The following announcement was written by The National Archives of Great Britain:

The Cartographic Branch is pleased to announce that RG 242: Target Dossiers Pertaining to the British Isles, 1938-1945 (NAID 3371016) has now been fully digitized and is available for viewing and download through the National Archives Catalog.

The records in this series are a subset of RG 242: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, 1675-1958. The dossiers, which are aerial photographs and maps of German identified bombing targets, are arranged by country and, thereunder, by location. Other series, not yet digitized, include France, Iceland, Egypt, Yugoslavia, and Iraq just to name a few!

This series relates specifically to the British Isles is made up of over 1,100 images.  Each dossier, in the most basic sense, is composed of three parts: a map, an overprinted aerial photograph, and a site report (in German). However, there are variances in the number of actual documents in each dossier.  Some dossiers have as few as a single document out of the three while others will have dozens of various versions of the documents included.  

Below is an example of a typical dossier from this series. This one focuses on Edinburgh, Scotland.

RG 242: Target Dossiers Pertaining to the British Isles, 1938-1945. Edinburgh, Scotland. Dossier GB-53-88. 1939. NAID 283024728.

RG 242: Target Dossiers Pertaining to the British Isles, 1938-1945. Edinburgh, Scotland. Dossier GB-53-88. 1939. NAID 283024728.

RG 242: Target Dossiers Pertaining to the British Isles, 1938-1945. Edinburgh, Scotland. Dossier GB-53-88. 1939. NAID 283024728.

In addition to the maps and aerial photos being detailed, the dossiers also provide a wealth of other information printed on the individual pages.  Coordinates, scale, date, locations, and dossier number are printed on each and every sheet making this series incredibly easy to work with even if you do not speak German!

Queen Camilla traveled back into the past with a little help from a historian — and had something funny to say about it!

The Queen Consort, 75, surprised Adam Simpson-York, who runs the Facebook page Medals Going Home, with a personal thank-you note. Simpson-York had recently mailed Buckingham Palace a photo he found on eBay of Queen Camilla's ancestor, her great-great-grandmother Edrica Faulkner, and he was delighted to receive a reply from the royal.

"Many thanks for the photograph of my great, great-grandmother. It is the first time I have ever seen her picture, I must say she looks a bit sad in it!" the Queen Consort wrote. "With best wishes, Camilla," she signed the note on Clarence House stationery, stamped with her new royal cypher.

Simpson-York said he was thrilled to receive such a genuine reply from the royal after mailing in the picture on Jan. 4.

You can read the full story at https://people.com/royals/queen-camilla-reply-collector-found-ancestor-photo/.

Today is Groundhog Day in the United States

Every February 2nd, residents of the United States turn their attention to the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. A group of men in top hats put a groundhog on a log in front of hundreds of people and wait for it to notice or not notice its own shadow. If Phil the groundhog sees his shadow, we're supposed to have six more weeks of winter. If he doesn't see it, winter is supposed to end earlier.

NOTE: The weather forecast for today for Punxsutawney calls for “mostly cloudy” skies. So what does that mean for how long winter is supposed to last?

A groundhog is also known as a woodchuck. It is a member of the family of rodents known as marmots.

A rodent in Pennsylvania, watched by men in top hats, can tell what the weather will be like for the next several weeks? Sounds strange to me! Actually, it is based upon the traditions of some of our ancestors.

Ancient Pagans celebrated the holiday Imbolc on the midpoint between the solstice and the equinox, which was considered the real beginning of spring. On our modern calendar, that day is February 2. Early Christians celebrated Candlemas on February 2nd, which marked the end of Mary's 40-day purification period after the birth of Jesus.

Celebrating the real beginning of spring makes sense to me but what about the groundhog? It seems that different animals have been used as weather prognosticators in various times throughout history. In much of Europe, the bear was used the predict the weather. If a bear awoke from winter hibernation, it was considered to be an omen that spring would soon be here.

