The Calcasieu Parish Public Library has announced that the Southwest Louisiana Genealogical and Historical Library, located at 411 Pujo St. in downtown Lake Charles, reopened to the public.

The library had been closed for repairs and renovations. New features include furniture, fixtures, paint, shelving, new technology, and more.

Once a shelf in the main branch of the library, the genealogy collection moved to its own book cart, then to its own room, and finally, to the Carnegie Memorial Library building.

The library now has a collection size of over 12,000 items. The library’s collection, much of which can be accessed remotely, includes:

• Books
• Periodicals
• Microfilm
• Compiled family records
• An obituary index
• Records on most of the American states
• Limited information on British genealogy
• Cemetery and church records
• Parish courthouse records
• Military records
• Parish histories
• Land records

There are also online databases available for viewing including include the Maude Reid Scrapbook Index, the 1895-1896 Lake Charles City Directory, Ancestry Library Edition, local newspapers such as the American Press and the Southwest Daily News, Fold3 Library Edition, and HeritageQuest.

From an article by Emily Hemphill published in the Cardinal News web site:

Artifacts from the former Black school have now been digitized. It’s part of a national push to preserve Black history records and make them more accessible.

For 100 years, Christiansburg Institute battled white discrimination by serving as a model of Black education and culture tucked away in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. Today, the battlefield has transferred to a digital arena as the nonprofit that carries its name strives to preserve it for future generations.

A national effort to digitize archives and artifacts embodying African American history, which has long been ignored and inaccessible to the masses, began soon after the racial unrest of 2020. The digitization movement made its way to the institute, which once stood just down the hill from the current Christiansburg High School, after executive director Chris Sanchez and museum curator Jenny Nehrt successfully applied for a $250,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources for “Digitizing Hidden Collections” in 2022.  

“It’s basically immoral to underpreserve Black history in any society that claims to be democratic,” said Sanchez. 

The nonprofit, in collaboration with University Libraries at Virginia Tech, recently finished scanning and uploading 870 photographs, 60 slides, 15 diplomas, 48,000 typed pages and 3,300 handwritten pages from the school’s heyday. These artifacts can now be accessed by anyone with an internet connection: https://hub.catalogit.app/8896. The collection will also be stored in the University Libraries’ digital space. An exhibit to promote the almost-completed work is open to the public until Dec. 17 on the second floor of the Newman Library.

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/4xkxpz6p.

The following is a press release written by the (U.S.) National Genealogical Society:

Get Tips to Help You Scan, Record, and Write

October is Family History Month—a perfect opportunity to delve into the rich tapestry of your past. NGS is excited to support your genealogy journey as you explore, preserve, and share your family's unique history.  Whether you're curious about old photos and hoping to scan them, looking to record family members’ memories, or aiming to write stories that are part of your family's legacy, this is the moment to begin or restart a project. It's easy to put off these tasks, thinking there's always tomorrow. But as we're often reminded, the best time is now.  NGS created three resources to inspire you this month with steps to help make projects successful. Download Recording Family Memories and Stories: Get guidance to plan and record interviews and capture meaningful conversations. Scanning and Labeling Family Photos: Dive into our handy tips to preserve and digitize your family’s visual history. Writing and Sharing Family Stories: Find your voice and tell your family's cherished tales with our prompts and ideas. Get Family History Month Resources Sharing stories within your family cultivates a deeper connection between members in the past and present and the generations to come. (Remember to respect privacy. Discuss plans to ensure everyone is on board when conveying personal anecdotes and information.) So, gather your family, dive into those photo albums or boxes, and collect the stories that weave the fabric of your family history. NGS is here for you every step of the way. And pass this on—download free images on our site you can post on social media with #FamilyHistoryMonth and the link to ngsgenealogy.org/family-history-month.  Celebrate this October and invite people to join you!

An announcement today from the (U.S.) National Genealogical Society:

As of 1 October 2023, ConferenceKeeper.org is now officially part of the NGS family. ConferenceKeeper is the most complete, entirely free, online calendar of genealogy conferences and events. 

Created in 2012, ConferenceKeeper was the brainchild of Jen Baldwin. In 2015, Baldwin passed it on to Eowyn Langholf Walker and Tami Osmer Mize. Mize has been its sole manager since 2016 and will continue in this role as a consultant for NGS.

ConferenceKeeper will continue to support local genealogical societies, libraries, and genealogy-related businesses by providing a wider audience for their programs. The website will offer its calendar of thousands of genealogical education opportunities as a free resource for everyone interested in furthering their knowledge of family history research. ConferenceKeeper will also continue to accept genealogy-related advertising. NGS member organizations will benefit from a special advertising rate and increased visibility for their events.

