The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

The following announcement was written by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS):

Registration now open

The 42nd Annual IAJGS (International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies) International Conference on Jewish Genealogy will be held virtually Aug. 21-25.

Participants are expected from across the US and around the world. The Conference will feature approximately 60 live-streaming presentations, 100 pre-recorded presentations and 40 group meetings.

Registration is now open, with Early Bird fees available until May 31. Link to the conference website: www.iajgs2022.org for details.

For the first time ever, Early Bird registration offers an additional benefit beyond the reduced price. Several unique bonus pre-Conference recorded sessions from our sponsors – My Heritage, Ancestry. and Family Tree DNA, will be available starting May 2022 to Early Bird registrants only.

“Challenging the Conference Committee to create an exciting and memorable event, both pre-recorded and live-streamed sessions will cover the gamut of the 2022 themes,” said Judi Missel, lead co-chair. Themes will include Philadelphia and Western Pennsylvania research, and DNA experts explain the basics, as well as more sophisticated analysis in multiple presentations. Leaning how families lived across the world from small towns of America to Germany and the Caribbean allows researchers to add depth to their family experience. Those who want to document their family history will be able to listen to sessions on writing the stories and documenting them through multi-media and networking.

There will be a robust virtual Expo Hall with our Conference Sponsors and Exhibitors and an updated digital Resource Library. The Mobile App will be available for all attendees and our traditional Family Finder function will be found in the Attendee Service Center. Using a newly updated appointment system, mentors and translators will once again be available to help attendees.

Programs at the Conference will be geared from first-timers to conference veterans, and will include lectures as well as networking through Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Research Divisions (RDs), and Birds of a Feather (BOFs). An Exhibitor Hall and Resource Room will include genealogy experts and archivists for a one-stop research experience.

The Conference is hosted by IAJGS, an umbrella organization of more than 93 Jewish genealogical organizations worldwide. Judi Missel of AZ and Hadassah Lipsius of NY are Conference Lead Co-chairs. The Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Greater Philadelphia (JGASGP) is the Local co-host. Fred Blum, a past president of the Philadelphia Society is Conference Local Co-co-chair. “Although we are disappointed that visitors will not be coming to Philadelphia this summer, we are excited to still provide virtual information about the vibrant Jewish community and genealogical resources in our city,” he said.

The IAJGS coordinates and organizes activities such as its annual International Conference on Jewish Genealogy and provides a unified voice as the spokesperson on behalf of its members.

The IAJGS’s vision is of a worldwide network of Jewish genealogical research organizations and partners working together as one coherent, effective and respected community, enabling people to succeed in researching Jewish ancestry and heritage. Find the IAJGS at: www.iajgs.org and like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/iajgsjewishgenealogy.

The following announcement was written by the Tamworth Regional Gallery:

Thursday 5 May, 2022

In 2021 Tamworth Regional Council was funded to digitise historic objects and artworks from the region’s museums, and Tamworth Regional Gallery. The project was managed by Tamworth Regional Gallery who partnered with five local museums and collections: Tamworth Power Station Museum; Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, Rocks, Gems, Minerals and Fossil Collections; Moonbi Museum and Tamworth Regional Film and Sound Archive. The project provided training and support to the New England and North West museum sector as part of a process of learning, knowledge sharing, sustainability and digitisation to national standards.

Nine local government authorities were funded to digitise significant artworks, museum objects and archives in their regions through the NSW Government’s Regional Cultural Fund, which supports the development of cultural infrastructure in regional NSW.  All projects have adopted a hub and spoke partnership model to deliver their projects, whereby small museums and historical societies share equipment and expertise to digitise significant objects.

The results of some of this work will now feature on Storyplace, a new website developed by Museums & Galleries of NSW that tells important stories from throughout regional New South Wales.

These stories are inspired by the digitised objects from the collections of regional museums, galleries and Aboriginal Keeping places that are part of this project. Storyplace is a living and evolving archive investigating people, places, communities and cultures from all over New South Wales. Behind the scenes of Storyplace are many paid and volunteer staff who have worked together to document, conserve and digitise these important regional collections. Storyplace is the result of this dedicated work. 

Regional museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres are the custodians of vast collections that represent the history of regional NSW and in turn the state and the Nation. Many collections contain the only records of some aspects of historic day-to-day life in regional communities. 