However, Germany used the badger as its prognosticator. An old diary from 1841 shows that German immigrants brought the Candlemas tradition of weather prediction to Pennsylvania but said it was a the groundhog that could predict weather. Perhaps badgers were rare in colonial Pennsylvania.

NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, knows something about weather forecasting. Its web site states:

"The trail of Phil’s history leads back to Clymer H. Freas, city editor of the Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper. Inspired by a group of local groundhog hunters — whom he would dub the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club — Freas declared Phil as America’s official forecasting groundhog in 1887. As he continued to embellish the groundhog's story year after year, other newspapers picked it up, and soon everyone looked to Punxsutawney Phil for the prediction of when spring would return to the country."

In the years following the release of Groundhog Day, a 1993 film starring Bill Murray, crowds numbering as high as 30,000 have visited Gobbler's Knob, a tiny hill in Punxsutawney where the ceremony takes place.

However, I don't think any of those early-morning revelers have any idea of what next week's weather will be.

A new email, notepad, and file space service in the cloud is now available. The best part of Skiff is that everything is automatically encrypted. Skiff gives you the power to take your thoughts and ideas to the next level and to communicate freely.

Nobody spies on your email (are the folks who supply GMail paying attention to this?) If someone attempts to access your files stored in Skiff's cloud-based file storage service, they won't be able to read the files because everything is encrypted.

Best of all, you don’t have to pay a thing to use Skiff for end-to-end encrypted email, file sharing, and collaboration. (That includes limited file storage space. Obtaining addition file storage space requires payment.) It’s also very easy to use, but includes advanced features for the technically inclined.

You probably understand that using a popular free email service like Gmail means you pay by losing a degree of privacy. But have you thought about the risks of using cloud storage or collaboration from the same corporate sources? The developers of Skiff started with an encrypted collaboration solution as a private alternative, then expanded to secure file storage and sharing, and finally added encrypted email.

The Skiff team hopes this combination of secure email, file sharing, and collaboration will be attractive enough to wean users off of Google and other large public entities. Using Skiff's impressive combination of free email encryption, private collaboration, and secure file sharing, you'll make a major step toward taking back your privacy.

Skiff offers apps for Macintosh, Android, and Apple's iOS. The company expects to soon bring out a Linux application. There is no announced plan to ever bring out a version for Windows. 

By default, your secure files and email messages reside on Skiff’s secure servers. Communication between those servers and your local app are end-to-end encrypted. But those who like to live on the cutting edge can opt for storage in the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS)(Opens in a new window), a distributed secure storage system that’s independent of Skiff. Rather than going to a central server, files stored in the IPFS get broken into chunks, encrypted, and pushed out to different nodes in the IPFS system hosted on multiple servers all around the globe. 

The biggest disadvantages of Skiff in my opinion is the lack of a Windows client and the fact that both the email sender and the recipient must be using Skiff in order to send and receive messages.

If you don't want spying eyes to monitor your communications, you might want to check out Skiff.

Other encrypted data services include Proton (Mail, Drive, and VPN), Tutanota, StartMail, Private-Mail, SecureMyMail, PreVeil, Hushmail, CounterMail, Runbox, Mailfence, Posteo, Mailbox, Zoho Mail, and others. 

You can learn more about Skiff at https://skiff.com/ as well as in  series of YouTube videos at: https://youtu.be/tGaIofzrRDc.

The following is a press release written by Stockton University:

The Alliance Heritage Center will use a new grant to create a public digital database of its collection documenting the history of Jewish farming in southern New Jersey.

The New Jersey Historical Commission recently awarded more than $300,000 to 14 organizations to explore under-represented history in the state, including $24,500 to the Alliance Heritage Center at Stockton University.

The goal of the Alliance Heritage Center is to preserve the history of the first successful Jewish farming village in the United States, the Alliance Colony in Pittsgrove Township, Salem County.

The center will use the grant to support a one-year project to create a public digital database to house its collections, said Patricia Chappine, adjunct professor of History.

