Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library is pleased to announce the launch of a new online resource, the Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) Digital Archive. This resource is the product of an ongoing, three-year initiative at Columbia University Libraries to digitize and make available more than 15,000 residential drawings from the Frank Lloyd Wright archival collections.

The FLW Digital Archive supports the Libraries’ commitment to make collections as accessible as possible for in-person and online use. It facilitates global access to high-resolution images for use in teaching, research, and historic preservation worldwide. The archive launches with over 10,000 high-resolution images and will continue to expand as drawings are digitized, with an estimated completion date of spring 2026.

“We are immensely proud to make these digitized collections broadly available for public and scholarly use,” said Teresa Harris, Director of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. “The residential projects were at the very heart of Frank Lloyd Wright’s practice as Wright developed many of the enduring themes of his work in the context of designs for houses.  These themes including the meaning of organic architecture, the importance of place and materials, the reliance on hands-on learning, and an emphasis on affordable building techniques continue to resonate with researchers and enthusiasts alike. Public access to these collections honors the spirit of openness and iteration in Wright’s work.”

For example, the project sheds light on the many women who were instrumental in making design decisions for their homes, but were previously absent from the residences’ public descriptions. Archival research and enhanced item-level cataloging now allow each residence to be searchable by all known client names, rather than only one head-of-household. As she is no longer veiled under the moniker of “Mrs. Arthur Miller,” users will be able to search by Marilyn Monroe’s own name to discover the former couple’s iconic unbuilt residence, replete with expansive entertaining areas and dedicated space for costume storage.

The archive will also soon be available on Columbia Libraries’ website and will continue to grow as already-digitized materials outside of this project are added. Avery Library also aspires to digitize and make publicly available further Frank Lloyd Wright materials including non-residential drawings, photographs and correspondence.

The following is a press release issued by the Institute of National Remembrance (in Poland):

On 6 September 2024, a press conference was held at the President Lech Kaczynski Central History Point in Warsaw, regarding the IPN project “Personal losses and victims of repression under German occupation in 1939-1945.” Its result is a publicly accessible online database known as the straty.pl database.

The database allows the users to set queries (searching by type, place and year of repression). It can also be used by historians and journalists. It does not contain scans of documents on the basis of which the data are entered, but it indicates the places where these documents can be found.

Since January 2020, 912,000 new records have been entered into the straty.pl database. Today there are 5.5 million records in our database. There is no family in Poland that has not been affected by the tragedy of World War II to some extent. I would like to appeal to all those who have such a family history to turn to the Institute of National Remembrance so that our work can be completed next year. On the one hand, it is a database of materials that are in the IPN Archive, prosecution materials, investigative materials from the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, but on the other hand, it is also information that comes from you all, said the IPN President during the conference.

The Director of the IPN Archive Marzena Kruk informed that the IPN archival collection amounts to nearly 4 km of archival materials that relate to the period of World War II.

As of 2 September 2024, the database provides information on 5,565,892 victims and people repressed by the German regime, including Archbishop Antoni Julian Nowowiejski, Henryk Ząbek, Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann, as well as two women: Irena Szydlowska and Anna Stolowska, whose wedding rings were found as a result of search work in the Valley of Death in Chojnice.

The press conference was accompanied by an exhibition of documents and artifacts prepared by the IPN Archive, including files stored in matchboxes.

We encourage you to report information about your relatives repressed by the Germans, who are not included in our database yet. We would like also to encourage other institutions to join the project by providing information.

Video of the conference on the IPNtv channel: https://straty.pl/.

California investigators have utilized new DNA technology to finally identify the identity of a man found in a waterway in 2001.

Authorities announced last week Craig William Ott was the person found in Minor Slough on Ryer Island near Rio Vista in Solano County on March 11, 2001.

After discovering the body, investigators spent the next year trying to identify the person, but ultimately were not successful. 

However, as identification technology advanced over the next 20-plus years, investigators opted to reopen the pursuit of identifying the body in 2023.

This decision was made as part of an initiative called the Doe Cold Case Project, which seeks to use new advancements in science and technology to identify previously unidentified bodies. The project is run by the Solano County Coroner’s Office to re-open and re-investigate cases of people who haven’t been identified in several years. 

Authorities exhumed the body and spent over a year trying to find an identity. Ultimately, new DNA testing and forensic genetic genealogy enabled the forensic staff and coroner to identify the body as Ott.

