The following announcement was written by the University of South Florida:

A new online exhibit launched today by the University of South Florida's La Florida: The Interactive Digital Archives of the Americas will provide the public with unprecedented insight into the daily lives and relationships of the multi-ethnic population that comprised St. Augustine, Fla. from the 16th-19th centuries. The Florida city is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the continental U.S.

Titled “Lost Voices from America’s Oldest Parish Archive, 1594-1821,” the initiative is making St. Augustine’s diocesan archives digitally accessible for the first time to a global audience. The project is being launched in two phases. Phase I, published on June 6th, includes more than 4,000 pages of ecclesiastical records from America’s first parish. Phase II will be published later this year.

“These records give us biographical sketches and can help us track individuals through time," said J. Michael Francis, the Hough Family Endowed Chair of Florida Studies at USF’s St. Petersburg campus and the executive director of the La Florida project. “When combined with other records from Florida and Spain, we can flesh out stories of individuals that hardly ever appear in historical records, such as women and Native Americans and free and enslaved African Americans.”

The “Lost Voices” initiative is featured on the newly-revamped La Florida digital platform. The platform allows teachers, students, scholars and the general public to research pivotal moments in early Florida history, conduct detailed searches on individuals and demographic changes and create custom infographics from the entire collection.

The collection presently includes baptism, marriage, death and burial records, including the 1801 burial record of Georges Biassou, an early leader of the Haitian Revolution who moved with his family to St. Augustine. Other documents identify the names of dozens of runaway slaves who risked their lives to escape English plantations in search of freedom in Spanish Florida.

Some of the individuals recorded in the parish records were buried in St. Augustine’s historic Tolomato Cemetery. “Lost Voices” will enable historians to connect individuals in the cemetery to their actual historical records and start geotagging events in those individuals’ lives. The people documented in these records will also be added to a searchable population database, allowing users to link individuals to the original records in which they appear.

"Lost Voices" is translating and digitizing thousands of handwritten documents from America’s first parish, providing rare insight into early Florida history.

"This project breaks new ground by giving a voice to those who have been traditionally overlooked by the history books," said Martin Tadlock, regional chancellor of USF's St. Petersburg campus. "By enhancing those complex and nuanced stories through the use of updated technology, Dr. Francis and his team have given all of us a new and fuller understanding of Florida's rich colonial history."

Piecing together clues about the little-known lives of Native Americans, free and enslaved Africans, and conquistadors from Spain, Portugal, Germany, Ireland and elsewhere, La Florida brings early Florida’s diverse population to life through short videos, interactive maps and a searchable population database. It weaves together the lives and events of more than three centuries of Florida’s colonial past, from Juan Ponce de León’s 1513 expedition to 1821, when Florida became a U.S. territory.

“La Florida’s fundamental goal is to combine cutting-edge technology with rigorous historical research in order to share Florida’s colonial history in compelling and innovative ways,” said Rachel Sanderson, associate director of La Florida.

Francis and his team work with academic and cultural institutions to comb through thousands of pages of original documents in archives in Spain, Italy, England, Mexico and the United States. The three-year “Lost Voices” initiative built on the expertise of paleographers, historians and translators to transcribe and translate the entire collection of St. Augustine’s colonial ecclesiastical documents, which are largely written in Spanish, along with hundreds of Latin documents.

“History books are never written about common people that were the fabric of a community, but that in a sense is what the La Florida project is doing for St. Augustine,” said Father Tom Willis, the pastor of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, America’s first parish. “I was born and raised here in St. Augustine, so I have always had a loving connection with St. Augustine history. And what Michael and this project have done is brought it alive in so many wonderful ways.”

The “Lost Voices” project was supported by a $250,000 major initiatives grant from the National Archives and the generous support of the Hough Family Foundation, the Lastinger Family Foundation and the Frank E. Duckwall Foundation.

A name from the past popped up today in my email in the form of a press release. It's nice to see Paul Allen is remaining active in business endeavors. The name Paul Allen appears about three-fourths of the way through this press release:

The Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) innovation fund, SHRMLabs, has chosen to invest in Soar.com, an up-and-coming leader in AI workplace solutions. SHRMLabs is a critical communication channel between leaders of tech, to HR professionals who lead culture and maximize talent across global organizations.

The Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) innovation fund, SHRMLabs, has chosen to invest in Soar.com, an up-and-coming leader in AI workplace solutions. SHRMLabs is a critical communication channel between leaders of tech, to HR professionals who lead culture and maximize talent across global organizations. SHRMLabs is inspiring innovation by investing in innovative companies to create better workplace technologies that solve today's most pressing workplace challenges. According to Guillermo Corea, Workplace Innovation Lab & Venture Capital leader, SHRM chose to make one of its largest investments in Soar.com because “AI has the power to decode and improve workplace interactions and learning in ways never before possible, and Soar.com has assembled an impressive team and vision to do just that. SHRM Members will benefit through access to cutting edge AI innovations that may be implemented into existing SHRM workplace offerings.”

As one example, SHRM selected Soar.com to provide a new powerful AI video search experience for SHRM members that will unlock the value of their video content from webcasts to conference presentations and keynotes. SHRM’s video archive will now be fully searchable so that members can quickly find and jump to specific segments or highlights within their video archive. Moreover, members can share clips with others to bring greater visibility to SHRM’s video assets. Nick Schacht, Chief Global Development Officer, believes this will “enhance the value our members receive from on-demand access to important knowledge, and make it easier to share their discoveries with others.”

SHRMLabs joins the ranks of other early investors in Soar.com such as Sandler Training CEO, Dave Mattson, former Rackspace CEO & Chairman, Graham Weston, and BuiltBar Founder, Nick Greer among others. Mattson shared his decision to invest was based on his trust in Soar.com CEO & Founder, Paul Allen and the team he assembled. He is betting on their proven track record (Allen previously was CEO & Founder of Ancestry.com) and their mission to “help humans become better humans”.

SHRM’s support of an AI workplace solutions company like Soar.com will add to SHRM’s ongoing effort to champion innovation in the workplace, by:

• • Helping personalize the learning experience

  • Enhancing workplace communication and culture

  • Help learning communities feel more connected

  • Revolutionizing the way learning translates into application and eventual mastery

AI has the power to give rapid feedback to employees across all digital communication channels, assist in developing positive habits, and help each employee feel more connected and appreciated in the workplace.

To learn more about SHRMLabs, please visit https://www.shrmlabs.com/.

About SHRM

SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, creates better workplaces where employers and employees thrive together. As the voice of all things work, workers and the workplace, SHRM is the foremost expert, convener, and thought leader on issues impacting today's evolving workplaces. With 300,000+ HR and business executive members in 165 countries, SHRM impacts the lives of more than 115 million workers and families globally.

SHRM is a global organization that empowers members to lead fulfilling workplaces where employees thrive. “HR champions culture, HR maximizes talent, HR accelerates performance and HR optimizes information,” said Nick Schacht, Chief Global Development Officer of SHRM on the AI To Uplift Humanity podcast, produced by Soar.com.

“SHRMLabs is inspiring innovation to create better technologies that solve today's most pressing workplace challenges by supporting tech innovators and startup companies in the workplace technology industry,” explained Guillermo Corea, managing director of SHRMLabs speaking to SHRM Online. Learn more at SHRM.org and at SHRMLabs.com.

About Soar.com

Soar.com is the latest tech startup from Paul Allen and Clint Carlos. Allen was the founder and CEO of Ancestry.com and Carlos is a three-time HR tech founder and former volunteer member of AZSHRM state council. Soar.com is focused on uplifting humanity through AI. Its AI video platform fulfills that mission by giving frictionless access to learning insights when they’re needed most. “SHRM members who use the AI video platform will feel as if they have perfect recall,” Allen said. “When struggling with a challenging workplace situation or talent issue, an HR executive can search through every parallel experience to get the knowledge they need within seconds. We are thrilled to see how global HR leaders will transform their work cultures to uplift humanity.” Learn more at Soar.com.

NOTE: This article is off-topic. That is, it does not concern anything to do with genealogy, DNA, or related topics normally found in this newsletter. However, it focuses on one of my other interests: online privacy. I will suggest everyone who is online should be equally interested in this article. Big Brother is watching you in India, the USA, and elsewhere!

Virtual private network (VPN) provider Surfshark is shutting down physical servers in India, in response to India's top cybersecurity agency's data demands. It thus becomes the second such company after ExpressVPN to pull out its servers in the country after CERT-In issued a directive on April 28 mandating VPN companies to maintain basic information about customers.

