The following is an announcement from MyHeritage as published in the MyHeritage Blog:

Valentine’s Day is a celebration of love, and what better time could there be to explore the love stories of your ancestors? For a limited time only, we’re offering free access to all marriage records on MyHeritage! The records will be free to search and view from February 13–19, 2023.

Search marriage records on MyHeritage for free

Beyond the romance factor, marriage records contain a wealth of genealogical information and can help paint a more complete picture of your family’s stories. You may learn how old the bride and groom’s age at the time of marriage, where the bride and groom lived, when and/or where they were born, the names of their parents, where their parents were born, what their occupations were, and more.

MyHeritage is home to 194 marriage record collections containing 614 million records from all over the world, some of which include beautifully scanned images, and some of which are exclusive to MyHeritage. Since last Valentine’s Day, we’ve added 30 new collections containing around 14 million records from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, France, Finland, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and other countries.

Normally, a Complete or Data plan is required to view these records, but for 6 days only, you’ll be able to search and view them even if you don’t have a paid subscription. Free registration to MyHeritage will be required for non-MyHeritage users.

Enjoy!

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com:

(+) CDs Are Not Forever

Facing Up to the Long-term Future of Your Genealogy Society

Audrey Collins, R.I.P.

Access the GPC eBook Library at Your Convenience With GPC's New Subscription Platform

Do Police Have Access to Your DNA? What to Know About Investigative Genetic Genealogy

Gramps - Free Genealogy Software

Pharos Tutors Releases New Two-Part Beginners’ Course

USCIS Genealogy Program Fee Fight (Again)

Codebreakers Find and Decode Lost Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots

Mapping the Stories of Formerly Enslaved Black London, Ontario Residents Focus of New Research

Augusta Genealogical Society presents “Finding Dan and Jane: A Case Study in African American Genealogy”

Bosnia’s Jewish Community Putting Together an Archive for an Eventual Museum

The Hidden Truth in Viola Davis' Family Tree

U.K. Veterans Data Dashboard Live

Digital Access to a Collection of Rare Revolution-Era Books and Publications

TheGenealogist Adds More Than 342,500 to Their 1939 Register, Opening Previously Closed Records

FindmyPast Adds Nearly 60,000 New Records

Recently Added and Updated Collections on Ancestry.com

Your Blood Type Affects Your Risk of Early Stroke, Scientists Find

Rent a 1950 Cadillac Hearse Edition

Historian Eli Tauber, leading the project, says it will be a challenge to piece together family histories and destinies that cover 500 years.

As their numbers dwindle, Bosnia’s Jewish community is creating an archive of Balkan Jewish history, including documents, photographs, artifacts, and genealogies to preserve the Bosnian Jewish story.

The Jewish Community of Bosnia Herzegovina group acquired a 7,500 square-foot space in downtown Sarajevo in the fall, with the hopes of turning the eventual archive into a museum.

Eli Tauber, 72, who has written several books on Bosnian Jewish culture and history, is leading the project.

“Our idea is to write the history of the Jewish people in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Tauber told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But this is not so easy, we are talking about 500 years of history and not just history but people, families, and the destinies of all those people across 500 years.”

Today, at most 900 Jews live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, around 500 in the capital Sarajevo. But before the Holocaust, Sarajevo was about 20% Jewish and known lovingly as “little Jerusalem” for its variety of synagogues, mosques and churches — both Catholic and Orthodox — all in close proximity.

Sephardic Jews first arrived in the region during the time of the Ottoman Empire, after fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Ashkenazi Jews followed suit when the area fell under Austro-Hungarian rule in the 1870s.

Tauber said he hopes the archive — which is still at least two years away from completion — will help reconnect all those who left to the country they or their ancestors had come from.

“What is important is that at the end we will establish some computer program with family trees, for all those people who have their roots in Bosnia, and find all that they did,” Tauber said.

You can read more in an article by David I. Klein published in The Times of Israel at: https://tinyurl.com/t7euca5m.

The (UK) Office for Veterans’ Affairs (OVA) has launched a Veterans Data Dashboard with information on ex-armed forces personnel.

It brings together data from different public bodies for the first time, provides scope for veterans and the public to learn about the community, and information on support services.

Functions include the ability to scroll through data on issues such as population, housing, mental health and employment.

The OVA said it will be updated regularly.

Minister of Veterans’ Affairs Johnny Mercer MP said: “In order to step up services for veterans and standardise support across the country, we need a better picture of the community we’re serving.

“So it’s a key part of our job at the Office for Veterans’ Affairs to improve the data we have on the veteran community and today shows that we’re making good strides forward.

