A staggering 706,009 pages have been added to the newspaper archive this week, with 11 new titles and many more updated. 

New titles: 

·         Blaydon Courier, 1929 

·         Evening Echo (Cork), 1904, 1909, 1914 

·         Football Echo (Sunderland), 1956 

·         Islington News and Hornsey Gazette, 1918 

·         Manchester City News, 1901-1902, 1904, 1906, 1910, 1914, 1937 

·         Southport Guardian, 1901, 1906, 1921 

·         Sports Post (Leeds), 1925 

·         St. Pancras Guardian and Camden and Kentish Towns Reporter, 1881, 1908, 1910, 1912, 1918 

·         Thomson’s Weekly News, 1933 

·         Whitehaven Advertiser and Cleator Moor and Egremont Observer, 1918 

·         Yorkshire Evening News, 1907, 1914 

Updated titles: 

·         Accrington Observer and Times, 1920 

·         Aldershot News, 1907, 1909 

·         Ashby Mail, 1999 

·         Atherstone News and Herald, 1986 

·         Axholme Herald, 1993 

·         Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 1778 

·         Birmingham Daily Post, 1902-1909 

·         Birmingham Mail, 1919-1920, 1992 

·         Birmingham News, 1999 

·         Cambridge Town Crier, 1999 

·         Cannock Chase Post, 1999 

·         Caterham Mirror, 1999 

·         Catholic Times and Catholic Opinion, 1903 

·         Cheltenham News, 1999 

·         Chertsey & Addlestone Leader, 1999 

·         Cheshire Observer, 1863 

·         Chester Chronicle (Frodsham & Helsby edition), 1997 

·         Coleshill Chronicle, 1981 

·         Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser, 1999 

·         Dorset County Chronicle, 1929 

·         Durham Chronicle, 1916 

·         Ealing & Southall Informer, 1999 

·         East Kilbride News, 1992 

·         East Sussex Focus, 1992 

·         Esher News and Mail, 1986-1987, 1989, 1992-1993, 1996-1998 

·         Evening Despatch, 1950 

·         Evening Herald (Dublin), 1949 

·         Faversham Times and Mercury and North-East Kent Journal, 1998 

·         Gainsborough Target, 1998-1999 

·         Gateshead Post, 1979, 1983, 1990, 1995, 1997-1999 

·         Grimsby Daily Telegraph, 1992 

·         Harrow Informer, 1999 

·         Hertford Mercury and Reformer, 1953 

·         Hinckley Times, 1989 

·         Horncastle Target, 1998 

·         Hounslow & Chiswick Informer, 1983, 1985 

·         Huddersfield and Holmfirth Examiner, 1875-1876, 1881, 1884, 1887 

·         Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 1875-1876, 1880, 1883-1884, 1887 

·         Hull Daily Mail, 1974-1977, 1982-1983, 1986, 1990, 1994-1995, 1999 

·         Huntingdon Town Crier, 1999 

·         Irvine Herald, 1980-1981, 1983-1985 

·         Lanark & Carluke Advertiser, 1999 

·         Leatherhead Advertiser, 1998-1999 

·         Lincoln Target, 1999 

·         Lincolnshire Echo, 1951, 1953, 1956-1958, 1960, 1962-1964, 1967-1976, 1978-1983, 1985, 1988-1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1997-1998 

