Italian citizenship is one of the most sought-after nationalities in the world. Whilst numerous migrants today secure Italian citizenship and residency rights by investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in Italy or relocating to Italy, those with an ancestral connection with Italy may attain Italian citizenship through a more straightforward and affordable route - Italian citizenship by ancestry ("Italian CBA").

If certain requirements are met, those of Italian descent may apply for Italian citizenship without purchasing a property or making a business investment in Italy. While legal costs for Italian CBA vary depending on the complexity of the case, such costs are typically significantly lower that those required by other immigration options. This is because Italian CBA applicants are entitled to secure Italian citizenship by right of blood and they typically go through a simpler citizenship application process compared to other migrants.

Advantages of Acquiring Italian Citizenship

Securing Italian citizenship can bring a host of benefits. One may not only gain the right to live, work, and study freely in Italy and anywhere in the European Union ("EU") by becoming Italian citizens, but they may also apply for social securities, healthcare subsidies, and education benefits from any EU member states. Additionally, those who qualify for Italian CBA may secure one of the most coveted travel document in the world – the Italian passport. The Italian passport is ranked the third most powerful passport in the world in 2023 and holders of Italian passports are granted visa free/ visa-on-arrival access to 174 destinations around the globe. Moreover, in cases of emergencies, Italian passport holders may seek consular assistance and protection from any EU embassy.

Qualifying for Italian CBA

The advantage of the Italian CBA program is that the program imposes no generational barriers on its applicants, so those with an ancestral link with Italy may qualify for Italian CBA regardless of how far back their ancestral lines extend.

You can read more in an article by Polly Ho at https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/general-immigration/1296770/obtaining-italian-citizenship-through-your-ancestors. 

Jacqui Love Thornell and her husband Kwasi Thornell have made the largest ever photography donation to Broward’s County’s African American Research Library Cultural Center (ARLCC) in Fort Lauderdale.

They gifted more than 1,300 photographs, documenting African American life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, to the ARLCC Special Collections and Archives Department’s “Frozen in Time: Selections from the Love-Thornell Collection.”

Love Thornell, a human resource executive for several major media companies said she had retired when she found herself wanting to do more.

“I started out on ancestry.com looking for family photos, (and) realized we had none,” she said. “I expanded my search. I started looking up photos from the 1800s to the 1950s. I found everyday people. I started looking up albums and started learning about forms of photographs.”

The scholar with an Ed. M. from Harvard University, also an avid reader, traveler and writer, said she envisioned the expansive collection, donated, in November 2021, as an educational tool. “I thought it would be great for teachers for Black history.”

With numerous worldwide options for sharing the fruits of her labor, the Miami native chose South Florida, and entered talks with the Broward research library, which now is the collection’s home. The exhibition also is digitized, so it can be viewed from anywhere around the globe.

You can read more in an article in the South Florida Times web site at: https://www.sfltimes.com/news/love-thornell-collection-largest-photography-gift-to-aarlcc.

If you travel about 51 miles north of Pittsburgh and go 220 feet underground, past armed guards, you’ll find the Bettmann Archive. If you’re somewhat familiar with the world of photojournalism, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of this renowned archive that's managed by Getty Images. Preserving around 11 million images, the archive is a visual record of many of the world’s most important historical events since the invention of the camera in the early 1800s.

The Bettmann Archive was started by Otto Bettmann, a curator living in Nazi-occupied Germany, where he worked as the curator of rare books at the Prussian State Art Library in Berlin. Known to many as “The Picture Man,” Bettmann was dismissed from his position after Adolf Hitler took power and forced Jewish people out of civil service jobs. When he fled Germany for the United States in 1935, Bettmann “virtually invented the image resource business,” according to the archive’s former owner and now-defunct image licensing giant Corbis. When he arrived, he had just two trunks filled with old photo prints, which is what humbly began the now-vast archive that still bears his name. 

Over the next few decades, with his encyclopedic knowledge of historical visuals, Bettmann figured out a cunning business, licensing images he amassed to editorial and advertising clients. Charles Clyde Ebbets’s “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” the Apollo 11 moon landing, Malcolm X meeting Martin Luther King Jr., the Hindenburg’s explosion, and a young Queen Elizabeth II (posing with one of her corgis) is only a small taste of the archive’s famous images.

When he was 78, he spoke of his relationship with clients, telling the New York Times, “Instead of visual cliches, I provided them with a graphic shorthand that illuminates the present by revealing the past, preferably with humor.”

You can read more (and view dozens of historic photographs) in the BuzzFeed News web site at: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kennethbachor/bettmann-archive

The National Library will discontinue microfilming in early 2024. It will then no longer supply microfilms to clients.

Newspapers received as legal deposits will be digitised upon receipt and made available via the Digital resources of the National Library, digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi, service. Based on the Tutkain agreement, all newspapers and journals published by the end of 2021 will be available for research use at the higher education institutions that have concluded the agreement.

Regardless of microfilm discontinuation, any microfilms made by the end of 2023 will remain accessible in the National Library’s North Hall.

Microfilming will be discontinued for several reasons. One is that as the required technology is no longer developed except to a very limited extent, we would be unable to replace our ageing equipment. Access to equipment maintenance services is also uncertain, making microfilming risky.

Since the 1950s, microfilm has been a reliable and secure storage format for extensive datasets. As resources are becoming increasingly digital, the National Library will use the Digital Preservation Service offered by CSC (IT Center for Science) to ensure the preservation and usability of digital newspapers for future generations. The Digital Preservation Service is intended for the long-term preservation of cultural heritage resources.

From the National Genealogical Society's web site:

Videos of our recent conference question and answer Zoom sessions are now available on the NGS YouTube Channel. Sessions were held on 9 February and 14 March 2023. The videos provide overviews of the main conference and pre-conference activities including tours, the BCG Educational Fund workshop, FOCUS events for genealogy organizations, and featured events. Speakers include Conference Committee Chair Jan Alpert, Executive Director Matt Menashes, Organizations and Communities Manager Kate Smith, Conference Chair Teresa Kelley, VGS Host Committee Chair Mary Vidlak, Teresa Koch-Bostic, and more.

Registration is now open at https://conference.ngsgenealogy.org/.

An average of 80 people have attended each event, and participants have tuned in from as far away as California.

A partnership between the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center and the Jewish Genealogy Society created nearly 30 programs with close to 2,400 attendees from around the world over the last three years.

Due to the success of the alliance, the organizations have decided to renew their collaboration for another two years.

The idea of a partnership first came to Rauh Jewish Archives Director Eric Lidji in late 2019 when he was approached by representatives of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, telling him that the William M Lowenstein Genealogical Education Fund, created after the pioneering genealogist’s death, required a distribution to be made every few years.

You can read more in an article by David Rullo published in the Times of Israel web site at: https://tinyurl.com/45wt8rxp

The 4th annual 24-Hour Genealogy Webinar Marathon will take place on April 13–14, 2023, hosted by Legacy Family Tree Webinars.

The entire event is free and open to all. Pop in for just a session or two, or challenge yourself and tune in to the entire marathon. The event will include live Q&As and door prizes, and will feature 25 back-to-back lectures from the world’s top experts on a wide variety of topics relating to family history research and DNA.

Visit the MyHeritage Blog to check out the full lineup of lectures, and to 

Tina Hwang, slated to be co-leader of Twitter Inc.'s law department until Elon Musk bought the social media company, has taken a job as vice president of legal and chief privacy officer at Ancestry.com LLC.

Hwang succeeds Eric Heath, an attorney who left Ancestry last year to take the top the privacy job at Placer Labs Inc., a real estate data and analytics startup.

She started March 13 and reports to general counsel Gregory Packer, said Katherine Wylie, a spokeswoman for Ancestry.com.

Tina Hwang was part of a legal leadership succession plan that Twitter’s then general counsel, Sean Edgett, put in place before Musk fired him upon taking control of the company last October. Twitter then scrapped the plan, and Hwang, a deputy general counsel for product and intellectual property, joined a slew of legal leaders in leaving the San Francisco-based company.

Within the past few weeks, many of those former Twitter lawyers have started to secure new jobs at other technology companies and law firms.

The C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. Public Library is located in East Tampa, Florida and highlights the community's rich Black history.

The Florida Sentinel Bulletin Collection dates back to the 1940s. The collection highlights African American history that you wouldn't see in other media outlets. Right now, the library is in the process of digitizing all of the items to make them more accessible to the community. 

Raishara Bailey, Administrative Librarian said, "It's so important because a lot of African Americans don't get to, you know, see themselves in other avenues of media. So, a lot of families come to look at obituaries, to find out family history, old sports articles, things like that. So it's very, it's used a lot by the community because they really, really enjoy seeing their families and, and reading articles about things that weren't highlighted in other areas."

The following press release was written by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC):

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Historical Representation at American House Museums Web Archive, curated by librarians, library workers, and professors at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. House museums have been a key component of historic preservation in America since the mid 19th century. Until recently, house museums largely interpreted the lives of great men (and, on rare occasions, women), first and second generation settlers in America, or the work of master architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright or Stanford White. More recently, many house museums have begun changing their focus to include the experiences of underrepresented peoples, including but not limited to working people, immigrants, the enslaved, women, LGBT individuals, and indigenous peoples. Websites have in many cases replaced printed guidebooks in disseminating the social history of these sites.

Web archives preserve vulnerable information that may disappear from the live web and capture the ways in which selected websites have evolved over time. The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Collecting Program is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research. Learn more about the program or explore the collections here.