“Data and evidence is at the heart of our veterans policy and I encourage everyone to check out the new dashboard.”

Transformation package

The launch of the dashboard has come a year after the Government announced a £44 million digital transformation package to support veterans. This pointed towards the development of a new portal for access to compensation and pension services and work on a digital verification service to prove veteran status.

Alongside the release, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has published findings from the 2021 National Census, in which demographics characteristics of the veteran population were covered for the first time – through a question on whether the respondent was a veteran.

The data shows that of the total (just over 1.85 million) UK armed forces veteran population in England and Wales, 13.6% were women and 86.4% were men – and that their overall health was similar to that of the general population when adjusted for age and gender.

The ONS is working to further analyse the data.

The following was written by Rich Venezia, a member of the The Records Not Revenue Team:

Here we go again! A few years ago, I founded Records Not Revenue to combat U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS)' outrageous proposed fee hikes to their Genealogy Program. 

USCIS has again proposed substantial increases to the fees required to access historical records held by the Genealogy Program. Many of these records should already be available to the public at the National Archives.

As you may or may not know, USCIS holds tens of millions of records of 19th- and 20th-century immigrants to the United States. These records are unique and can be found nowhere else. USCIS now wants to raise these fees to as high as $340 for a single document. This comes when the wait times for requests and customer service has never been worse.

Please make your voice heard and help stop this fee increase by submitting a comment about the proposed rule. Comments are due March 6th!

The Records Not Revenue website has been updated with information on the proposed rule, a summary of the issues, and comment starters to get you thinking. Please follow the below steps to take action:

Step 1: Review the proposed rule here, and jump to the Genealogy Program section here. You can also read the Summary of the Issues on our website.

Step 2: Write your comments, addressing the issues listed on the website or any issue you think is important. See comment starters on our website.

Step 3: Send your comments BY MONDAY 6 MARCH 2023 to

a.     Federal Rulemaking Portal and refer to DHS Docket No. USCIS-2021-0010-0001. Follow instructions for submitting comments; and

b.     If a US resident or citizen, save and send a copy of your comments to your US Senators and Representative, and refer to DHS Docket No. USCIS-2021-0010-0001. Tell them you care about preserving access to federal records!

You do not need to be a US resident nor citizen to submit a public comment. Any interested party can make their voice heard.

The more individual and unique comments USCIS receives on this proposed rule, the better. Please share our website with your local genealogical and historical societies and anyone else who may be interested in submitting a comment. If you are on the Board of a genealogical society, we would very much appreciate you sending an e-blast to your members.

We are also doing two webinars over the next couple of weeks to discuss this topic and walk folks through the issues and the comment process. Our event for JewishGen is Wed 02/15 at 2 PM EST (free to register) and the event for NGS MemberConnects is Wed 02/22 at 8 PM EST (registration is for NGS members only, I believe).

Thank you for taking action! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. 

 Rich Venezia

The Records Not Revenue team

The many friends and acquaintances of Audrey Collins will be saddened to hear that Audrey passed away a few days ago.

Researcher, author, speaker and records specialist, she was renowned for her good humour, her warm and friendly character and her in-depth knowledge of family history. 

Audrey worked as a freelance researcher for 15 years before joining the staff of The National Archives.

She was employed at The National Archives (TNA) at Kew in England for many years and was a key individual there. One of the things she delighted in was conducting personalized tours of The National Archives for visiting foreigners, myself included. It was the highlight of that particular trip to England and I am sure the same could be said of many other similar tours she conducted over the years.

Audrey was the author of three titles in the ‘Basic Facts’ series of family history guides, co-wrote The Complete Guide to Tracing Your Family History and has also contributed sections in the Family History Companion, and Census: the expert guide. She regularly gave talks at family history events and conferences in the UK, Ireland, the USA, and on cruise ships. She greatly increased the knowledge of thousands of conference attendees who heard her speak.

She was especially noted for her willingness to help anyone and everyone whose path she crossed.

Audrey's research interests included: the history and operation of the General Register Office, Civil Registration and the UK census; Scottish and Irish records in The National Archives; newspapers and periodicals and retail history.

The genealogy community has lost a true legend amongst our community.

Rest in peace, Audrey.

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

CD discs (often called “optical discs) have been commercially available since the 1980s. Sadly, many computer users have inserted their older CDs into a computer and found that the discs no longer work. 

Sometimes it is a software problem: the old software for the CD might not work on a newer version of Windows or Macintosh. However, the most common problem seems to be physical: the CDs themselves have microscopic mold or "rot" that ruins the surface and prevents the data from being read. Even worse, there is no cure. If the data is bad now, it will only get worse. There is no reliable way to restore data from a defective CD.

