UMass Lowell’s Saab Center for Portuguese Studies has received a major boost to chronicle the experience of the Portuguese in Massachusetts with a second $300,000 grant from the William M. Wood Foundation of Boston.

Dr. Frank Sousa, the center’s director, said the funds will support the expansion of the collections of the Portuguese American Digital Archive (PADA) at UMass Lowell’s Center for Lowell History.

“The impact on the Portuguese American Digital Archive will be extensive,” he told O Jornal.

What will the grant be used for?

Dr. Sousa said the grant will make it possible to document the Portuguese-American experience in more Massachusetts communities.

“First and foremost, the funds will be used to expand our collections from Lowell, Lawrence, Hudson and Gloucester - archival efforts that were underwritten by the first $300,000 Wood grant from 2020 - and to begin collecting in other Portuguese communities North of Boston, especially Cambridge/Somerville and Peabody,” he said.

Established three years ago, the digital archive currently contains 34 collections and over 3,000 photographs and documents, as well as film and audio recordings. The archival holdings are readily available not only to students and educators but also to the general public.

Dr. Sousa said the new grant will allow PADA to keep a full-time archivist and historian Dr. Gregory Gray Fitzsimons.

You can read more in an article by Lurdes C. da Silva published in The Herald News web site.

From an article by Adi Robertson published in theverge.com web site:

The Internet Archive announced today that it has appealed its loss in a major ebook copyright case. A notice indicates that it’s filed with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a publishing industry lawsuit over the nonprofit group’s Open Library program. The appeal follows a settlement that saw the Archive limit access to some of its scanned books as well as a second suit filed by music publishers over the Archive’s digitization of vintage records.

Hachette and three other publishers — HarperCollins, Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House — sued the Internet Archive in 2020 after it opened a program dubbed the National Emergency Library. The National Emergency Library expanded the Archive’s long-running Open Library program, which lets people digitally “check out” scanned copies of physical books. Publishers dubbed both systems “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale,” and in a March ruling, a New York judge substantially agreed.

The March ruling found that the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of books didn’t fall under the protections of fair use law, and an August settlement required it to remove public access to commercially available books that remained under copyright. In addition to affecting the Archive, the ruling cast doubt on a legal theory called “controlled digital lending” that would allow other libraries to offer access to digitized versions of books they physically own — rather than relying on frequently expensive and limited lending systems like OverDrive.

Internet Archive director of library services Chris Freeland acknowledged that the appeal could be a difficult legal battle. “As we stated when the decision was handed down in March, we believe the lower court made errors in facts and law, so we are fighting on in the face of great challenges,” said Freeland in the Archive’s announcement. “We know this won’t be easy, but it’s a necessary fight if we want library collections to survive in the digital age.” Freeland says the Archive will share more details about the case as it progresses.

Court documents indicate the Internet Archive is still preparing its response to the lawsuit by UMG and other record labels; a pretrial conference in that case is currently scheduled for October.

Google Photos isn’t just a place for storing and sorting your photos and videos — both the web interface and the mobile apps come with a slew of image editing tools so you can spruce up and enhance your pictures before sharing them with the wider world.

Google regularly updates these editing tools, and a significant upgrade just arrived on the web. There are new features here (some of which were previously available only on the Android app), including preset color profiles and more granular control over existing features such as brightness and contrast adjustment.

You can read more in an article by David Nield published in TheVerge web site at: https://www.theverge.com/23864917/google-photos-tools-edit-tutorial .

The following announcement was written by the Board for Certification of Genealogists®:

FREE BCG-SPONSORED WEBINAR

“Follow the Trail of Records and DNA from Ireland to Oregon (1810–1860)” 

by Karen Stanbary, CG

Tuesday, September 19, 2023, 8:00 p.m. (EDT)

A deep dive into the records narrates a family’s journey. Advanced methodology and DNA reconstruct the forgotten family.

Karen Stanbary, MA, LCSW, CG®, BCG Trustee, is an author and national lecturer focusing on topics related to using genetic evidence correlated with documentary evidence to solve genealogical brick walls. A Chicago local, she holds a Master’s Degree in Clinical Social Work from the University of Chicago and has completed advanced graduate study in Social Anthropology at the Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico. Her genealogical practice specializes in Midwestern U.S., Chicago, and Mexican research as well as complex problem-solving, unknown parentage, and DNA analysis. She is a coordinator and faculty member at IGHR, and SLIG. She received the NGSQ Award for Excellence for her complex evidence case study incorporating traditional documentary research and autosomal DNA analysis in the June 2016 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. She published “Drowning in DNA? The Genealogical Proof Standard Tosses a Lifeline” in Debbie Parker Wayne’s book Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and Case Studies. Most recently, she published another complex DNA evidence case study in the NGSQ June 2023 issue: “A Charming Scoundrel and a Tragic Victim―Charles Mapes and Maggie McBurney of Rock Island County, Illinois: Biological Parents of Myrtle Eva (Porter) Dewein.” She holds the credential Certified Genealogist from the Board for Certification of Genealogists where she serves as a Trustee and is chair of the DNA Committee.

BCG’s next free monthly webinar in conjunction with Legacy Family Tree Webinars is “Follow the Trail of Records and DNA from Ireland to Oregon (1810–1860)” by Karen Stanbary, CG. This webinar airs Tuesday, September 19, 2023, at 8:00 p.m. EDT.  

When you register before September 19 with our partner Legacy Family Tree Webinars(http://legacy.familytreewebinars.com/?aid=8110) you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. Anyone with schedule conflicts may access the webinar at no charge for one week after the broadcast on the Legacy Family Tree Webinars website. 