The Storyplace project, managed by Museums & Galleries of NSW, has employed professional staff and story tellers to work with these newly digitised collections. Their work includes researching, writing, editing and publishing stories to Storyplace. 

The Storyplace website is unique and it will make available to a wide online audience the knowledge regional collections represent, and encourage visitors to regional museums, galleries and cultural centres.

Brett Adlington, CEO, Museums & Galleries of NSW said: Launching Storyplace has been a long but rewarding journey. M&G NSW is pleased to be leading such an exciting project. But, it would not have been possible to develop and launch Storyplace without the support of our many regional partners – including small volunteer-run museums.  

“The website provides a long-awaited online platform to help promote the importance and value of regional collections. It has, and will continue to assist, the regional museum and gallery sector to progress some important collection care issues – such as digital preservation and collection documentation. Both actions make important contributions to ensuring regional collections can be more thoroughly used now, as well as enjoyed in the future.”

Storyplace has been funded by the New South Wales Government through the Regional Cultural Fund.

The final published website address is: https://storyplace.org.au

Every year, Cherokee youth take to their bikes to explore the tragic history of the Trail of Tears on a 950-mile ride.

When 20-year-old Kaylee Smith of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, stepped into the sacred water of the Blue Hole Spring at Red Clay State Historic Park in Tennessee, she felt the emotional tug of her ancestors like never before. As part of a tribal cycling team made up of Cherokee youth from Oklahoma and North Carolina, Smith was taking part in a bike journey from her tribe’s original homelands in Georgia and Tennessee through Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas to the capital of the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah to experience sites that are part of her history. The Blue Hole was a sacred place for the Cherokee before the U.S. government brutally relocated them from their homelands to a land they didn’t know.

“That was a place where the Cherokee went to the water for traditional and spiritual purposes,” Smith says. “My team and I were allowed to enter the water. That was probably my favorite part of the ride because I never really learned about the traditional experiences that a lot of my people went through.”

While the dip into the sacred water was enlightening for Smith and her touring team, other experiences along the cyclists’ Trail of Tears route were shocking and emotional for the history they evoked. More than 180 years ago, tens of thousands of Native Americans were forcibly removed from their homelands in the Southeast (and other parts of the country) and made to march on foot to Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma. The Removal tribulation began in 1830; the Cherokee Trail of Tears mainly spanned a period from August 1838 to March 1839, including a particularly horrific winter that final year.

A quarter of the Cherokee population died in the Removal.

You can read more about the 2022 "Remember the Removal Bike Ride" at: https://www.cowboysindians.com/2022/05/remember-the-removal-bike-ride/.

Many genealogy books are self-published. A news article today caught my eye: What You Should Know Before Self-Publishing a Book.

The article written by Lindsey Ellefson  and published in the Lifehacker web site answers frequently-asked questions about creating such a book. Save yourself some problems later by first reading the article at: https://lifehacker.com/what-you-should-know-before-self-publishing-a-book-1848885033.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. has inspired hundreds of celebrities and public figures throughout the years to explore their ancestry and make insightful revelations about their past.

However, Gates’ interest in ancestry didn’t start after he became a renowned scholar, professor, filmmaker, journalist and cultural critic. Instead, it began when he was a young child in West Virginia interviewing his parents about their family tree.

That interest grew throughout the years, eventually serving as the foundation for his hugely successful PBS show “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” where he explores the ancestry of influential people from diverse backgrounds.

Gates discussed the origins of his show, his own interest in genealogy and family history research, and other topics during during “Past Connections That Bind Us All: A Conversation with Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” a Q&A event by Arizona PBS and ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication on Saturday, April 30 at ASU Gammage. The event was graciously sponsored by Arizona Gammage, SRP and ASU Library.

You can read the full article at: https://bit.ly/3KOgu8K.

Happy Star Wars Day!

Perhaps I should say, "May the Fourth Be With You."

Star Wars Day is a (very) informal commemorative day observed annually on May 4th to celebrate George Lucas's Star Wars media franchise. Observance of the day has spread quickly through media and grassroots celebrations since the franchise began in 1977.

