As a recent survivor of Hurricane Ian that plowed through Florida, and also as a long-time user of the Zello app (for several years now), I paid close attention to an article by Charity Blanton published in the WPSD web site: 

Millions of people in the path of Hurricane Ian are still without power.

With many cell towers down or inoperable, it's extremely difficult for the people who need help and the people who want to help to communicate.

Cellular companies are rolling in temporary portable cellular towers to provide at least some connection to the internet, but these towers often cannot meet the demand of customers. Rescue departments and volunteers have turned to a smartphone app as a solution.

Zello is sort of like a walkie-talkie app, allowing users to send audio and text messages to one another even in areas with limited cell service. Many rescue agencies use Zello to communicate with each other. Volunteers use Zello too — Cajun Navy Relief is using it right now to help in Florida.

Cajun Navy formed years ago during Hurricane Irma and began using the Zello app as its sole communication tool. The community currently has volunteers reviewing requests for help and mobilizing volunteers across the country. It's pretty amazing to listen to their Zello channel as people from Texas, Virginia, Arizona, and other states far away from Florida log on to review requests or tickets from victims of Hurricane Ian.

The article goes on for a bit longer at: https://tinyurl.com/ykepym6t.

I strongly agree and recommend Zello. I recommend you install it on your cell phone. You may never need it. Then again, maybe you will. The app is free for iPhones and Android devices.

The following announcement was written by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration:

COLLEGE PARK, October 26, 2022 — The National Archives Catalog now contains more than 200 million digitized pages. 

The Office of Innovation collaborated with offices across the National Archives, as well as external partners like Ancestry and FamilySearch, to reach this milestone in August. 

Technical upgrades that improved how the agency uploads images have been critical to meeting this milestone and staying on track for the ultimate goal: 500 million digitized pages in the Catalog by September 2026.

The 205,039,338 digitized pages reflect records digitized by the agency and its partners, and the pages can be found in more than 28 million archival descriptions in the Catalog. 

“In the context of the past couple of years, digital access means so much to archives and to our customers,” said Digital Engagement Director Jill Reilly. “It has been really meaningful for us to accelerate our ability to get the content the National Archives and the partners have been generating and open that up to everybody via the Catalog.”

Some recently uploaded highlights include photographs of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, U.S. Marshal Criminal Bookings for 1961–1978, and Utility Patent Drawings. 

The latest additions are regularly updated on What’s New in the Catalog on the National Archives website.

The National Archives is in the process of modernizing the Catalog. Check out a sneak preview of the beta version and provide feedback.

This is a follow-up to my earlier article, Making Black America: Through the Grapevine, that I published last week at https://www.eogn.com/page-18080/12962630:

That article describes Making Black America: Through the Grapevine, a four-part television series from executive producer, host and writer Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which premiered on October 4th on PBS stations nationwide. 

In last night's broadcast, Henry Louis Gates showed Slave Schedules. Ironically National Genealogical Society just published Tony Burroughs' latest study of Slave Schedules, "Do Slave Schedules Accurately Report Owners?" in the latest issue of the NGS Quarterly. 

Tony's article obviously covers much of the same information but then goes into a more detailed and more in-depth description of Slave Schedules. Tony's article begins with:

"Before the Civil War the majority of African Americans in the United States were enslaved - the property of their enslavers. When tracing an enslaved ancestor it is essential to identify the former owner. Many researchers use a surname taken from an 1850 or 1860 federal census slave schedule to help identify their African American ancestor of that surname. However, slave schedules may not correctly distinguish owners from employers. Other genealogical records better identify the owner of an enslaved African American ancestor."

Tony's article then goes on to provide numerous hints on how to identify the correct surname.

If you are researching Slave Schedules, make sure you check Tony's article in the NGS Quarterly..

I found an interesting article written by Jillian Wilson and published in the Yahoo! News web site (at https://tinyurl.com/ncv6uzzb):

Are you afraid of the dark? You are not alone with that very normal and natural fear. 

Between horror movies and ghost stories, the dark is often associated with scary things. And for many people, that association can lead to actual fear of the dark — especially in kids.

There is a real reason behind this very common fear, and it goes way beyond the ghost stories and scary movies you’ve heard and seen (although they are part of it, too).

Here, experts share why many adults and children are afraid of the dark.

Being afraid of the dark is known as a “prepared fear.”

“I would see a fear of the dark as what we call a prepared fear,” said Martin Antony, professor of psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University and author of “The Anti-Anxiety Program.” “What that means is we’re prepared or predisposed to develop fears of some things more than others.”

These prepared fears stem from what would have been dangerous to our prehistoric ancestors — things like heights, spiders, snakes and the dark.

“We were probably built throughout evolution, through natural selection, to develop this fear, and the dark would be one of those situations that we’re predisposed to fear more easily,” Antony added.

If there are predators in the dark, you probably can’t see them, and this is as true today as it was for our ancestors thousands of years ago.

The full story is much longer. You can read the entire article at: https://tinyurl.com/ncv6uzzb.

The following announcement was written by the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA):

Following a long-term development plan, the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA) has unveiled its new branding, to reflect its position within the industry and prospects for the future.

Founded in 1968 as a membership organisation to represent the best of independent professional genealogists and historical researchers, AGRA’s logo had been in use for over fifty years, and one of the outcomes of the development plan was recognition of the need to create a new look to better reflect the dynamic organisation that AGRA has become.