You can read more in an article in the forensicmag web site at: https://tinyurl.com/4w8mee7h.

The remains of two women were discovered back in 1994 in one case and in 2013 in the other. Since then, police had no idea who they were, let alone who killed them.

Albuquerque police say they were able to use DNA from the victim’s remains and turn that into a profile. From there, they’re able to upload the profiles to genetic testing sites like 23andMe.

If they get a match, then they start the process of tracking down the victim’s family.

“You can take DNA that’s left behind at a crime scene or that from a victim in this case, and we turn it into an ancestral profile,” said APD Commander Kyle Hartsock. 

It’s science based on chance.

“As you’re doing these investigations, new people can upload their DNA. So one day you log in, and all of a sudden you have a first cousin who tested, and yesterday you only have a third cousin,” said Hartsock. 

Hartsock says the department and the FBI are using genealogy to solve cold cases.

“It gets us on a path, it gives us a lead,” Hartsock said. 

After uploading a victim or suspect’s DNA to a genetic testing site, they wait for a hit. From there, Hartsock says they do old-fashioned detective work.

“You have to get very close to actually confirm who it is. And then, while talking with the families, they said, ‘Oh yeah, we haven’t seen our daughter or granddaughter since this time,’” said Hartsock.

APD and the FBI were able to do this, this year, identifying Carmela Vivian Duran, and Terry Matthews as the remains discovered in 1994 and 2013.

You can read more in an article by Monica Logroño published in the kob.com web site at: https://shorturl.at/Am6kV

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

Adobe's popular PDF file format is often used in genealogy work. Many of the CD-ROM disks of interest to genealogists have been published in PDF format, as has much of the information found on genealogy web sites. 

The Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the de facto standard for electronic documentation distribution. Once a file is created in PDF format, anyone can read your document across a broad range of hardware and software, and it will look exactly as you intended — with layout, fonts, color, links, and images intact. In short, it will look like a document published with a desktop publishing program. It will look the same on any operating system, including Windows, Macintosh, Chromebook, Linux, UNIX, and even handheld computers. Best of all, the required software to view your PDF document is completely free. As a result, everyone can read your document. 

PDF files used to be considered to be "secure." That is, nobody could ever take your PDF document, import it into a word processor, and then use your data. However, that has now changed. In fact, you can now easily convert PDF files to Word .DOC files, .TXT files. or to other formats.

This conversion capability is new. As an illustration, here is an excerpt from an article I published 22 years ago in this newsletter that shows the state of the PDF format at that time. In the February 25, 2002, edition of this newsletter, I wrote:

“By setting security options in Acrobat, the author can give his or her PDF documents a certain level of copy protection. One of the options available within Adobe Acrobat program that creates PDF files will prevent users from copying text or images, effectively disabling the normal ‘copy-and-paste’ functions. Other options prevent users from printing the document or changing the features that the author has set. You can even set a password to prevent viewing by would-be users who do not have the password. To be sure, anyone who can view a document can always re-type the information by hand. However, PDF files make it very difficult to electronically extract bits and pieces of information from within a document.

“I should point out that this protection is not 100% guaranteed. In fact, sophisticated hackers have succeeded in ‘cracking’ Adobe PDF files and extracting the original information. However, a lot of software skills are needed to ‘crack’ a PDF file. Even owners of the Adobe software that creates PDF files cannot easily ‘crack’ a PDF file created by someone else. Only a handful of people have ever managed to open a PDF file, and one of those even spent a few days in jail for his activity. While not 100% safe, you can assume that, if you select the proper options, there is about a 99.99999% chance that a PDF document you create will never be ‘cracked’ by anyone else. Few people are willing to risk incarceration for extracting data from your genealogy PDF file!”

My, how the world has changed in the past 22 years! Today, there are a number of programs that will quickly and easily extract (or “crack”) data from a PDF file. Adobe has since given up all ideas of protecting their file format. Nobody is in danger of being incarcerated in 2024 for "cracking" a PDF file. (Of course, copyright laws still apply to any converted file.)

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/13403556 (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. 

A 54-year-old Augusta man will serve over 25 years in prison for a sexual assault that happened back in 2007.