The date of May 4th originated from the pun "May the Fourth be with you", a variant of the popular Star Wars catchphrase "May the Force be with you". Even though the holiday was not created or declared by Lucasfilm, many Star Wars fans across the world have chosen to celebrate the holiday. It has since been embraced by Lucasfilm and parent company Disney as an annual celebration of Star Wars.

The first recorded reference was the phrase being first used on May 4, 1979, the day Margaret Thatcher took the job as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. An online news article from the Danish public broadcaster says her political party, the Conservatives, placed a congratulatory advertisement in The London Evening News, saying "May the Fourth Be with You, Maggie. Congratulations."

Of course, that reference to May 4, 1979 has nothing to do with Star Wars. However, why let that stand in the way of a good promotion?

Perhaps a better reference is that on May 4th, 2015, astronauts in the International Space Station watched the Star Wars movie.

Whatever the reason, I would like to wish you and Yoda a Happy Star Wars Day!

By the way, the next day, May 5th is Cinco de Mayo in Mexico but is also known as "Revenge of the Fifth" day in a galaxy not so far away.

Buried deep inside an article about many different (and unrelated) things, there is this brief mention:

After more than a decade, the head of the National Archives and Records Administration retires. April 30 was David Ferreiro’s last day as archivist of the United States. He led NARA since being confirmed in late 2009 during President Barack Obama’s first term. During his 12 years in charge, Ferreiro oversaw a major shift from paper to electronic recordkeeping. Ferreiro also led the establishment of the Citizen Archivist program that allows volunteers to transcribe and tag records.

Deputy Archivist Debra Wall will serve as the acting archivist of the United States until the White House selects a permanent replacement.

You may be interested in an article by Maya Jasanoff and published in The New Yorker magazine. It describes the "history of genealogy." That is, how we got to where we are today. and how genealogy purposes have changed over the years Quoting from the article:

"You hardly meet an American who does not want to be connected a bit by his birth to the first settlers of the colonies, and, as for branches of the great families of England, America seemed to me totally covered by them,” Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled in 1840. It’s often said that genealogical research is the second most popular hobby in the United States, after gardening, and the second most popular search category online, after porn. Those claims should be sprinkled with a few grains of salt, but more than twenty-six million people have taken genetic ancestry tests since 2012, incidentally creating a database of huge value to pharmaceutical companies and law enforcement. The Silicon Valley-based testing company 23andMe, which formed a partnership with Airbnb to market “travel as unique as your DNA,” went public in June, 2021, with a valuation of $3.5 billion. The genealogical behemoth Ancestry, which boasts more than three million subscribers and the nation’s largest genetic database, was purchased for $4.7 billion in 2020."

The article also states:

"Our engagement with ancestry spans the spiritual, material, political, and biological realms, each of which has its own technologies and authorities. As a result, our laws, institutions, and imaginations are poorly prepared to deal with the contradictions that arise when one kind of evidence, like a DNA test, contradicts another, like a family story. Such tensions provide fertile ground for memoirs and magazine features, but the situation gets murkier when it comes to privacy, social justice, and national politics."

In years past, Maya Jasanoff claims that genealogy was an attempt to prove that one was in a "higher position" person than those of the masses. While true at one time, I would hope that is no longer true today. Instead Maya Jasanoff describes today's genealogy as requiring much more effort and complexity than I ever imagined. You can read the article at: https://bit.ly/3w2WN7Q.

On Monday, The Columbian’s digital archives became available to the public for the first time, allowing users to search with keywords and date ranges.

The archives, available at columbian.newspapers.com, open up a new world for historians, students and curious Clark County residents who may want to search for their own names, an ancestor’s name, addresses, or a date of a specific paper or an event.

“The digital newspaper archives are a really great resource,” said Donna Sinclair, history professor at Washington State University Vancouver. “They bring life to the past.”

The Columbian archives from 1890 to 2011 are available for $7.95 a month. The public can also access the archives on a computer at the Clark County Historical Museum, 1511 Main St., with a standard admission price of $5 for adults and $4 for seniors and students.

The Columbian’s digital archives are the first Clark County-specific online newspaper archives available after 1884 (The Vancouver Independent’s archives are at newspapers.com for the years 1875-1884). The archive may be found at: https://columbian.newspapers.com/.

You can read more at: https://bit.ly/3yaUd2v.