In consultation with its membership, AGRA’s council and marketing committee selected Rochester based design company, The Branding Fox, to bring about the new identity. Focusing on a contemporary style the new design demonstrates how members make connections throughout the research community, also reflecting the many diverse approaches to genealogical research such as the ever-changing technical demands of genetic genealogy or reflecting other specialisms such as House Histories.

The new brand, which has also been rolled out across the AGRA website (www.agra.org.uk), is just part of the current marketing strategy that AGRA has developed to reflect its vibrancy, activeness and growth for the future. By significantly rebranding, AGRA and its membership are looking forward to continuing to promote the core values of providing clients with genealogical excellence and research of the highest standards.

Commenting on the rebrand and outlook for the future, AGRA Chair, Gill Thomas, said:

‘AGRA has been representing independent professional genealogists for over 50 years. Although our membership works with records from the past, we are a vibrant forward-looking organisation and the time has come for our logo to reflect this. We are at the centre of the genealogical community, making connections and our members continue to offer excellence in research.’

The rebrand comes after a successful year of development which has seen Dr Sophie Kay become the first recipient of the annual Dr John Burt Bursary, Joe Saunders and Alexander Briggs appointed as Social Media Ocer and Communications Ocer respectively and the creation of Associate representation on AGRA Council with Richard Holt being voted into the role in June.

With AGRA membership at an all-time high, it is anticipated that the re-brand will be the first of several initiatives, whilst retaining the core AGRA strengths valued both by its membership and their clients.

Note: This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, thousands of genealogists are taking my advice and storing backup copies of their valuable files "off site" in the cloud. This article is about a new announcement about a major increase in free cloud storage:

Warning: This article contains personal opinions.

From Slashdot.org:

Generically, passkeys refer to various schemes for storing authenticating information in hardware, a concept that has existed for more than a decade. What's different now is that Microsoft, Apple, Google, and a consortium of other companies have unified around a single passkey standard shepherded by the FIDO Alliance. Not only are passkeys easier for most people to use than passwords; they are also completely resistant to credential phishing, credential stuffing, and similar account takeover attacks. 

On Monday, PayPal said US-based users would soon have the option of logging in using FIDO-based passkeys, joining Kayak, eBay, Best Buy, CardPointers, and WordPress as online services that will offer the password alternative. In recent months, Microsoft, Apple, and Google have all updated their operating systems and apps to enable passkeys. Passkey support is still spotty. Passkeys stored on iOS or macOS will work on Windows, for instance, but the reverse isn't yet available. In the coming months, all of that should be ironed out, though. 

Passkeys work almost identically to the FIDO authenticators that allow us to use our phones, laptops, computers, and Yubico or Feitian security keys for multi-factor authentication. Just like the FIDO authenticators stored on these MFA devices, passkeys are invisible and integrate with Face ID, Windows Hello, or other biometric readers offered by device makers. There's no way to retrieve the cryptographic secrets stored in the authenticators short of physically dismantling the device or subjecting it to a jailbreak or rooting attack. Even if an adversary was able to extract the cryptographic secret, they still would have to supply the fingerprint, facial scan, or -- in the absence of biometric capabilities -- the PIN that's associated with the token. What's more, hardware tokens use FIDO's Cross-Device Authentication flow, or CTAP, which relies on Bluetooth Low Energy to verify the authenticating device is in close physical proximity to the device trying to log in.

"Users no longer need to enroll each device for each service, which has long been the case for FIDO (and for any public key cryptography)," said Andrew Shikiar, FIDO's executive director and chief marketing officer. "By enabling the private key to be securely synced across an OS cloud, the user needs to only enroll once for a service, and then is essentially pre-enrolled for that service on all of their other devices. This brings better usability for the end-user and -- very significantly -- allows the service provider to start retiring passwords as a means of account recovery and re-enrollment." 

In other words: "Passkeys just trade WebAuthn cryptographic keys with the website directly," says Ars Review Editor Ron Amadeo. "There's no need for a human to tell a password manager to generate, store, and recall a secret -- that will all happen automatically, with way better secrets than what the old text box supported, and with uniqueness enforced." 

If you're eager to give passkeys a try, you can use this demo site created by security company Hanko.

The following announcement was written by folks at the Internet Archive:

Introducing Democracy’s Library

Tara Calishain is the author of hundreds of "Search Gizmos." Here is her announcement of her latest free offering:

The amount of genealogy content on the Internet is amazing, but it’s a bit hard to search on the open Web. Especially if you’re doing something like looking up obituary notices and your relatives have common names.

I can’t give your relatives new names, but I can make a tool that narrows down the scope of your results and makes finding obituaries easier. So I did. It’s called Obit Magnet and you can find it at https://searchgizmos.com/obit-magnet/ .

It’s easy to use. Enter a name and the date of death for the person you’re searching for, and Obit Magnet makes searches for that name for Google Books (newspapers only), Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, and Chronicling America. Instead of making the searches open-ended, though, Obit Magnet makes searches for a 7-day span after the date of death and a 15-span if the 7-day span doesn’t catch the obituary.

If the person you’re searching has a middle name, use it in the search. Obit Magnet will automatically create searches with and without a middle name. If you’re searching for a married woman and you have her middle name, enter her full name like this: firstname middlename maidenname lastname. Obit Magnet will automatically generate a full complement of name variations for your search. Here’s what part of the result for John James Smith looks like: