The following press release is from the International Confederation for Genealogy and Heraldry (CIGH):

Cambridge. On August 17, 2022, the General Assembly of the Confédération Internationale de Généalogie et d`Héraldique (CIGH) elected a new board of the International confederation. The representatives of the CIGH met on the occasion of the 35th International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences in Cambridge, England (see: www.congresscambridge2022.com). The CIGH represents as umbrella organization the internationally organized genealogical-heraldic world family, which organizes and promotes the international exchange between associations and institutes for the promotion of genealogy (family history research) and heraldry (heraldry).

Re-elected as president of the CIGH was Dr. Pier Felice degli Uberti (Italy). The three vice-presidents are Manuel Pardo de Vera y Díaz (president of the Royal Nobility Society RHAE), Dirk Weissleder (president of the Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft genealogischer Verbaende DAGV) and Valérie Arnold-Gautier (president of the Fédération Française de Généalogie FFG). Dr. Giorgio Cuneo (Italy) is the new general secretary, as successor of Dirk Weissleder (in office since 2019). Dr. Manuel Ladron de Guevara from Spain was elected as the new treasurer. (For more information about the whole international board see www.cigh.info).

The CIGH board of the world confederation regularly exchanges ideas via electronic media and meets in person every two years at the 36th International Congresses of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences. The next worldwide family meeting is scheduled September 24-28, 2024 in Boston, USA (see: BostonCongress2024.org).

The new CIGH Board of Directors 2022 – 2026 (from left to right): Dr. Manuel Ladron de Guevara (Treasury, Spain), Dr. Giorgio Cuneo (General-Secretary, Italy), Dirk Weissleder (Vice-President, Germany), Pier Felice degli Uberti (President, Italy), Valérie Arnold-Gautier (Vice-President, France), Manuel Pardo de Vera y Díaz (Vice-President, Spain)

Genealogy or Family Historian; these words, while used interchangeably, they are so different to some.

Genealogy is defined as the gathering of names, dates and locations of our families. It is documented with sources such as birth/marriage/death records, census and wills. As Joe Friday used to say, “Just the facts. Nothing but the facts.” Researchers use this information to fill out pedigrees and family group sheets and try to fill in any missing family member.

Family History is all of the above but with an additional twist. Why was our ancestors’ given his particular name? Why did they live where they did; why did they migrate to another country? Answering these questions provides a little history behind our ancestors’ lives. As genealogists, we find the basic facts. As we research a little deeper, we become historians. The researcher wants more stories about their ancestry. That is Family History: answering the questions of “Why” and “How?”

Sources we used for birth/marriage/death develop as we read journals, land deeds, letters, newspapers and histories of the places our ancestors’ resided in. Photographs are studied to see their time periods, any familiar resemblances, and the type of dress or uniform they may have worn.

We desire to know more than the basic facts and research accordingly. Interviewing relatives and friends who knew about the family is a great tool.

A lot of county sites have histories of their early pioneers. Learning the occupations may even be listed on that census you researched earlier when looking for that birth or marriage. Some researchers are elated to learn they descended from someone “famous” or a “rich” ancestor. When it comes down to it, we are all happy with all the history we can find.

Genealogist? Family Historian? No matter what we call ourselves, we are first calling ourselves genealogists as we are looking for the same basic information; then later we become family historians, researching a little deeper. We hope to discover what made them like they were and, maybe, in the process learn something about ourselves.

What do you consider yourself to be? Genealogist or Family Historian? Let me know your opinion! (Use the comments section below this article.)

From an article in the Clemson University web site:

Next summer, faculty from Clemson University and Furman University will lead an effort to reconstruct Black history in South Carolina with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Clemson English professors Susanna Ashton and Rhondda Thomas will join Furman faculty members Gregg Hecimovich and Kaniqua Robinson to lead a summer institute entitled “Reconstructing the Black Archive: South Carolina as Case Study, 1739–1895.” The three-week residential institute is designed for more than 20 higher education faculty to study ways of reconstructing Black histories, using South Carolina as a case study. The institute is supported by a $198,317 grant from the NEH.

“The Black archive demands new ways of looking,” Ashton said. “If we look at census data, if we look at property records, if we look at court records—are there new questions we can ask of this material, perhaps in ways that push the boundaries of historical investigation?”

“The Black archive is a diverse collection of documents, artifacts, materials that document the Black experience and the African diaspora,” Thomas said. “So that would include everything from slave narratives to inventories of enslaved people to personal letters, journals, newspaper articles, photographs or artifacts that help to tell the story of Black people.”

You can read the full article at: https://bit.ly/3RkdPY9.

