got some good news. Walkie-talkie apps bring all the excitement of walkie-talkie chat to your smartphone, allowing you to talk to your friends, send them messages, and leave voicemails. Of course, they don’t use real walkie-talkie frequencies — so you won’t get any interference — but they’re still the coolest, most retro way of talking with your friends. There are even apps that allow you to talk with users in your area and worldwide. Turn your Android or iOS device into a digital walkie-talkie with our hand-picked selection of the best apps.

You can read the complete article at; https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/best-walkie-talkie-apps/:

From the MyHeritage Blog:

In just one week since its release, AI Time Machine™ has garnered a huge following and exploded on social media. People all over the world are having a blast as they transform themselves into different figures throughout history, and the feature continues to gain traction. AI Time Machine™ is rapidly becoming a massive TikTok trend, with users sharing out-of-this-world results and gaining significant exposure. Check out this video from influencer Chelsey Brown that has 241,000 views so far, and one from the_real_lin_shady that has 1.2 million views!

We’re constantly fine tuning the feature and enhancing it with more options and amazing outputs. We’ve just added 17 new themes, making the time-travel options even greater than before!

For more details about AI Time Machine™, read the launch announcement on our blog, and our earlier post about its growing popularity.

Here’s a list of the fun new themes to try:

You can read a lot more and view a number of example images in the lengthy article in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/11/new-themes-added-to-ai-time-machine/.

The following press release was written by the (U.S.) National Archives and Records Administration:

Washington, DC

Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall approved 31 proposals totaling $1,904,539 in National Archives awards for projects in 25 states and the District of Columbia, pending appropriations of a final budget for FY 2023. The National Archives grants program is carried out with the advice and recommendations of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). A complete list is available online.

Publishing Historical Records – $522,740 for four projects that document major historical figures and important eras and social movements in the history of the nation: John Adams and Family Papers, Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Edition, Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, and the Documentary History of the Ratification of the U.S. Constitution & Adoption of the Bill of Rights. 

A $120,000 NHPRC-Mellon Planning Grant for Collaborative Digital Editions in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American History and Ethnic Studies will go to Fisk University in Nashville to support a two-year planning grant to develop a collaborative digital edition, Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg, in collaboration with the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Schomburg (1874–1938), a historian, writer, and activist of Puerto Rican and German descent, became one of the most important collectors of Afro-Latin American cultural heritage in the United States. 

A Major Collaborative Archives grant of $330,253 will support the University of Central Florida’s People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel (PRINT) project to create a curated digital repository of 2,700 letters written by Anabaptists, Quakers, and Pietist refugees to the American colonies (1630–1730) from five repositories in the United States and Europe. 

The NHPRC will award $325,152 to four planning grants and three implementation grants for Archives Collaboratives. Planning Grants will be awarded to collaboratives at the New York Folklore Society, Civil Rights collections in Alabama, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, and a partnership among Basque history collections in Nevada and California. 

Implementation Grants will be awarded to Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious, a consortia of the Internet Archive’s Community Web Programs, and the Ka Ipu Makani Cultural Heritage Center in Hawaii to create a Molokaʻi Community Repository, including digitizing 12,000 records from collaborating repositories and community collections, on the small rural island of Molokaʻi.

An additional $606,394 in 18 State Board grants will go to state historical records advisory boards to carry out programs that assist smaller archives, provide workshops and educational tools, and provide statewide archival services. 

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) of the National Archives supports projects that promote access to America's historical records to encourage understanding of our democracy, history, and culture. The 15-member Commission includes representatives from all three branches of the federal government as well as the leading archival and historical professional associations. Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall  is the Chairman, and Christopher Eck is the Executive Director. Since it was established in 1934 along with the National Archives, the NHPRC has awarded 5,000 grants for preserving, publishing, and providing access to the nation’s historical documents.