Kinsta announced FREE hosting for up to 100 static websites, including static WordPress sites, and 100 GB bandwidth per month.

• Free hosting offered by Kinsta for static websites, including static WordPress sites
• 100 GB bandwidth per month per company
• 1 GB build image size per site
• Free tier will remain free "forever" according to Kinsta

Managed WordPress Hosting company Kinsta announced they are offering free static website hosting that comes with 100 GB bandwidth/month and 1 GB build size limit.

Kinsta says that the free hosting tier plan is being given away so that users can experience it for themselves.

According to the information that Kinsta provided:

“Static sites are completely free, you can host up to 100 sites for free.

Later we will introduce add-ons and features that might be paid, but as of now the service is free and this tier will remain free forever.”

Who Can Get Free Kinsta Hosting?

The free hosting is for static sites, can include WordPress sites that are converted to static (WordPress static site conversion guide).

Developers and users who leverage node-based static site generators that generate re-rendered content. Users of the Astro, Gatsby static site generators and other popular solutions.

Any individual or business can get a free static site hosting plan from Kinsta.

It’s also an opportunity for agencies and developers to test out static site hosting for free in order to see if it’s a good match for clients.

What Are Static Sites?

Many publishers are converting their WordPress sites to a static version and enjoying faster speeds. Sites with massive amounts of traffic can serve webpages all day with little stress on the server.

I used to create static affiliate sites back in the early days, some of which went viral and received massive amounts of traffic with zero downtime, no crashes.

Static sites also enjoy better security because vulnerabilities hidden in plugins or themes no longer exist on static sites.

An important quality of static sites is that they require little to virtually no maintenance.

Free Features In Kinsta Static Site Hosting

Kinsta is offering many features in their free plan.

• 100 static sites per company
• 1 concurrent build per site
• 1 GB build image size per site
• 600 build minutes per month per company
• 100 GB bandwidth per month per company
• API access
• Integration with GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket
• Deploying to the Edge – making your site closer to visitors by serving it from more than 300 locations
• Diff-based Uploads

Additional features that are planned for the service include:

• Maintenance mode
• Password protection
• More builders
• Choose a build template
• Detailed Analytics

Get Free Static Site Hosting Here

Kinsta free hosting is available right now for static sites. Visit Kinsta for more details or to sign up.

From battlefieldstrust.com:

This database provides information about monuments, including memorials, plaques and information boards, located across the British Isles which relate to events concerning and key figures associated with the British Civil Wars 1639-1660. It also covers monuments located anywhere in the world relating to soldiers who served in the British Isles between 1639-1660. Such memorials can be extant or non-extant. The database currently contains 245 entries

In time, we hope the database will become a key resource for those wishing to understand more about or research the memorialisation of the British Civil Wars, but also for those interested in the Civil Wars who may wish to know what memorials can be seen when they visit a place. We continue to source public contributions and if you are aware of a memorial that doesn't appear on the database that meets the criteria set out above, please help us by contributing an entry via our submission form. If you see an error in one of the entries please let us know by emailing bcwmemorials@ukbattlefieldstrust.onmicrosoft.com.

Copyright, data protection and other related information about the project can be found on the online submission form.  Images published on and information from the database can be re-used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Do you have old tape recordings or possibly old videos with sound that now have excessive hiss or other background noise? If so, you might be interested in this press release that was issued today:

Background noise is one of the biggest headaches in audio recording: anyone who has ever used a microphone knows how difficult it is to deal with environmental noise and electrical interference. Before, you had to record in an expensive studio or use complex software that is time-consuming and difficult to use. This is about to change.

Today, music software developer Tape It released their free AI-powered Denoiser that automatically removes background noise such as hums and hisses. It produces studio-quality results on full songs, single instrument tracks, and field recordings — not just on spoken word. Tape It launched its Denoiser as a free web app and will later implement it into the company’s flagship product, the Tape It iOS app, which helps musicians organize and record song ideas. This tool is part of a bigger strategy to develop tools that simplify recording for musicians.

“Everyone is excited about AI being creative,” says Thomas Walther, CEO of Tape It. “We are excited about AI solving boring problems. We take care of background noise, so you can entirely focus on the creative parts and write more songs!”

Together with the launch, the company released an academic study with a comprehensive scientific listening test which has shown that the software’s quality competes with - and sometimes even outperforms - industry-leading denoisers that usually require hours of adjustment and tweaking.