Some experts claim that CDs will last up to 200 years. However, practical experience shows that hasn't happened in the first 30 or 40 years. To be sure, not all CDs have gone bad. Only a percentage of them have failed so far. Perhaps the MAJORITY will last 200 years or the AVERAGE will be 200 years, but we know it will not be true of 100% of the discs. However, nobody knows how to predict which disc will fail next. The CD that is most valuable to you might last another 170 years, or it may fail tomorrow.

We do know that CDs created one at a time in a PC do not last as long as CDs created in a factory, where hundreds of them are made at once. Those backups you made or that family genealogy book you wrote may not last very long on a CD you "burned" at home.

To understand what limits the life span of optical discs, let’s look at how they are built. What all optical discs have in common is the presence of three key layers:

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/13093182.

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 following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

TheGenealogist.co.uk has just added over 342,500 new records to the 1939 Register for England and Wales. Researchers can now see all people born in 1922 opened under the 100 year rule along with those who have passed away since the last release.

TheGenealogist’s version of the 1939 Register is matched to its powerful mapping tool, Map Explorer™ so that researchers can see more accurately where their ancestor’s house was situated on maps down to house, street or parish level, giving more detail than ever before. With its SmartSearch family historians can discover even more from the records in the 1939 Register not just where their ancestors were living as the Second World War began in Britain, but potential birth and death records.

 Sir Christopher Lee in the 1939 Register as a 17 year old

TheGenealogist’s unique and powerful search tools and SmartSearch technology offers a hugely flexible way to look for your ancestors at this time. Searching the 1939 Register on TheGenealogist also allows researchers to take advantage of some powerful search tools to break down brick walls. For example there is the ability to find ancestors in 1939 by using keywords, such as the individual’s occupation or their date of birth. Researchers may also search for an addressand then jump straight to the household or, if you are struggling to find a family, you can even search using as many of their forenames as you know.

Having discovered a record in the 1939 Register, TheGenealogist then gives its subscribers the ability to click on the street name and so view all the residents in the road. This feature can be used to potentially discover relatives living in the area and can therefore boost your research with just a click.

The 342,543 newly opened records from the 1939 Register, linked to the detailed mapping tool on TheGenealogist, is a tremendous way for family historians to discover where their forebears lived in September 1939.

See TheGenealogist’s article: The “Count” and the Contessa found in the 1939 Register

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/the-count-and-the-contessa-found-in-the-1939-register-1661/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

Sidney Lapidus ’59 has donated a collection of rare Revolution-era books and publications to Princeton University as part of the Venture Forward campaign, enabling Princeton University Library (PUL) to greatly enrich the Sid Lapidus ’59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution. The collection includes more than 2,700 original books, atlases, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines relating to human and political rights, liberty, and independence around the time of the American Revolution. Lapidus also made a financial gift that enabled the PUL team to digitize the collection, making it keyword-searchable and openly available to the world.

“We are deeply grateful to Sid Lapidus for enabling scholars and students to access a deeper perspective on the ideas that animated the Enlightenment and the American Revolution through the digitization of his vast personal collection of books,” said President Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83. “His loyal support of Firestone Library and his love of literature, history and the artistry of books will benefit generations of Princetonians.”

Lapidus has collected rare books and other publications for more than 60 years. His first purchase inspired what became the theme of his collection. The summer after he graduated from Princeton, he visited London. “Peering through a dusty bookstore window in central London, I saw a 1792 edition of Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man,’” Lapidus said. “It was less than $5 — about the most I could afford at the time. I bought it and that basically got me started collecting.”

Paine was already a semi-prominent figure in Lapidus’ life. The Thomas Paine Cottage, where the “Common Sense” writer lived near the end of his life, is located across the street from Lapidus’ high school in New Rochelle, New York. “I had some excellent teachers at New Rochelle High School and when they taught us Paine, I thought, ‘This guy speaks to me,’” Lapidus said. “I felt like he was my neighbor, so seeing that book in London brought me back home in a way. Of all the pieces in my collection, that was always the one that meant the most to me.”

Lapidus’ personal collection also includes rare books and pamphlets related to the abolitionist movement as well as the expansion of religious liberty and civil rights, particularly for the Jewish community on both sides of the Atlantic, and he has donated portions of his collection to other institutions. He provided pieces from his collection to help establish the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Trans-Atlantic Slavery at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Lapidus and his wife, Ruth, have also made numerous gifts to NYU Langone Health, including volumes from his private collection that now reside in the Sid and Ruth Lapidus Health Sciences Library at NYU Langone.