“We’re very excited to start this project,” said Chappine, who works with the center and its director, Thomas Kinsella. “Adding our collections to Stockton’s online archives will make our holdings more accessible, expand our community connections and help us preserve the stories of Alliance and Jewish agriculture in the area.”

The Alliance Colony was established in 1882 by 43 original Jewish families fleeing persecution from Russia and Eastern Europe. Chappine said the center’s archives include several physical and digital collections, including manuscripts, naturalization papers, newspapers, deeds, maps, land surveys, synagogue records, photographs and oral history interviews. It also includes the bound writings of Rabbi Moses Bayuk, one of the founding members of the Alliance Colony.

“Telling complex, diverse and nuanced histories will continue to be a priority of the New Jersey History Commission, and this funding is an important next step to achieving that essential goal,” said N.J. Secretary of State Tahesha Way.

The funds are part of New Jersey’s Inclusive History Grant Program (IHGP), which was created to help commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

Chappine said the grants will help create a searchable online database and digital museum using the Preservica archival management software that will be open to the public.

“By expanding access to these collections, we will open these holdings to researchers who can make broad and important connections between our resources and the history of immigration and refugee communities in New Jersey,” she said. “This will ultimately alleviate the shortage of secondary sources available on the subject.”

The center also plans to use a portion of the grant to create interactive virtual exhibits with the help of Stockton students.

Two major gifts to the Stockton University Foundation helped establish the center in 2019. A $500,000 gift from an anonymous donor established a fund for the Elizabeth and Samuel Levin Director of the Alliance Heritage Center. A $200,000 gift from Bernard and Shirlee Greenblatt Brown and their children created a research endowment.

Learn more about the Alliance Heritage Center at: https://stockton.edu/alliance-heritage/.

The following announcement was written by UNC University Libraries:

You can register to attend this panel discussion at: https://unc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_U5LfmlKYRb2C_kDzby9BuA.

Genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences said Tuesday that it will try to resurrect the extinct dodo bird, and it’s received $150 million in new funding to support its “de-extinction” activities.

The dodo was already part of Colossal’s plans by September 2022, but now the company has announced it with all the pomp, circumstance, and seed funding that suggests it will actually go after that goal. The $150 million, the company’s second round of funding, was led by several venture capital firms, including United States Innovative Technology Fund and In-Q-Tel, a VC firm funded by the CIA that first put money into the company in September.

Dodo bird

Adding the dodo to its official docket brings Colossal’s total de-extinction targets to three: the woolly mammoth (the company’s first target species, announced in September 2021), and the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, the largest carnivorous marsupial.

If they can do that with animals, I wonder if they could do the same with humans. I really would like to ask my great-great-grandfather some questions!

Do you think you really understand your family's history? Can you look at an old photograph and guess rather accurately the year in which the photograph was taken? Yes, clothing, hairstyles, and other clues can be very helpful

OK, here is how to check your skill level.

Chronophoto presents the player with a photo and a timeline ranging from 1900 to current times. The closer you get to the exact year of the photograph's creation, the more points you'll be awarded. Some of my answers were spot on, and others were embarrassingly off. You have 5 rounds to prove yourself. 

Chronophoto is available at: https://www.chronophoto.app/

NOTE: This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it is about another interest of mine: Chromebooks. I also believe that many readers of this newsletter share my interest.

Chromebooks are designed to work with Google services first and foremost, but they also work well with everything from Linux apps to cloud gaming platforms. Google is now working to improve Microsoft 365 on Chromebooks.

Google announced that it is working with Microsoft to offer “a guided setup experience that takes them through the process of installing the Microsoft 365 web app and connecting Microsoft OneDrive to their Chromebook Files app.” The new integration will be available sometime in the next few months, and will appear earlier in the Chrome OS Dev and Beta channels.

There aren’t many specific details yet, but it sounds like opening Microsoft Office files from local storage (like a USB drive or the Downloads folder) will display a prompt for setting up Microsoft 365 on your Chromebook. Files that are opened through this method will be moved to Microsoft OneDrive, where the changes will be synchronized in the cloud.