“We appreciate the opportunity to present these high-quality educational webinars,” said President Faye Jenkins Stallings, CG. “At BCG, our purpose is to promote public confidence in genealogy by supporting uniform standards of competence. These webinars help to achieve that by providing educational opportunities to family historians of all levels of experience.”

Following the free period for this webinar, BCG receives a small commission if you view this or any BCG webinar by clicking our affiliate link: http://legacy.familytreewebinars.com/?aid=2619.

To see the full list of BCG-sponsored webinars for 2023, visit the BCG blog SpringBoard at https://bcgcertification.org/bcg-2023-free-webinars/.  For additional resources for genealogical education, please visit the BCG Learning Center (https://bcgcertification.org/learning).

This summer, the Digital Library of Georgia released several new grant-funded newspaper titles to the Georgia Historic Newspapers website. Included below is a list of the newly available titles.

Titles funded by the Chattooga County Historical Society with a grant from the Tillotson-Menlo Charitable Foundation, Inc

Titles funded by the Forsyth County Public Library

Titles made available as part of the Georgia Newspaper Project Born Digital Project

Titles funded by the Georgia Public Library Service

Titles digitized in partnership with Georgia State University Library

Titles digitized in partnership with Kennesaw State University Museums, Archives and Rare Books

Titles funded by Mercer University Libraries

Titles funded by the Middle Georgia State University Library

Titles funded by the National Digital Newspaper Program with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

Titles digitized in partnership with the Taylor County Historical-Genealogical Society

Titles funded through a grant from an anonymous donor

The letter was dated July 17, 1939, and signed by a man named Joseph Gross. He was writing from New York to thank the Forward for helping to find his relatives. Alongside it in the digital archive was a letter written in Yiddish, dated the following week, sent from Brussels and signed by Avrom Gross, Joseph’s cousin.

“I read the letter with such great astonishment,” Avrom wrote. “I have no way of thanking you.”

I stumbled across these letters online, in the digitized archives of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Jerusalem, while searching for references to a column called Seeking Relatives that ran for decades in the Forward.

They were part of a collection donated, upon Yad Vashem’s founding in 1953, by a man named Isaac Metzker, a Forwardeditor who oversaw the column for years. I soon discovered that Metzker’s files included some 15,000 documents relating to Seeking Relatives, letters and notes that hinted at the way the newspaper connected thousands of Eastern European Jews with family in the U.S. before, during and after World War II.

The Yiddish letter written by Avrom Gross on July 26, 1939, thanking the Forward.  

I had been looking for information about Seeking Relatives in June 2022 for what I thought would be a fairly straightforward article to help commemorate the Forward’s 125th year of operation. Instead, Metzker’s files would lead to more than a year of painstaking reporting in partnership with the Forward’s archivist, Chana Pollack.

You can read more in an article written by Andrew Silverstein and published in the forward.com web site at: https://forward.com/culture/552402/story-behind-holocaust-survivors-letters-testimony-jewish-victims/. 

In case anyone is interested:

As mentioned in a previous article last week (at https://eogn.com/page-18080/13248857), I am back at home after my recent hospitalization. As I mentioned in that update, "I am not back to 'my old self' but I do feel better than I did for the past week or so."

Indeed, the recuperation has been slower than I expected. Maybe that is because my body is getting older. (I celebrated a birthday a few days ago.)

In any case, I am now planning to work on this newsletter every day. In other words, I now plan to revert to my regular schedule.

For anyone who didn't read my earlier update, after taking a rather long automobile trip, I went to get out of the automobile but I stumbled and fell, hitting the back of my head rather hard on the pavement. I immediately saw stars and all sorts of other lights. Being a typical male, I shrugged it off as "a minor incident." However, upon walking into the house a few minutes later, I fell twice on the living room floor. Maybe it wasn't so "minor."

Three days later, things were not improving so I went to a walk-in medical center. They gave me a quick once-over evaluation and immediately sent me to a nearby hospital emergency room. After a more extensive evaluation, I was admitted to the hospital.

Three days later I was discharged with a warning that a full recovery would take at least 2 or 3 weeks. Since then, I haven't left the living room couch for more than a very few minutes.

Do you know how BORING daytime television is?

From Gail Dever's blog: Nova Scotia Archives last week added marriages from 1947 to its website, and they are searchable by name.

In May, the provincial archives updated its online death records, adding deaths from 1972. 

A team of scientists in Beijing say they have developed a new gene-editing tool that is more efficient than CRISPR technology, as the threat of US export restrictions looms over China’s biotech sector.

The researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology reported their modular gene-editing system – called CyDENT – in the journal Nature Biotechnology on August 28.

It works a little differently to CRISPR/Cas9, which is patented in the United States. That gene-editing tool splits double-strand DNA in order to make edits to the base pairs that make up the strands, according to CRISPR Therapeutics. The DNA is cut and then repaired by a natural cell process, meaning it could lead to imprecise editing and even undesirable mutations.

But CyDENT can be used to perform strand-specific gene editing without any cuts, according to the paper.

Kevin Zhao, one of the study’s authors and co-founder of Suzhou-based Qi Biodesign, said CyDENT used modules to perform different parts of the editing process. The design allows researchers to “find the best bespoke application” for the variations that emerge.

You can read the full story at: https://tinyurl.com/4u653cmh.

There is a fascinating story involving a stolen infant. Thanks to a DNA kit from MyHeritage, the infant (now an adult) was reunited with his birth mother. You can read the full story in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/08/chilean-american-adoptee-reunites-with-his-family-42-years-after-he-was-stolen-from-them/