The following is a press release written by the folks at the (U.S.) National Genealogical Society:

The National Genealogical Society (NGS) has released two, new books as part of its Research in the States series. The latest volumes are Research in Hawaii by Darcie Hind Posz, CG, FASG, and Research in Maine, by Eva Holmes, CG, AG. The books are available in the NGS store in both PDF and print versions. 

Both guidebooks provide detailed information on a wealth of resources including business, census, and court records; institutional, military, and vital records; directories and newspapers; and advice for researching female ancestors. The authors include the website address, physical address, and telephone number for each resource.

In Research in Hawaii, the author provides details for research distinct to Hawaii such as its rich oral genealogies. Posz includes information covering African American, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, Polynesian, and Portuguese ethnic records. The section on archives, libraries, and societies includes those centrally located in Honolulu and on each island with resources specific to ethnicity, occupation, region, and time period. Posz discusses unique resources that are essential to many family historians such as the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association Plantation Archives, which offers maps of plantations and camps where workers resided. Hawaiian land records for this state-land-state are thoroughly explained. The author also includes a glossary of Hawaiian words found in vital records. 

Research in Maine offers readers a comprehensive guide of where and how to find records of ancestors who lived in Maine. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Maine led the United States in shipbuilding. Its ships engaged in international trade stretching across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Holmes provides family historians with a detailed guide on researching maritime records from diaries, ledgers, and logbooks in local cities and towns as well as out-of-state repositories. She also includes valuable information on cemetery records such as at the Maine Old Cemetery Association with information on over 7,100 cemeteries. The section on ethnic records covers African American, French, French-Canadian, German, Italian, Jewish, and Native Americans as well as Irish, Scots, and Scots-Irish.

The Research in the States series is edited by Barbara Vines Little, CG, FNGS, FUGA, FVGS. This series now covers research in thirty-three states, the District of Columbia, and the tribal records of Oklahoma’s American Indians. Purchase the newest books, Research in Hawaii and Research in Maine, in the NGS online store.

The following is a press release from the Polk County Public Library:

We have just added issues of the Tryon Daily Bulletin from 1951-1953, 1980-1982, 1990-1992. These join the issues already on our site from 1928-1951. Contributed by the Polk County Public Library, the issues from the 50s were added from microfilm. In addition, the Library’s staff scanned print issues from the 80s and 90s to add to our site. “The World’s Smallest DAILY Newspaper” is a true example of a local paper, with contents created locally and confined mostly to county or regional news.

Published 5 days per week, the Bulletin from these different time periods have things in common! On the left side of every front page is the column “Curb Reporter.” Starting with the day’s weather, it has brief snippets of local to international news. 

In all decades, you’ll find classified ads, committee and government meeting reports, and personal notes and mentions that have all but dropped off of newspapers today.

View all issues of the Tryon Daily Bulletin on the newspaper’s home page.

The following is a press release written by the folks at the Newark Public Library:

The Newark Public Library, in partnership with Advantage Archives, proudly announces free access to nearly 1.2 million pages of historical newspapers from Newark, New Jersey.

The Newark History Archives (https://newark.historyarchives.online) features the Newark Evening News from 1883 to 1971, providing a rich resource for educators, researchers, and the general public. Encapsulating nearly a century of journalism, the archive provides a practical means to explore how Newark’s community, economy, and politics have shifted over the years while providing a local perspective on national and international historical events.

Founded in 1883, the Newark Evening News served as Newark’s paper of record until its closure in 1972. It had bureaus in Montclair, Elizabeth, Metuchen, Morristown, Plainfield, Kearny, and Belmar, as well as bureaus in the New Jersey State House in Trenton and in Washington, DC. Throughout its nearly 90-year run, it was the primary source of news and information for residents of Newark and the broader New Jersey area. The newspaper was renowned for its comprehensive coverage, detailed reporting, and a broad spectrum of editorial content, which included everything from local news and statewide political affairs to cultural events and community issues, capturing the daily happenings and the city’s evolving story.

The digital reproductions of the Newark Evening News found in the online archive are indexed by date, and the collection is keyword-searchable. The intuitive platform allows users to explore, discover, and gain insights into the community’s development through the narratives of its residents, the significant events that have shaped its trajectory, and the historical forces that have influenced its present circumstances.

Beth Zak-Cohen from the Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center was instrumental in bringing this project to life. She shares her enthusiasm: “We love the website; it’s so much easier to search than our previous system or than microfilm, and personally, I can’t stop looking things up just for fun!”