Ted Foy’s first appearance (KSN Photo)

The case was finally solved in May 2023 when Wichita police made an arrest using DNA evidence collected during the initial investigation and genealogy websites where users had uploaded their DNA data to identify Ted Foy. It is the first time the Wichita Police Department has used this process to identify a suspect.

In March, Foy pled guilty to aggravated criminal sodomy, rape, aggravated sexual battery and attempted rape for the attack in southeast Wichita. As part of his plea agreement, Foy had to disclose how he chose his victim and knew where she lived.

District Judge Christopher Magana sentenced Foy to 310 months in prison.

In a remarkable discovery, researchers have uncovered a vast trove of indigenous Amazigh legal contracts, known as “arraten,” in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

The documents, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, span a period of approximately 400 years and provide an unprecedented window into the social, economic, and legal landscape of Amazigh communities.

The discovery was made by antique dealer Hamza Elbahraoui and former professor Igor Kliakhandler during their exploration of the remote mountain range.

The researchers stumbled upon the arraten manuscripts in various states of preservation, scattered in abandoned chambers of ancient granary fortresses called “agadirs.”

Agadirs, which dot the Atlas Mountains, served as communal storage spaces for Amazigh families. Each agadir contains numerous chambers, with some housing up to 300 cellars.

The researchers estimate that the Atlas Mountains are home to between 25,000 and 100,000 such chambers, of which they explored a mere 1-2%.

The arraten documents were found recorded on both wood and paper. Wooden tablets, crafted from locally sourced argan trees, make up the majority of the discovered manuscripts.

The researchers conservatively estimate that at least 100,000 wooden arraten exist, with the number potentially reaching 500,000. Additionally, between 40,000 and 150,000 paper arraten were likely produced.

Analysis of the arraten texts revealed that they serve as legal contracts or deeds, covering a wide range of matters such as property transactions, marriage arrangements, loans, inheritance, and intertribal agreements.

The discovery is remarkable, as the documents provide valuable insights into the functioning of Amazigh society and the role of customary law.

Despite the cultural and historical significance of the arraten, the manuscripts have remained largely unknown and understudied.

You can read more in an article in the moroccoworldnews web site at: https://shorturl.at/cIHvl.

Russian forces have damaged several ancient burial mounds on the front line in southern Ukraine, potentially violating the Hague and Geneva Conventions, according to research from the Ukraine Conflict Observatory published on Sept. 4.

Ukraine is home to many of these ancient graves, known as kurgans or mohyly. The mounds can be up to 20 meters tall and date back to as far as 3,000 BC, containing archeological treasures relating to prehistoric life in Ukraine, including the Scythian era. 

The Conflict Observatory analyzed open geospatial data to find that the two sites in Vasylivka district in Zaporizhzhia Oblast have been damaged under occupation by the Russian Armed Forces.

"The damage includes the construction of military infrastructure at the archaeological sites and the creation of a large, lewd geoglyph in the shape of a phallus in an adjacent field," the report said. 

"The use of the sites for military purposes places heritage at risk of incurring additional damage from the conflict."

Damage incurred separately from the construction of military installations "may indicate looting or destruction of the mound's associated artifacts and ancient remains."

Since cultural heritage is entitled to protection under international law, the damage to the sites and potential looting may constitute a violation of international humanitarian law and the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the report said.

You can read more in an article by Elsa Court  in the kyivindependent web site at: https://kyivindependent.com/russian-forces-ancient-burial-mounds/. 

Google is testing a new display and user interface for forum content within its search results. “We’re testing a new display for forum content when it appears in search results, allowing people to quickly view top comments and related discussions to help them find useful information and dig deeper,” a Google spokesperson told us.

What is this new display. The new display will highlight the “top comments” on a specific discussion forum thread and then also highlight related discussions on that topic.

Google told us that searchers often want to learn from others’ experiences with a topic, and because of that, Google is trying new ways to highlight those experiences in Google Search. This is in addition to the “Discussions and Forums” feature and the Forums filter, previously named perspectives.

Google has shown “top answers” for years, a decade actually, but this new UI shows more to the searcher. Google told us also that in some cases, Google has agreements from a forum to show these additional details. I assume this is about the Reddit partnership. But Google added that it surfaces content from hundreds of forums and other communities across the web.

You can read more in an article by Barry Schwartz published in the searchengineland web site at: https://shorturl.at/Blbek.