Thousands more new and exclusive English parish records published  

Findmypast adds records for Suffolk and Staffordshire this Findmypast Friday 

Thanks to Findmypast’s longstanding partnership with the Family History Federation, thousands more exclusive parish records have been published this week. 

Suffolk Baptism Index 1538-1911 

Over 307,000 records have been added into this existing collection, covering 232 churches and the years 1813-1900. Thanks to the work done by volunteers at Suffolk Family History Society, these baptism records could reveal the parents’ names of your Suffolk ancestors, their baptism dates and where they lived, taking your family tree further than ever before. 

"This latest release completes the set for 1813-1900 for Suffolk baptisms and adds to other Suffolk records already on Findmypast.  We are hugely grateful for the efforts of all the volunteers involved in transcribing, checking, checking again, and then formatting the information for publication. Some of them work from home (wherever that is) from films and fiche, some are able to go into the record offices and see the records there. We hope to bring more transcriptions to Findmypast over the coming months.” - Suffolk Family History Society 

Staffordshire Baptisms 

Courtesy of Burntwood Family History Group, a further 141,000 new records across 28 churches have been added into this existing collection, which now stands at 2.1 million records. Many include original images, where residences and fathers’ occupations may be found. 

Staffordshire Marriages  

Another 70,000 records have been added into this collection from 19 churches. With some going back to the 1560s, researchers may learn more about their ancestor’s residence and age, plus details of witnesses on the original images. 

Newspapers 

Delve into more recent history this week with thousands of pages from 1990-1999 across 64 newspapers. 

 New titles: 

·         Trinidad Chronicle, 1864-1885 

·         Midland & Northern Coal & Iron Trades Gazette, 1875-1884 and 1886 

·         Leytonstone Express and Independent, 1877-1912 

·         Jarrow Guardian and Tyneside Reporter, 1872-1880, 1898, 1909-1910 

·         Surrey Independent and Wimbledon Mercury, 1882-1905 

·         Haltemprice & East Yorkshire Advertiser, 1995 

 

From an article by Bobby Bennett and published in the competitionplus.com web site:

"You know your family is badass when they name a colony after you.

"Buddy Hull is blaming it on ancestry.com, the DNA-based genealogy website where patrons spit in a cup, send it off and wait for weeks to learn how many famous kin-folk they have.

"That's what the Texas-based [drag racing] Top Fuel driver Hull did, and the results have him knee-deep in tracing the family tree.

"'No one in my family really truly knew how our family got to the U.S.,' Hull said. 'Four years ago, I really took it upon myself to learn. And so I did the typical, I spit in the cup and sent it into ancestry.com, and they got me started.'

"Sure enough, Hull realized he was a member of a family with a reasonably famous military heritage.

"'I kept digging, digging, digging, and it actually got very addictive,' Hull said. 'I spent two to three hours a night looking at the thing. And to boil the fat off of it, and we triple, quadruple verified it, my family first came over here from Hull, England, and settled what is the area of Massachusetts which used to be called the Hull Colony, which I think is just so cool.'"

I think Buddy Hull's description of the fascination with genealogy also applies to many of us. You can read more in the article at: https://bit.ly/3CiIyAK.

Comment: I don't know who writes the headlines for that site, but maybe we can all contribute and buy that person a spell checker!

From an article by Rami Amichay and published by Reuters:

In the hours after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Ilya Fomintsev, a 43-year-old oncologist and director of a medical charity, took to the streets of Moscow to protest. He was arrested and sentenced to 20 days’ detention. Fearing for his future, like many other opponents of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Fomintsev decided to leave the country.

But as other opposition-minded Russians headed for Turkey, Georgia and Armenia, Fomintsev, on the advice of an old patient, began gathering documents proving his Jewish ancestry and made an appointment at the Israeli consulate.

"I am of Jewish origin and the only option for me to emigrate was to Israel," Fomintsev said in an interview at his new home in Tel Aviv.

“By and large in other countries, it is impossible to legalise yourself, it is also impossible to open bank accounts there or do business. Israel was the only option I had and I took advantage of the repatriation programme.”

Fomintsev was part of a renewed wave of Jewish emigration from Russia that, though not as large as earlier pre-revolutionary and post-Soviet exoduses, has seen tens of thousands of Russians make for the Jewish state.

According to Israeli government figures, 20,246 Russians emigrated to Israel between January and July 2022, with numbers spiking from around 700 per month in February to over 3,000 in March. By contrast, in the whole of 2019 only 15,930 Russians emigrated to Israel.

Most of the emigrants from Russia are Jews, but some may only have close relatives who are Jewish. Under Israel's Law of Return, a person needs at least one Jewish grandparent to be entitled to immediate citizenship. Around 600,000 Russians qualify.

You can read the full story at: https://reut.rs/3T1Bez4.

Starting this September, the next version of Heredis for mobile devices will no longer be free.

An email from Heredis points out that:

"...since 2012, Heredis has chosen to offer its users a free mobile application on iOS (and then on Android). More than 35,000 of you are using these apps on a daily basis and we thank you for that.

"However, these applications require a heavy maintenance and a lot of extra work to update them so that they keep working with each new version of Heredis but also so that they remain compatible with your phones and tablets’ latest operating systems.

"This is why, from September onwards, we will have to charge you for our next mobile applications.

"If you have an older version already installed or if you want to download this older version, it will remain completely free. But you will need to pay for our next application, which will be compatible with the new version of Heredis. And it will be so with each new version in the future.

"The new Heredis apps will be available on the Apple and Android stores for $9.99 U.S. (tax incl.). Which means that for each new version, Mac or Windows, the user of this version will also have to purchase the corresponding mobile application."

If you use Heredis (Windows or Macintosh), I'd suggest you download the FREE mobile version now! You may do so at: https://bit.ly/3K7niQm.

The 42nd IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy will be held August 21 to 25, 2022. This year's event will be virtual so you can attend from anywhere in the world as long as you have a computer (or a tablet) and an Internet connection. Pay close attention to timezone differences however.

The IAJGS Board of Directors has decided that the 2022 IAJGS Conference will be an All Virtual Conference. For details, see the announcement at https://s4.goeshow.com/iajgs/annual/2022/virtual.cfm.

Quoting from the online "brochure" for this year's conference:

"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 including Philadelphia and Western Pennsylvania research. DNA experts will explain the basics, as well as mitochondrial and endogamy analysis in multiple presentations. You can learn how families lived across the world from small towns of America to Germany and the Caribbean. Those who want to document your family history will be able to listen to sessions on writing your family stories and documenting them through multi-media and networking.

"There will be a robust 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.

"Early Bird Registration will open in the next few weeks. Attendee Levels and fees will be published at that time.

"The Conference Committee is looking forward to once again offering an informative and satisfying All Virtual Conference."

There is a lot more information (much too long to post in this article) available at: https://s4.goeshow.com/iajgs/annual/2022/.

This is a follow-up to my earlier article, President Biden Announces Colleen Shogan for National Archivist Post, that I published on August 4 at: https://eogn.com/page-18080/12873973 but this new article provides more information on Colleen Shogan's background and qualifications:

From an article by Fred Lucas published in the stream.org web site:

President Joe Biden’s nominee to the usually obscure and apolitical office of archivist of the United States comes as the agency she hopes to lead is in the middle of the biggest political story in the country.

On Aug. 3, Biden announced the nomination of Colleen Shogan to head the National Archives and Records Administration.

Five days later, the FBI raided the Florida home of Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, after the National Archives asked the Justice Department to investigate its concerns over the former president’s possession of some documents earlier this year.

The controversy over documents at Mar-a-Lago, which long preceded Shogan’s nomination as archivist, likely will continue to thrust the agency responsible for maintaining government records into the forefront of a national story.

Shogan, 46, is senior vice president and director of the David M. Rubenstein Center for White House History, the research arm of the White House Historical Association. She has taught at and was an adjunct lecturer in the government department at Georgetown University.

Shogan also is the author of eight murder mysteries in a series called “Washington Whodunnit” in which the main character is a congressional aide who solves the cases.

The Senate, which must confirm Shogan, referred her nomination by Biden to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Pittsburgh native previously worked for more than a decade at the Library of Congress, serving in several senior roles. She is a former deputy director of the Congressional Research Service, which produces reports for lawmakers. She also was an assistant professor of government and politics at George Mason University.

Shogan holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Boston College and a doctorate in American politics from Yale University.

The lives of our ancestors were not always as simple and easy-going as we sometimes imagine. In the late nineteenth century, ice cream, a popular but poorly understood dessert, brought illness and death to America’s fairs and festivals.

In Victorian America, ice cream became an increasingly popular dessert. As historian Edward Geist writes, it was also sometimes a dangerous one, with semi-regular reports of whole groups of picnickers or fair-goers becoming terribly sick with bowel pain, vomiting, and diarrhea. Some, typically children, died.

Geist explains that ice cream’s widespread availability in the mid-nineteenth century came thanks to the rise of the commercial ice trade, abundant sugar production, and the invention of the hand-cranked ice cream freezer. Custard-based ice creams favored by the rich remained too expensive for most people, but eggless “Philadelphia style” ice cream or even cheaper flavored ices were widely available.

The hygienic practices of the vendors who sold these treats were, to an observer in the twenty-first century, horrifying. They often used reusable glass dishes, which were merely wiped off between customers. And some refroze melted ice cream, something we now know offers a perfect opportunity for bacterial growth.

You can read more in an article by Livia Gershon and published in the jstor.org web site at: https://daily.jstor.org/death-by-ice-cream/.

If you were born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government. By the 1970s, states had established newborn screening programs, in which a nurse takes a few drops of blood from a pinprick on a baby's heel, then sends the sample to a lab to test for certain diseases.

Over the years, the list has grown from just a few conditions to dozens. The blood is supposed to be used for medical purposes -- these screenings identify babies with serious health issues, and they have been highly successful at reducing death and disability among children. But a public records lawsuit filed last month in New Jersey suggests these samples are also being used by police in criminal investigations.

The lawsuit, filed by the state's Office of the Public Defender and the New Jersey Monitor, a nonprofit news outlet, alleges that state police sought a newborn's blood sample from the New Jersey Department of Health to investigate the child's father in connection with a sexual assault from the 1990s.

Crystal Grant, a technology fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the case represents a "whole new leap forward" in the misuse of DNA by law enforcement. "It means that essentially every baby born in the US could be included in police surveillance," she says.

It's not known how many agencies around the country have sought to use newborn screening samples to investigate crimes, or how often those attempts were successful. But there is at least one other instance of it happening.

Because there are no federal laws governing newborn screening programs, states set their own policies on which diseases they test for, how long samples are stored, and how they can be used," notes Wired. "Some states hold on to blood samples for months, others for years or decades. Virginia only keeps samples from infants with normal results for six months, while Michigan retains them for up to 100 years.

You can read more in the Slashdot.org web site at: https://bit.ly/3pqcFyr.

Are you looking for some obscure information? If so, have you checked the Internet Archive lately? (It is also known as the Wayback Machine.)

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items:

Books – 78,091 New items in July

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive – 91,636 New Items in July

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

LibriVox Audiobooks – 119 New Items in July

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 8,888 New Items in July

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Live Music Archive – 965 New Items in July

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Movies – 135 New Items in July

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

If you have Hispanic or Southwestern U.S. ancestry, you probably will be interested in an article by Nicolás Cabrera that has been published in the Denver Public Library's web site. Cabrera writes:

"Many documents researchers encounter in Hispanic and southwest genealogy research are handwritten in Spanish with archaic terms, abbreviations, and old spelling rules, especially during the colonial and territorial periods. When consulting extractions, indexes, and modern records, this may not be a problem. Older, original records may be harder to understand. A familiarity with paleography, the study of old writing forms, is beneficial. For example, it is good to know that some priests and clerks abbreviated 9embre for the month of November, Jsph means José, and that Guadalupe is a male and female name."

There is a lot more information in the article at: https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/tips-10.