The project was made possible through support from Senator Cory Booker’s office and funding from a federal grant. It highlights the significant benefit of collaboration among libraries, government entities, and private organizations in unlocking our shared cultural heritage. It also showcases how leveraging technology can democratize access to historical knowledge, ensuring that this connection to the community’s past is inclusive, not just for those who can physically visit a library or afford a subscription to a pay-for-access service.

Jeffrey Kiley, Founder of Advantage Archives, says that partnerships of this nature are at the core of Advantage’s mission and vision: “We are very proud of our partnership with the Newark Public Library, and it is a privilege to be an active participant in their efforts to make the Newark Evening News more accessible. Our guiding principles center around building strong community-based partnerships to provide free online access to local history, and the library’s vision for this project aligned perfectly with our stated mission.”

Kiley’s business partner Chris Donohue explains, “We know that all good partnerships are reciprocal, so our role is to shoulder all of the ongoing costs associated with the platform, including storage, hosting, development, infrastructure, support, and maintenance of the digital archives to ensure that this content is always available and free to access. The archives do not require a subscription, seat license, annual support contract, or any other ongoing costs or expenses to the institution or members of the Newark community.”

The Newark History Archive will be invaluable for researchers, genealogists, and historians. The easy-to-use platform will also be a powerful tool for educators, allowing them to integrate local primary sources into their lesson plans.

To access the Newark Public Library’s digital collection, visit the Newark History Archives

About the Newark Public Library:

Founded in 1889, the Newark Public Library has long been a cornerstone of community engagement, education, and historical preservation. The Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center, located within the library, is dedicated to collecting and preserving materials related to Newark and New Jersey’s rich history.

About Advantage Archives: 

Advantage Archives forges strong, community-based partnerships with institutions across the United States with a shared goal of providing free online access to local history. These partnerships ensure that local primary sources are always available to provide a direct account of history from the perspectives of those who experienced it. For more information about creating a Community History Archive, please contact Advantage Archives at info@advantagearchives.com.

A new online archive is about to share a fascinating collection of stories and artefacts from Scotland during the Second World War.

The materials have been preserved by an Oxford University project that has digitised more than 25,000 previously hidden artefacts from the Second World War.

Photos of the objects and stories will be available to view on the project website, theirfinesthour.org, on June 6 to complement events commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

The archive contains a remarkable range of stories and objects that capture both the extraordinary and everyday lives of those who experienced the war.

Artefacts include the memoirs of James Glass from Currie, Edinburgh, who served in the Royal Army Service Corps as a driver in Palestine and the Western Desert; class photos from Rumford Street School, Glasgow; pages from the wartime diary of Sheila Jenkinson, a teenager in Edinburgh during the war; and a photograph of Eupheme Sutherland and friends making sandbags on the second day of the conflict.

The archive includes the story of William James Carrie, a Colonial Service member from Edinburgh University, who was interned at Stanley Internment Camp in Hong Kong after its fall to Japan on Christmas Day 1941. During his internment, William served as head of burials, and his diary details significant wartime events and daily life before Hong Kong fell.

You can read more in an article by Matthew Kidd published in The Scotsman web site at: https://bit.ly/3x1rrTG.

The hugely successful free-to-view RIP.ie database has been acquired by the Irish Times Group.

Founded in 2005 by brother and sister team Jay and Dympna Coleman of County Louth, the site has been publishing death announcements and funeral notices (and much more) since July 2006.

Although so recently established, it has become a trusted resource in Ireland and can be useful to genealogists looking to update their family trees. Each notice is placed by the funeral director and typically includes information about the deceased's relatives and sometimes other personal details.

The opportunity for family, friends, colleagues and other acquaintances to upload condolences to the site has become extremely popular since Covid 19 arrived, and can often be another rich source for family history. 

The site's sale raised immediate concerts that the platform would be placed behind a paywall. However, in a statement issued yesterday, the Irish Times Group committed to keeping RIP.ie 'free to view' following its acquisition.

The Ohio Genealogy Society’s Lorain County Chapter, will present an online program called “Have you Written your Story?”  at 7 p.m. EDT on June 10.

Chapter president Margaret Cheney will guide attendees through the steps of writing their unique story as a legacy of their descendants. Everyone has a story to tell and with modern technology it makes it that much easier to do, according to a news release

This virtual presentation is free and open to the public. To join, request a link by emailing meetings@loraincoogs.org and ask to be added to the list.

