The following is a press release written by the FamilySearch Library:

The FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, the world’s largest genealogical library, is pleased to announce Debbie Gurtler as its new assistant director. She is replacing Lynn Turner, who became the new FamilySearch Library Director in April 2022. Gurtler is an accredited genealogist (AG^®) with 5 credentials and has been with FamilySearch for 12 years. She is highly respected for her expertise in Latin American research and fluency in Spanish.

As the new assistant director, Debbie Gurtler will manage the day-to-day operations of the FamilySearch Library. She will oversee research specialists, the teams responsible for guest services, volunteer staff and training, online services, the FamilySearch Library web page, webinars, and online consultations.

“I am excited to assume this new role,” said Gurtler, "I’ve enjoyed working with Lynn [Turner] through the years, and I look forward to helping shape the future of the FamilySearch Library and its reach. As someone who has lived in many different areas of the world, I’m excited to explore ways we can more impactfully expand our expertise, services, and offerings to people throughout the world, not just those who visit us in person in Salt Lake City, Utah. I also hope to organize library teams in such a way to provide more leadership opportunities for our outstanding staff.”

Gurtler’s role will allow the library director to focus on the library’s direction, like strategic planning, alignment with FamilySearch initiatives and goals, facility upgrades, online services, and selecting industry affiliations.

Lynn Turner is happy to add Gurtler’s leadership to the library team. “Debbie is well-prepared to step into this position. She has served in various roles in the library and understands the library’s vision, purpose, and resources. Her research expertise covers broad geographical areas and has been honed over the years working with library guests and getting to know their needs. Debbie is a natural leader who appreciates and encourages the strengths and talents of her co-workers. She is enthusiastic about family history research and all the library offers to help our guests make personal discoveries. Her strengths will continue to be a big benefit to the FamilySearch Library and the genealogical community."

During her employment at the Library, Gurtler has managed the Latin America, International, and Simplified Learning teams. Prior to this new assignment, she was the manager of the Latin American, and German and Slavic combined teams. As the FSL training coordinator, she oversees the training for volunteer staff.

Gurtler holds 5 Accredited Genealogist (AG) credentials with ICAPGen℠. Accreditation shows competency in genealogical research for various specialties. Debbie is accredited in research in the United States Mid-south region, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, and Chile.

She graduated with high honors from Brigham Young University in 2009 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Family History and Genealogy. After working for 2 research firms, she was hired at the FamilySearch Library in 2011 as a Latin America research specialist. She became fluent in Spanish while living in Chile with her family. Debbie has taken research trips in the United States, Portugal, and Spain and is a popular presenter.

She is an Arizona native and the mother of 3 adult children and 5 grandchildren.

About the FamilySearch Library

The FamilySearch Library is the largest genealogical library in the world and the flagship library for FamilySearch International. Our guests visit from all over the world to discover their ancestors. The library’s collections represent more than 10,000 archives and repositories from more than 100 countries. We have everything you need to discover your family from friendly, knowledgeable staff, web-enabled computers, scanners, preservation services, and interactive discovery experiences.

Your life expectancy is dependent upon many things, including your DNA that you inherited from your ancestors. However, that is only one factor. Now, Eva Sittig has published an article in the phys.org web site that focuses on DNA:

"Our lifestyle has a very big influence on our life expectancy, such as our level of fitness, or whether we smoke or are overweight. Other external factors like social contacts, environmental conditions or education are also important. In addition, our genes also help determine how long we may live. Longevity in humans means living to 95 years and older in relatively good health.

"Variations in the APOE gene have the highest genetic contribution to longevity," says Professor Almut Nebel from the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology (IKMB) at Kiel University (CAU).

"The APOE gene provides the blueprint for apolipoprotein E (APOE), which plays an important role in lipid metabolism as a component of lipoproteins.

"The three variants ε2, ε3 and ε4 are relevant for longevity. APOE ε4 is associated with a very high risk of Alzheimer's disease and can consequently shorten life expectancy. APOE ε2, on the other hand, increases the chance of living a long life, and ε3 is considered neutral. In Europe, the three variants are distributed quite unevenly, with the frequency of the unfavorable variant ε4 decreasing from the north (22%) towards the south (6%).

"The ε2 and ε3 frequencies also vary widely geographically, with ε3 usually being the most common (at least 70%) and ε2 the rarest variant in a population (at most 12%). A research team led by Professor Nebel was the first to use paleogenetics to investigate what may have led to this distribution. They recently published their results in the journal Aging Cell.

"We were able to show that the current distribution of variants in Europe arose primarily from two major immigrations 7,500 years ago and 4,800 years ago, and the subsequent mixing of population groups," reports first author Daniel Kolbe from Nebel's research group. "The differences between northern and southern Europe can mainly be explained by these two demographic processes," says Kolbe, who is doing his Ph.D. in the Translational Evolutionary Research (TransEvo) research training group (GRK) at the CAU."

The full article may be found at: https://phys.org/news/2023-04-genetic-contribution-stone-age-chance.html 

An interesting article by Alice Clifford published in the TiogaPublishing web site:

"Ancestry sites are giving away the identity of anonymous sperm and egg donors, a new study reveals.

"Donors who thought they were anonymous are getting tracked down by their children.

"In April 2005, children were given the right to request their donor’s identity when they turned 18. Before this, donors were able to remain anonymous forever.

"However, with the availability of DNA tests through ancestry sites, children are able to discover links to their biological parents even if they donated before 2005.

"By using these results, and further research on social media, they have been able to find out the identity of their biological parent.

"Professor Ryan Flood, a professor of sociology and Director of the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, said: “Increasingly donor-conceived people are accessing information about their biological roots, either through genetic testing or social media sites.

“'Contemporary technologies challenge the privacy traditionally associated with donation by providing donor-conceived people with the possibility of identifying donors.

"'Anonymity can no longer be guaranteed for donors.'"

You can read the full article at: https://tinyurl.com/b8ta6uvc.

Anyone with an interest in Chinese genealogy will be interested in a new article by Huang Wei published on the SixthTone web site:

"In the 1960s, a city librarian went rogue and saved thousands of priceless documents.

"Last fall, when the Shanghai Library opened a massive new branch in the city’s Pudong District, headlines tended to focus on two things: its size and architect Chris Hardie’s design, which included exhibition, performance, and event spaces in addition to the customary stacks.

"Somewhat lost in all this was the library’s collection, one of the driving reasons for the expansion in the first place. In particular, the Shanghai Library is home to arguably the world’s top collection of Chinese genealogies, including more than 300,000 volumes of nearly 40,000 different genealogies, totaling 456 surnames.

"A genealogy is a historical document that records the lineage of a blood line descended from a single ancestor, the blood relationship between family members, and a family’s assets and customs. They can include depictions of famous family members from history, textual research on the origin of a family’s surname, clan rules and regulations, information on the construction of ancestral halls, even poems. Genealogies of famous families often contain archives of special records, including imperial edicts, orders, and letters given by emperors to officials in the family."

You can read the full article at: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1012694.

Many years ago, people had the luxury of writing important stuff on stone tablets. However, today's requirements and recommendations are very different. So what’s the recommended method to keep your bits crisp for centuries?

It’s easy to think of data preservation as something big companies or important people need to worry about, but what if you have information that you’ll need ten years or even fifty years from now? What if you need to preserve information somewhere for someone 100 years or more in the future?

For various reasons, you might need to hold onto data for a long time. Maybe you have some old documents or records that you’d like to pass down to future generations, or perhaps you need to keep financial records and other necessary paperwork around for legal reasons. Even if you’re trying to preserve your personal memories, like photos or videos, you’ll need to figure out a way to store all that stuff.

The key to preserving data over the long term is finding a storage format you can trust to last. This could mean using physical storage methods, like high-quality paper or film designed to last a long time, or digital storage options, like cloud storage or external hard drives.

The Challenges of Storing Digital Data for Decades or Centuries

If you’re thinking about storing digital data for the long term, there are several challenges you should be aware of.

First, digital storage media like hard drives and SSDs (solid-state storage devices) can degrade over time and eventually fail. That means you must keep making new copies of long-term data before your storage devices fail.

Another challenge to consider is file format obsolescence. Some file formats may become outdated or incompatible with newer software as technology advances. That means even if your storage media survives, there may be no drives to read it, and even if there are, the details of the file formats you used to store that data might be lost.

Why Mechanical Drives Fail (and What You Can Do About It)

On the other hand, every time you migrate your current data to a newer format to preserve it for a few more years, it might degrade in some way that won’t become apparent until someone tries to access it someday.

Hackers, malware, and natural disasters can all threaten your stored data, so it’s important to implement strong security measures to protect your information and to store the media in an environment that’s both safe for that media and offers long-term stability.

Cold Storage vs. Hot Data

In data storage parlance, “cold” storage refers to how rarely accessed data is stored. This is usually data kept for compliance or other necessary record-keeping irrelevant to day-to-day business.

Cold storage is usually kept offline, and the media holding the data is stored in a powered-off state or separately from the drives that can read the relevant press. If data is kept in cold storage, this can affect how long it will last.

“Hot” data is always accessed and is usually stored in media that’s always accessible and powered on. As you might expect, these media wear out through daily use, so archival data and backups aren’t a good fit.

The Best Long-Term Digital Storage Media

Archival-grade optical discs, such as M-DISC, are designed specifically for long-term data storage. They use a special type of data layer made of materials that are resistant to degradation over time, including UV light and moisture. Two factors are commonly responsible for “disc rot.” These discs can last for up to 1000 years or more—at least that’s what the various manufacturers claim. Obviously, it’s impossible to actually test this claim, but they can make an educated guess through testing.

Magnetic tape has been used for decades as reliable long-term data storage. It’s highly durable and can withstand extreme temperatures and humidity. It’s also relatively inexpensive compared to other options.

Generally, magnetic tape stored in cold storage with stable temperature and humidity conditions can last for up to 30 years or more, while some high-quality magnetic tapes can last for up to 50 years or more.

However, magnetic tapes need specialized equipment for reading and writing data. That machinery might not last as long as you need it to since a tape drive is a complex mechanical device.

Mechanical hard drives have been used for decades as primary storage for computers. They’re reliable, fast, and relatively inexpensive.

That said, they’re not designed for long-term storage, and the average lifespan of a hard drive is as little as 3-5 years. If you choose to use HDDs for long-term storage, you should regularly back up your data and replace the drives every few years.

SSDs are faster and more reliable than HDDs, but they are more expensive and not designed for long-term storage, and the average lifespan of an SSD is around 5-10 years. If you use SSDs for long-term storage, you should also ensure that you regularly back up your data and replace the drives every few years. If the SSD isn’t powered on periodically, it can still suffer from data loss as electrical charge leaks from its memory cells.

The last option is cloud storage, which puts the responsibility of keeping your data safe in the hands of a third-party company like Google or Microsoft. These companies have to conform to data storage standards to make sure your data is safe, but it’s not really an option for truly long-term storage because there’s no guarantee the company in question will still be around in ten, twenty, or fifty years.

So what is the best option for storing data for years and years?  The answer is simple: LOCKSS

The LOCKSS Program at Stanford University Libraries provides open-source technologies and services for high-confidence, resilient, secure digital preservation.

The abbreviation is simple: LOCKSS is an acronym for "Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe."

Stanford University Libraries provides hardware and software to help you set up, integrate, and manage LOCKSS technologies, to reach your digital preservation goals. See https://www.lockss.org/ for the details. However, private individuals can create their own implementation of the LOCKSS philosophy.

In short, an individual may create his or her own LOCKSS system simply by copying (making backups) data to multiple storage devices that are located in multiple locations.

So which is best: floppy disks, optical disks, hard drives, SSDs, or cloud storage?  The answer is: YES. All of those methods.

In fact, don't select any one method of making backups. Instead, use several different devices and (perhaps most important of all) several diffrent locations and even different computers to store the backups.

Suggestion: Keep a copy of all information tobe backed up on an external hard disk that plugs into a USB port on a computer at home, another backup on a similar computer at the office or at school, to a CD-ROM disk (or better yet to a Blu-Ray disk) kept at a relative's house, and also to 2 or 3 backup services in the cloud that are locate in different countries on different continents.

In case you need to retrieve your valuable data, at LEAST ONE of those copies will still be readable in future years.

Of course, just to be totally safe, you will want to copy those backed up copies to new drives every few years.

You can never have too many backup copies!

Blue eyed people listen up.

Ever wondered why your eyes are the colour they are? Well wonder no more.

Every blue eyed person is descended from a single European who lived around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, according to scientists.

How did they work it out? Originally, all humans had brown eyes in various shades until there was a specific mutation that made the change.

The mutation is a gene called HERC2 and it switches off OCA2, the gene that determines how much brown pigment we make.

So that's why eyes become blue. 

As for being descended from the same person, the evidence for this is because every blue eyed person alive today has this same mutation.

You can read more in an article by Kate Plummer published in the indy100.com web site at: https://www.indy100.com/science-tech/blue-eyed-people-common-ancestor-2659832759.

Historians say the application of modern computer science to the distant past helps draw connections across a broader swath of the historical record than would otherwise be possible, correcting distortions that come from analyzing history one document at a time. But it introduces distortions of its own, including the risk that machine learning will slip bias or outright falsifications into the historical record. All this adds up to a question for historians and others who, it’s often argued, understand the present by examining history: With machines set to play a greater role in the future, how much should we cede to them of the past?

You can find this interesting article at: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/11/1071104/ai-helping-historians-analyze-past/.

NOTE: This is a follow-up to my earlier article at https://eogn.com/page-18080/13159413. The newer article simply adds a few more details.

The Tennessee Historical Commission has unveiled a new online database of cemeteries in the state.

The Statewide Cemetery Map and the Tennessee Historic Cemetery Register are now available online in ArcGIS format for public use on the THC’s website. The map has been populated by data from the commission’s cemetery database, which currently contains more than 32,500 cemeteries statewide, a news release notes

"The public map contains various overlays which will enable the viewer to compare a cemetery’s location topographically, geographically, and even historically as Tennessee county borders have often shifted over the decades," the release says. "THC hopes this map will be a valuable tool for historians, genealogists, developers, landowners, realtors, and state agencies for the purpose of preserving and protecting burial sites."

The Tennessee Historic Cemetery Register is "intended to provide the public with a way to extensively document historic cemeteries for the purpose of preservation efforts," the release adds.

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/2brb7xxr.

The New York State Archives has compiled a list of resources in New York of interest to genealogists. Quoting from the compiled list:

"Records in the New York State Archives document functions and activities of State government; none of the records were created for the purpose of genealogical research. However, many records in the Archives contain information on individuals. Among these records are indexes to vital records (births, marriages, deaths); records of war service (War of 1812 through World War I); land records (mostly transactions involving the Colony or State of New York); court records (including colonial wills and early nineteenth century civil cases); and records of some correctional and custodial institutions."

The list may be found at: https://www.archives.nysed.gov/research/featured-topic-genealogy.

Archives NZ says it has set up a new team to work on its breach-ridden main search system.

The high-tech replacement for its main Collections search software went badly wrong last year. The $4 million Swedish system exasperated researchers, lawyers and other users with multiple shutdowns, security breaches, delays and slow searches.

Chief archivist Anahera Morehu said they were now working with users to test-drive improvements to the system.

The team's work was "anticipated to deliver significant benefits to users".

"It will provide a better search experience for users and enable easier access to the information and data in the system, support business process optimisation, and focus on training and change management," she said in a statement.

Morehu did not give a timeframe for it all to be bedded in or say if extra funding was needed - "the department is currently in discussions around arrangements", she said.