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com:

(+) Staying Legal When Digitizing Printed Books

Make Money With Genealogy

Scientists Create World’s Biggest Family Tree Linking 27 Million People

Extreme Lookalikes May Share Much Deeper Ties Than We Ever Realized

Chester County, Pennsylvania Will Soon Have All Historic Records Dating Back to 1681 Digitized

West Virginia University Libraries Receive Sixth NEH Grant to Digitize Historical Newspapers

Knowles Developing Website to Tell the Story of Holocaust Victims Through Places

Armenian Genealogy Conference Announces Preliminary Agenda

Beautiful 1901 Diary Full of Love Poems Unearthed at Flea Market

The First Social Security Number

Othram Appoints Carla Davis as Chief Genetic Genealogist

TheGenealogist Adds 100,000 New Headstone Records

IAJGS Presents 2022 Jewish Genealogy Awards

The History of the Hearing Aid

Use CloudConvert to Convert a File from One Format to Another

You must admit that some of today's technology advances are very useful. Take hearing aids, for instance. Today's micro-miniature hearing aids can hide inside the ear canal. A few sightly larger ones with more capabilities hide discreetly behind the ear. Hearing aids worn by our ancestors were not always so discreet.

The earliest known hearing aid, called an ear trumpet, was described by Belgian scientist and high school rector Jean Leurechon in his book Récréations-Mathématiues, in 1624. The book described how to make your own ear trumpet as there were no manufacturers of the device at that time.

In the late 1800s, Thomas Edison, who was hard of hearing, found that he could not use Alexander Graham Bell's new invention, called the telephone. The fact that he could not hear sounds from the telephone spurred his interest in improving it. This led to his 1878 invention of the carbon microphone for telephones, which, unlike Bell’s device, amplified the electrical signal.

In 1907, Lee De Forest of the Western Electric Company invented the first vacuum tubes, and the electronic amplification of sounds became possible. However, the company's first "hearing aid" in 1920 was anything but portable: it weighed 220 pounds and was the size of a filing cabinet. That hearing aid was best used when placed beside the user's living room easy chair; from his or her chair the user would hold a single earphone that looked like an old-fashioned telephone receiver. (Headphones were not invented until a few years later). For many wealthy deaf users, this was the first time in years they could participate in family conversations.

In 1938, the Aurex Corporation developed the first wearable hearing aid. A thin wire was connected to a small earpiece and then to an amplifier-receiver that clipped to the wearer’s clothes. The receiver was wired to a battery pack, which strapped to the leg.

By the early 1950s, hearing aids had been "miniaturized" to fit into a man's shirt pocket. I well remember my uncle wearing one of these. It contained miniature vacuum tubes, and it consumed expensive batteries quickly. My uncle reported that he was frequently bothered by the rustling sound of his clothing as amplified by the hearing aid. Then he would smile and also comment that the hearing aid also was a great excuse for not listening to his wife. "I don't know, Honey, I think the battery died."

By 1957, hearing aids were small enough to fit into eyeglass frames. Lee De Forest himself, by then 84 years old and hard of hearing, appeared in ads in 1957 endorsing the product, saying, “It overcomes all of the objections I previously had to wearing a hearing aid.”

Of course, miniaturization continued. Even better, digital processing of the audio appeared by the late 1980s, and the problems of background noise were reduced. Today people suffering from hearing loss have many tiny solutions to choose from. If only Grandpa had one of these available when he needed it.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

The International Headstone Collection at TheGenealogist has been boosted with 100,000 new records, bringing the total to nearly 400,000 records in the collection available for all Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist to search.

Included are some extremely interesting memorials that allow researchers to see details about ancestors that have been immortalised on gravestones. These inscriptions can provide the family historian with useful information about the deceased and their family as commemorated in various churches and cemeteries.

The headstone records released cover various burial places and include, at Mells St Andrew, Somerset - Siegfried Sasson, Ronald Arbuthnot Knox, a translator of the Bible and some members of the Bonham Carter family and the Asquith family.

In St Peter’s Churchyard, Bournemouth, is the grave of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. She was the widow of the Romantic Poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was cremated in Italy – though some of his mortal remains are reputedly also interred in this grave having been buried along with their son Sir Percy Florence Shelley.

[Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein grave at St Peter’s Bournemouth]

The Headstones Collection is also a record layer on TheGenealogist’s powerful Map Explorer™ with its ability to look into the area surrounding the location of the churchyard or cemetery. With its different historical and modern georeferenced maps, the researcher can discover the area and see the neighbourhood’s streets where the deceased ancestor may have lived, worked and played.

The International Headstone Collection is an ongoing project where every stone photographed or transcribed earns volunteers credits, which they can spend on subscriptions at TheGenealogist.co.uk or products from GenealogySupplies.com. If you would like to join, you can find out more about the scheme at: https://ukindexer.co.uk/headstone/

Read TheGenealogist’s article: The horror author with the heart of a poet

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/the-horror-author-with-the-heart-of-a-poet-1610/

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!