On Tuesday 11th June at 2pm British Summer Time, Else Churchill will be presenting a free talk “Focus on the SoG Genealogical Treasure and Collections” which this month will focus on family papers, letters and diaries in the document collections. 

You can book your free place at: https://members.sog.org.uk/events/653fd3a433d2260008c5cca1.

The talk will be recorded so if you cannot attend it live you can still catch up later.

The following is a Plus Edition article, written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

One of my ongoing projects involves digitizing most every document that I may possibly need in the future and then having it available at my fingertips at any time. You might consider doing the same. Today's technology makes it simple to have all your required documents available whenever and wherever you need them.

For instance, I had a doctor's appointment recently, and the doctor asked what medications I was taking. The problem is that I have difficulty remembering names of medicines that look like a mumbo-jumbo collection of random letters. I can't remember the names of my present and past prescriptions. Instead, I grabbed my ”smartphone,” touched an icon for my notes program, entered "prescriptions," and then touched SEARCH. A second or two later, a list of my prescribed medications appeared on the screen of the cell phone, which I was able to show to the doctor. Total time elapsed: about twenty seconds. That's not bad considering I was in the doctor's office at the time. It wasn't practical to go home and retrieve a list of medications.

If the doctor wanted a copy for his records, I could display the list on the smartphone's screen, press SHARE, select EMAIL, and then send it to the doctor's office's email address. That's easier, faster, and produces better results than making photocopies! If the doctor wants a hard copy, he can print out the email message. Luckily, my doctor runs a paperless office; he doesn't save any paper. Everything in his office is digital. I like that doctor!

I have also written several times about my ongoing efforts to digitize most all the genealogy books and magazines in my collection. Indeed, I am not limiting this to genealogy material; I am attempting to digitize most everything I might need ever again: receipts from both online and offline purchases, birth certificates, maintenance schedules for the automobiles, insurance policies, the user’s manual for the  refrigerator, my appointment book, my address book, my driver’s license, my ham radio license, my pilot's license, a scanned image of my passport (encrypted before being stored), lists of URLs (addresses) for web sites of interest, family photographs, insurance policy information, an encrypted list of all my credit cards with the card numbers, expiration dates, and the toll-free numbers shown on the back of each card, eyeglasses prescription, and most all other pieces of paper that arrive in the mail, except for the advertisements. Actually, I have even been known to scan an advertisement or two in cases where I wanted to keep the information. 

I even scan my incoming bills although I don't receive many of those in the old-fashioned U.S. mail anymore. Almost all my bills now arrive by email and, of course, I save those as well.

A few years ago, when a winter ice storm caused a tree branch to fall onto the brand-new fence that had been installed at home a few months earlier, I quickly snapped some pictures with my cell phone's camera and filed those pictures in my documents folder. When filing an insurance claim (which I also scanned), I printed the pictures and included them with the claim. I also saved a digital copy of the entire insurance claim, including the pictures. As the old saying states, "a picture is worth a thousand words." Those were words I didn't have to write on the insurance claim; the pictures show everything.

Some years ago, I placed a motor home in storage for a couple of months. The clerk at the storage facility asked for a copy of my motor home insurance policy. I normally wouldn't be carrying insurance policies with me everywhere I go but in this case I did have an electronic copy of every insurance policy in my private area “in the cloud.” I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket, retrieved the images of the insurance policy from the cloud, and asked the clerk, “What's your email address?” He told me and I sent the document to his address, again with my cell phone. Within seconds, he had a copy of the insurance policy in his in-box and he could print it, if he wished to do so. Total elapsed time? About a minute or so.

I find multiple reasons for scanning receipts. First, it's always nice to have receipts available at your fingertips in case there is a question about payment. Even more important, having these documents quickly available greatly simplifies the preparation of income taxes every year. 

By the way, the Internal Revenue Service now PREFERS digital images or receipts and of income tax forms. The IRS doesn't have room for millions of filing cabinets to save all that paper! If you do supply all your info on paper, do you know what the IRS does with it? Yes, the IRS employees immediately scan everything upon receipt and then either return the paper to you (if you are at an audit in the same room as the IRS employee) or else the IRS employee throws your paper away!

Storing thousands of documents requires a bit of disk space. Luckily, that space is now cheap. One-terabyte disk drives now sell for under $40. (That’s cheaper than purchasing an old-fashioned filing cabinet.) This project would have been impossible 15 years ago. It would have been difficult and expensive 5 years ago. Yet it is easy and inexpensive today. Even better, I also store duplicate copies of all the same files “in the cloud” in a highly-secure manner plus additional backups on a local hard drive connect to my computer's USB port. In fact, the documents stored “in the cloud” are encrypted and therefore are more secure than the copies kept on my computer's hard drive. 

Credit card numbers, bank account information, my driver's license, my passport, and more are all strongly encrypted before being stored, even if stored in my computer's hard drive. Even the employees of the cloud-based file storage services cannot read my more sensitive files. Only I have access to the encrypted information. That's a lot more secure than trying to save printed documents!

If my local hard drive ever crashes, I have multiple backup copies. In addition, the cloud-based copies are available wherever I am, as long as I have a data connection available on my cell phone, tablet computer, or laptop computer. I now have instant access to tens of thousands of documents wherever I am, even documents I saved 5 or 10 years ago. Just try to do something similar with paper documents!

To make the process work easily and effectively, I also need software that stores the various documents and retrieves them quickly when needed, wherever I am. That software must be able to store and retrieve images as well as text, and do so quickly. Being able to retrieve information when at home is nice, but I find it much more important to be able to retrieve the same information when I am at a doctor's office, a dentist's office, the auto mechanic's, or the accountant's office. In fact, I also often retrieve information when standing in the aisle of a retail store. I even keep my grocery list in digital format and can retrieve it at any time, whether in a grocery store or while standing in my kitchen cooking dinner or anywhere else.

The process is simple. 

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/13364383. (A Plus Edition password is required to access that article.)

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077. 

The General Records Office (GRO) holds the records from 1837 and includes the civil birth, marriage or death records for England and Wales has increased the price of the documents.  The price increase is not large:

£2.50 for a digital image of a record, the GRO now charges £3. Currency exchange daily at the time of this posting one-pound sterling was equal to $1.27 (USD). 

You can order certificates online or write to:

General Register Office
PO Box 2
Southport
PR8 2JD

 For records in Scotland contact the National Records of Scotland: https://www.gov.uk/national-records-of-scotland

For records in Northern Ireland go to:  General Register Office for Northern Ireland.

The skeletal bones discovered in a plastic bag in California in 1985 have been positively identified as belonging to a lady who was born during the American Civil War and died more than a century ago. This identification was made by a laboratory that collaborates with law enforcement agencies to solve unsolved crimes around the United States. 

In October 1985, a plastic bag containing partial skeleton remains was discovered near Channel Islands Harbor, located just west of Los Angeles. This information was provided by Othram, a laboratory that specializes in forensic genetic genealogy, in a news release. At that time, it was ascertained that the bones belonged to a female individual who had been in the age range of 35 to 50 at the time of her death. However, no other details were accessible. The case was investigated by officers from the Ventura County Sheriff's Office. 

The case remained unsolved for several decades. In 2016, data on the case was inputted into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, and a facial reconstruction was created using clay. Othram stated that despite the "extensive efforts" undertaken by law enforcement, no matches were found when a publicly published photo of the reconstruction was used to generate new leads. 

In May 2023, the Ventura County Sheriff's Office-Cold Case Unit collaborated with the county medical examiner's office to send the forensic evidence from the case to Othram. The laboratory located in Texas utilizes DNA evidence and various forms of analysis, such as forensic genetic genealogy, to assist in the identification of remains, including those discovered in this particular case. 

Othram scientists have successfully created a DNA extract and performed forensic-grade genome sequencing. This advanced technique allows for the creation of a comprehensive profile using only a little DNA sample. Using the DNA profile, the company's genetic genealogy team initiated thorough research, resulting in the discovery of fresh leads. 

Investigators established contact with probable relatives and then obtained a reference sample of DNA from a potential family member. The DNA sample enabled law enforcement to conclusively determine that the remains belonged to Gertrude Elliott-Littlehale, a person born in 1864 and deceased in 1915. 

Othram said that Elliott-Littlehale's burial site had been desecrated and her grave had been looted. The company did not provide a specific timeframe for when the grave was desecrated, but they mentioned that the skull had been removed and the resting place had been substantially disturbed. According to the United Nations' Environment Programme, plastic bags similar to the ones found with Elliott-Littlehale's remains were initially introduced in the 1960s and 70s, and then became widespread in the 80s.