·         Liverpool Daily Post, 1879, 1904 

·         Liverpool Daily Post (Welsh Edition), 1979 

·         Liverpool Evening Express, 1901 

·         Loughborough Echo, 1989 

·         Maghull & Aintree Star, 1999 

·         Middleton Guardian, 1918 

·         Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 1924-1925 

·         Northampton Herald & Post, 1999 

·         Rhondda Leader, 1991 

·         Rhyl, Prestatyn Visitor, 1999 

·         Rossendale Free Press, 1999 

·         Ruislip & Northwood Gazette, 1999 

·         Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 1999 

·         Solihull News, 1986 

·         South Wales Echo, 1993, 1995-1996 

·         St Neots Town Crier, 1999 

·         Staines Leader, 1999 

·         Stanmore Observer, 1999 

·         Stockport Express Advertiser, 1998 

·         Stockport Times, 1999 

·         Sunbury & Shepperton Herald, 1998-1999 

·         Surrey Herald, 1999 

·         Surrey Mirror, 1961, 1963-1968, 1970, 1997, 1999 

·         Surrey-Hants Star, 1999 

·         Sussex Daily News, 1917 

·         Sutton Coldfield Observer, 1999 

·         The People, 1999 

·         Thetford & Watton Times, 1914-1916 

·         Uttoxeter New Era, 1893-1894, 1904, 1907 

·         Wellingborough & Rushden Herald & Post, 1999 

·         Winsford Chronicle, 1990 

·         Worcester Journal, 1907 

·         Yorkshire Evening Press, 1905 

·         Yorkshire Gazette, 1903 

·         Holborn and Finsbury Guardian, 1891 

·         Luton News and Bedfordshire Chronicle, 1926, 1958 

·         Lynn Advertiser, 1978-1979 

An online resource holds records of human tissue held in more than 300 local United Kingdom museums.

Honouring the Ancient Dead (HAD) has completed the first major edition of its Your Local Museum database, which brings together records of ancient human remains held in more than 300 museums. All the museums seem to be in   the British Isles.

Each entry records how many ancestral remains the museum has in its collection, whether any are on display and what policies the museum may have for their care.

The resource is open for anyone to use and can be maintained by museums themselves through the HAD website, or via the organisation’s team. HAD uses the term “ancestors” rather than human remains in order to emphasise that human tissue, such as bones, skulls and cremated ash, belonged to individual people who may be ancient relatives of Britain’s modern-day population.

HAD was founded in 2004 to advocate for the respectful treatment of the bodies of the UK’s ancient dead and their related funereal artefacts, usually in the context of archaeological excavations and subsequent storage or display.

The new online database, which has been 14 years in the making, was created with the aim of understanding the scale of ancestral remains stored in British museums and allowing anyone to discover what is held at their own local museum.

In a statement the organisation said: “HAD would like to take this opportunity to thank all those museums, and their busy staff, for providing the responses that made compiling this database possible over the last 14 years. It is a credit to the museum profession that so many obviously care deeply about the ancestors in their care.”

You can read more at: https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2023/01/honouring-the-ancient-dead-completes-database-of-ancient-human-remains/#.

For further details and access to the database visit HAD’s website at http://www.honour.org.uk/.

Hundreds of court documents from the 1692 Salem Witch Trials are being transferred from the Salem museum where they have been stored for more than four decades to the newly expanded Judicial Archives facility in Boston.

The 527 documents — which include transcripts of testimony and examinations, depositions, warrants for apprehension and other legal papers — were moved to the Peabody Essex Museum in 1980 for safekeeping, officials said Thursday.

Although the museum had acquired some documents on its own, most had been stored at the clerk’s office at Essex County Superior Court, the museum said.

To properly preserve them, the documents need to be stored under the proper environmental conditions, including at or below 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius), at 50% relative humidity, and in low-light conditions, Dan Lipcan, director of the museum's Phillips Library in Rowley, said in a statement. They are also kept in acid-free folders and boxes and in fireproof cabinets.

“We are grateful to PEM for its capable stewardship of these invaluable documents and gratified that the state can now welcome the Salem Witch Trials documents home to the Judicial Archives,” Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Kimberly Budd said in a statement. “The court deeply appreciates the extraordinary public service that the museum has provided in caring for this unique collection for more than 40 years."

The SJC, the state's highest court, traces its origins to the witch trials. Originally the Superior Court of Judicature, created in November 1692, one of its first tasks was hearing the cases of 26 people accused of witchcraft. Twenty-three were found not guilty, and the other three were later pardoned, according to the court's history.

The witch trials were fomented by superstition and fear of disease, outsiders and Native Americans, and were stoked by petty jealousies and personal vendettas involving several families. Of the 20 people convicted of witchcraft and subsequently put to death, 19 were hanged and one was crushed to death by rocks.

The story and tragedy of the trials resonates to this day.

You can read more in an Associated Press article at: https://www.wral.com/hundreds-of-salem-witch-trials-documents-get-new-home/20670428/.

Comment by Dick Eastman: I have used some of these documents at the Peabody Essex Museum many, many years ago. (None of my ancestors were mentioned in the papers except one reference to one of my ancestors supplying an affidavit to the court stating that he believed one the accused witches was innocent. 

I do believe the new move of the documents is a good thing as the new location has better climate control that will preserve the documents for many more years.

Forensic Genealogy. What is it? How does it work? What are some practical examples of its use?

Criminology, aside from fingerprint technology -- thre's been no greater development in solving crimes than DNA. And now that tech has expanded with the use of forensic genealogy -- the marriage of DNA using public genealogy databases to identify criminals by identifying their relatives and then closing the circle and coming up with a suspect.

FOX 10's John Hook talks to Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, a pioneer in the discipline, who has solved murders. She's revealed identities of murder victims and unraveled countless mysteries.

You can watch a YouTube video that answers those questions and more. John Hook of FOX 10 Phoenix interviews Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, a pioneer in the discipline, who has solved murders,  revealed identities of murder victims and unraveled countless mysteries.

All this and more is available at: https://youtu.be/whfBq3pNle4

Who are we, really?

For many, the best way to answer that question is to dig into their genealogical pasts, amassing family trees that go back generations, supported by birth certificates, immigration documents, municipal records and whatever else can be tracked down. Before the dawn of the personal computer, that task was a prodigious and labor intensive undertaking.

But it’s a personal journey that has become considerably easier in the last decade or so thanks to the widespread digitization of public records and document archives and technological advancements that have turned genealogical research into a user-friendly, plug-and-play process.

The engine behind much of that research evolution is a genealogical products and service industry that generated some $3.5 billion in revenues in 2021 is expected to grow to over $8 billion annually by 2030.

Search specialist and veteran entrepreneur Kendall Hulet knows a thing or two about genealogy and search services having spent 14 years upgrading the search functions for family history giant Ancestry.com and launching his own mobile browser, Cake, a few years back.

Now, Hulet is CEO of Storied, a newly announced rebrand of newspaper and record archive service World Archives which was acquired in 2020 by Charles Thayne Capital. Storied is looking to make stories, from relatives as well as the important people in our lives outside the family circle, an integral part of building family histories.

“Records are awesome and a lot of family history sites are really good at hosting records and making them searchable,” Hulet said. “Right now, when discussions about family history happen, people’s eyes glaze over a little because it’s not stories they’re hearing, just a list of facts and dates.

“But stories are what really matter. Telling stories around campfires has been happening throughout our history and it’s how humans are hardwired to communicate.”

Storied is getting a running start as a new genealogy service, thanks to the billions of domestic and international records already amassed by World Archives.

While Storied is continuing to build out that database, its new platform offers tools to create, document and share stories from family members and the pivotal, nonfamily members who’ve impacted life stories and whose narratives complete the richer tale of a life lived, Hulet said.

You can read more in an article by Art Raymond published in the Deseret News web site at https://tinyurl.com/2zrdnhf2

You can also watch a YouTube video that describes Storied at https://youtu.be/ESYJZGGGCbU.

The devastation of the plague pandemic left such an incredible genetic mark on humanity that it's still affecting our health nearly 700 years later.

Up to half of people died when the Black Death swept through Europe in the mid-1300s.

A pioneering study analysing the DNA of centuries-old skeletons found mutations that helped people survive the plague.

But those same mutations are linked to auto-immune diseases afflicting people today.

The Black Death is one of the most significant, deadliest and bleakest moments in human history. It is estimated that up to 200 million people died.

Researchers suspected an event of such enormity must have shaped human evolution. They analysed DNA taken from the teeth of 206 ancient skeletons and were able to precisely date the human remains to before, during or after the Black Death.

The analysis included bones from the East Smithfield plague pits which were used for mass burials in London with more samples coming from Denmark.

The standout finding, published in the journal Nature, surrounded mutations in a gene called ERAP2.

If you had the right mutations you were 40% more likely to survive the plague.

You can read more in an article by James Gallagher published in the BBC News web site at: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63316538.

If you subscribed to the DAILY (not the weekly) email messages listing new articles posted to this web site in the previous 24 hours, please pay attention to this:

The DAILY (not the weekly) email messages are sent by Mailchimp.  (It is a service I pay for.)

Mailchimp recently said in a blog post that its security team detected an intruder on January 11 accessing one of its internal tools used by Mailchimp customer support and account administration. Mailchimp said the hacker targeted its employees and contractors with a social engineering attack. The hacker then used those compromised employee passwords to gain access to data on 133 Mailchimp accounts, which the company notified of the intrusion. 

NOTE: I have not received any notification from Mailchimp so I assume (I hate the word "assume" but it is appropriate right now) that subscribers to this newsletter's DAILY (not the weekly) email messages were not part of the affected 133 Mailchimp accounts. 

Mailchimp also states that no customer passwords or other sensitive data was taken.

So while we can assume (there's that word again) that subscribers to EOGN.com's DAILY (not the weekly) email messages are not affected by this, I still want to warn subscribers that there is still a POSSIBILITY  that your email address and password were accessed.

If you subscribe only to the WEEKLY email updates (usually mailed on Mondays in the mid-day U.S. time), Mailchimp is not involved in those mailings (sent from a different mail server owned by a different company) so you can safely ignore this message.

The Clark County (Washington) Medical Examiner’s Office used forensic genealogy to confirm the identity of a man whose body was discovered 24 years ago in the Columbia River. This is the second cold case in four months that the office has closed using forensic genealogy. 

The Medical Examiner’s Office recently identified Michael E. Johnson as the unidentified person found on Oct. 26,1998 in the Columbia River in Vancouver. The Medical Examiner’s Office estimates Johnson was about 53 years old at the time of his death. 

The Medical Examiner’s Office submitted a DNA sample from the remains to Bode Technology, a forensic DNA laboratory in Virginia that provides forensic genealogy services and specializes in the extraction of DNA from challenging human remains samples. The forensic genealogist used the DNA from the remains to predict the unidentified person’s ancestry and compared it to individuals in online genealogy databases that allow searches of unidentified persons. The forensic genealogist found an ancestral link to a family from California. While there were multiple possibilities, the forensic genealogist noted that one person, a son of Chesley Johnson Jr. and Ruth Marie Hansen, appeared to have no traceable activities since 1998.

In October, Medical Examiner’s Office operations manager Nikki Costa contacted other children of the couple. Russel Johnson and Kathy Bergen indicated their brother, Michael E. Johnson, had left California over 20 years ago and had no contact with family. 

Based on the results of the forensic genealogical analysis, DNA analysis and circumstantial evidence in the case, Clark County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Martha Burt concluded that the previously unidentified man was Michael E. Johnson.

Johnson’s cause of death is a gunshot wound to the head and his manner of death is undetermined.

From the MyHeritage Blog:

What a way to cap off 2022! In November and December 2022, we added and updated 67 historical record collections with 65 million records from all over the world. The collections are from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Spain, the U.K., Ukraine, and the U.S. Many of the collections also include images. The collections consist of birth, marriage, divorce, death, obituaries, burial, wills, census, naturalization, city directories, military, voter, employee, newspapers, and more. 

Here are some highlights of the new and updated collections.

Actually, it is a very lo-o-ong list. Rather than republish the whole thing here, you can read the entire list in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/01/myheritage-publishes-65-million-records-in-november-and-december-2022/.