Why doesn't this ever happen to me? Yes, I suspect every genealogist is asking himself or herself the same question.

An article in Newsweek states:

A New York influencer who finds lost heirlooms at flea markets has uncovered a beautiful diary dating back to 1901 that is full of romantic love poems.

Chelsey Brown, from New York, is a 29-year-old interior decorator who researches genealogy as a hobby, finding lost heirlooms at flea markets and antique shops and then returning them to their families. The New Yorker uploads videos revealing the histories behind the objects to her TikTok account and has almost 190,000 followers.

Brown told Zenger News in an exclusive interview that she found the diary kept by a woman who wrote beautiful poems to the love of her life.

She added: "The diary contains entries, poems, letters mostly about the boy she was in love with in 1901. It also includes newspaper clippings and information about friends and family. There are also a few letters tucked inside from the 1940s. She was a student and he went off to Washington State (cross country) in 1901 to teach for seven years."

Brown said: "As for their life, they had 6 children over 13 years. Throughout their time apart, they would send each other letters. Sadly, one of their sons died at a young age, 47, and it's so hard to watch a child die knowing you are supposed to be before them."

She added: "MyHeritage allows me to find census records, newspaper articles, marriage records, public family trees, war records, and more. Using this information, I can easily piece together the timeline of this couple's life."

You can read more at: https://www.newsweek.com/beautiful-1901-diary-full-love-poems-unearthed-flea-market-1736971.

OK, this may be the world's biggest family tree but it doesn't meet the standards of modern genealogy. For one thing, most of the individuals are unnamed. Nonetheless, it is an amazing accomplishment and undoubtedly will be a major asset for scientists everywhere.

From an article in the StudyFinds web site at: https://studyfinds.org/worlds-biggest-family-tree/:

The world’s biggest family tree linking around 27 million people has been created by scientists. The genetic model combines thousands of modern and prehistoric genomes, providing new insight into key events in human history.

The breakthrough is a major step towards mapping the entirety of human relationships, with a single lineage that traces the ancestry of all people on Earth. The family tree also has widespread implications for medical research, identifying genetic predictors of disease.

“We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the genetic variation we find in humans today. This genealogy allows us to see how every person’s genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome,” says principal author Dr. Yan Wong in a university release.

The University of Oxford team combed through eight databases containing 3,609 different genome sequences from 215 populations. They included samples from across the world; some being over 100,000 years-old. The resulting network contained almost 27 million ancestors and 231 million ancestral lineages.

You can read more at: https://studyfinds.org/worlds-biggest-family-tree/.

You can also watch a YouTube video about this project at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVWAZ4TdIZs.

In less than two years, Chester County’s most historic documents will be available online.

Thanks to improved scanning equipment, Chester County’s Archives & Records Services has accelerated the process of scanning and digitizing documents dating back to 1681. The goal: To make the collection publicly available on the county’s website so that people can easily acquire historic information.

The county installed a new scanner in January 2020 right before COVID hit, making this project possible. The department had been working with a less sophisticated scanner since 2007. To date, about 40 percent of the Archives’ collection has been digitized.

“Our goal is to have everything that is considered a historic, permanent record digitized,” said Chester County Commissioners’ Chairwoman Marian Moskowitz. “Some of the conversions are from microfilm to digital, while others are from the physical documents themselves to digital. The process of scanning originals is slow because they must be handled so delicately, and we are talking about 340 years of history here.”

You can read more in an article in the Daily Local News web site at: https://bit.ly/3QRltcE.

President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935. It was a major part of his New Deal plans, most of which were strongly opposed by the Republican Party. Three and a half months later, on December 1, 1936, the first block of 1,000 records were assembled and were ready to start their way through the nine-step process that would result in the creation of a permanent master record and the establishment of an earnings record for the individual.

When this first stack was ready, Joe Fay, head of the Division of Accounting Operations in the Candler Building, walked over to the stack, pulled off the top record, and declared it to be the official first Social Security record. This particular record, (055-09-0001) belonged to John D. Sweeney, Jr., age 23, of New Rochelle, New York. The next day, newspapers around the country announced that Sweeney had been issued the first Social Security Number.

Mr. Sweeney was the son of a wealthy factory owner. The younger Mr. Sweeney had grown up in a 15-room Westchester County home staffed with servants. In an effort to learn the family business, Mr. Sweeney was working as a shipping clerk for his father at the time he filled out his application for a Social Security card. The whole Sweeney family voted for Republican Presidential candidate Landon in 1936, although John Jr. allowed that he liked the new Social Security program, even though he didn't think much of the New Deal.

Ironically, John Sweeney died of a heart attack in 1974 at the age of 61 without ever receiving any benefits from the Social Security program. However, his widow was able to receive benefits, based on his work, until her death in 1982.