“Other denoisers either sound bad on music, or require expensive software that takes time and a lot of expert knowledge to use. Tape It just works.”

The denoiser’s main areas of focus are:

Tape It Denoiser will be officially presented at the Audio Engineering Convention in New York from October 25th to 27th, and is available for free today on the website.

A new initiative to increase Black participation in genomic research has been launched by one of the oldest and largest historically Black academic health sciences centers in the U.S. in partnership with four pharmaceutical companies. One of the project’s aims is to build the world’s largest African ancestry genomics research database with 500,000 volunteer participants.

Meharry Medical College, Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC), AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Roche have teamed to create the Together for CHANGE (“Changing Healthcare for People of African Ancestry through an International Genomics & Equity”) initiative.

“People of African ancestry have been underrepresented in genomics studies, which leads to clinical genetic testing that has less reference data and less confident testing results,” said Aris Baras, MD, senior vice president, Regeneron, and head of Regeneron Genetics Center. 

The big pharmas have said they will make contributions worth $20 million during the initiative. Regeneron Genetics Center will undertake and fund the sequencing of genetic samples.

It is well documented that the representation of Black people in genomics databases is woeful and distorts medical treatment. Recent research, for example, showed that men of sub-saharan origin have a much higher risk of prostate cancer but distinctive biomarkers of the disease.

“As part of our contribution to the consortium and as a component of our ongoing African Genomics Program, Roche will be leading efforts to collect up to 20,000 samples and related phenotype data from diverse regions of Africa,” said James Sabry, global head of pharma partnering, Roche.

You can read more in an article in the insideprecisionmedicine web site at: https://tinyurl.com/mssz8f4j.

You may be interested in an article by Thorin Klosowski published in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s web site:

In early October, a bad actor claimed they were selling account details from the genetic testing service, 23andMe, which included alleged data of one million users of Ashkenazi Jewish descent and another 100,000 users of Chinese descent. By mid-October this expanded out to another four million more general accounts. The data includes display name, birth year, sex, and some details about genetic ancestry results, but no genetic data. There's nothing you can do if your data was already accessed, but it's a good time to reconsider how you're using the service to begin with. 

What Happened

In a blog post, 23andMe claims the bad actors accessed the accounts through "credential stuffing:" the practice of using one set of leaked usernames and passwords from a previous data breach on another website in hopes that people have reused passwords. 

If your data is included in this stolen data set, there's not much you can do to get your data back, nor is there a way to search through it to see if your information is included. But you should log into your 23andMe account to make some changes to your security and privacy settings to protect against any issues in the future. 

You can read the full article at: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/10/what-do-if-youre-concerned-about-23andme-breach 

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has identified human remains found in a dumpster in Jenkins County on February 14, 1988, as Chong Un Kim, of Hinesville, Liberty County, Georgia. Kim was 26 years old when she was found.

Chong Un Kim came to the United States from Korea in 1981 and lived in Hinesville, Georgia for years before her death in 1988.

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 14, 1988, the GBI received a request from the Jenkins County Sheriff’s Office to assist with a death investigation. The victim, wrapped with plastic and duct tape, was found inside a large, nylon suitcase that had been placed in a dumpster just north of Millen, GA in Jenkins County. The victim had been dead for about four to seven days. The cause of death was asphyxiation.

Throughout the investigation, fingerprints and dental records from the victim were compared to other missing persons from around the country. A GBI forensic artist created a sketch of what the person may have looked like which was disseminated to the public. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NAMUS) opened a case. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) also created and disseminated a computer-generated sketch. As DNA technology advanced over the years, police resubmitted evidence to the GBI Crime Lab for additional testing. Analysts found DNA on the items submitted, but the profiles obtained were not eligible for entry into the CODIS DNA Database.

In 2023, the GBI began working with Othram, a company that uses advanced DNA testing to solve cases. Othram, Inc., based in The Woodlands, Texas, is a leader in using Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing to develop comprehensive genealogical profiles. The GBI sent forensic evidence to Othram, Inc. Based on the DNA, a genealogical search produced investigative leads that led to Kim’s identification. The GBI notified Kim’s family in October 2023 about the identification.

“Project Justice” funded the DNA testing.

The GBI is asking anyone who may have known Chong Un Kim, or has any information about this case, to contact the GBI at 912-871-1121. Anonymous tips can also be submitted by calling 1-800-597-TIPS (8477), online at https://gbi.georgia.gov/submit-tips-online, or by downloading the See Something, Send Something mobile app.