You can read more at: https://bit.ly/3xjfPHX as well as in my earlier articles at https://eogn.com/page-18080/12787685 and at https://eogn.com/page-18080/12803622.

After a two-year hiatus, the St. Charles (Illinois) Public Library will resume its Genealogy After Hours from 5 to 9 p.m. Saturday. New and experienced genealogists will have exclusive use of the library’s materials and public computers, giving them access to many of the library’s services for genealogy research, according to a news release from the library.

Participants can use available computers or bring a laptop and use the library’s WiFi network to search the library’s databases.

Three professional genealogists and several volunteers will be on hand to assist with research or ancestry and family tree maker questions. Attendees can save images to a flash drive and take advantage of scanning, copying and printing during the event. Tours of the library’s genealogy collection will be available.

Registration is required for this event and can be done by phone or in person at the library’s Research and Reading Desk. Details may be found at: https://bit.ly/3xemNhk and at: https://www.scpld.org/.

Historian Jessica Marie Johnson leads several teams tapping into the power of datasets to uncover new truths about Black history. Black Beyond Data is part of an occasional series that highlights Johns Hopkins faculty whose work examines issues around racial inequity, discrimination, and structural racism.

On a spring day in 1751, Charlotte, an enslaved teenage girl, went on a quest to petition the wife of the governor of Louisiana to grant her freedom. Charlotte had become acquainted with a ship captain recently arrived from Martinique, Sieur Pierre Louis Batard. He had promised to help Charlotte arrange an audience with the governor's wife, Madame de Vaudreuil.

On this May morning, Batard sent word to Charlotte that de Vaudreuil was willing to meet. Charlotte hurried to Batard's home, but he was not there. She spent the day awaiting his arrival in his house. But as evening arrived, so did a group of soldiers sent by Sr. d'Erneville, the man who both had fathered her and owned her. Charlotte hid under some mosquito netting in Batard's bedroom. When the soldiers discovered her, she asked them to look at the situation from her perspective; she just needed to wait a little longer for Batard to return. Charlotte explained that if they returned her to d'Erneville, he "would have her whipped unmercifully." She even offered them a sum of cash, 100 livres, that she had carried with her.

"Charlotte did more than run away from her father and owner," Jessica Marie Johnson writes in her book, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. The book won the 2021 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association. It also won the 2020 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, among other accolades. "She combined flight, appeal, allyship, and willfulness in her defiant bid to escape bondage. She demanded to be heard."

Telling Black stories

Johnson is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins and a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She discovered Charlotte's story buried in the Records of the French Superior Council of Louisiana and the Louisiana Historical Center. Charlotte's bravery, quick thinking, and confidence emerge from these records, much as the courageous young woman emerged from her hiding place in the ship captain's room.

This is one of Johnson's passions as a historian. To tell the stories of Black people—particularly Black women—in the Atlantic African diaspora during the centuries of slavery. She highlights the relationships, warmth, and intimacy they created despite the harshest of circumstances, as well as the ways in which they wielded intelligence, creativity, and interpersonal skills to strive for freedom.

But Johnson is equally committed to opening access to the myriad amounts of data that contain information about Black life and Black people, both historical and contemporary. Databases that contain information drawn from records as disparate as the manifest of slave ships, court records, and African American newspapers. She presides over and consults on numerous research projects in which other scholars are mining data sets. Their goal: to discover the lives of Black people who would otherwise be lost to time.

The full story is much longer but you can find it in its entirety at: https://hub.jhu.edu/2022/06/02/black-beyond-data-jessica-marie-johnson/.

Google has become the primary tool for all sorts of online searches. I use Google every day for genealogy and other searches. I perform searches for several ancestors, searches for any information about a small town where my ancestors lived, searches for any information about the small town where I grew up, any mentions of my newsletter, any mention of my cousins with the unusual surname, and a number of other topics. I perform these searches daily, always looking for any new information that appears online.

Of course, logging onto Google every day and manually performing such searches is tedious. Besides, I am forgetful. I don't always remember to perform the searches as often as I should.

Luckily, Google provides a solution for me and for millions of others who wish to perform repetitive searches of Google's billions of links, looking for new information. In fact, Google will perform a search for me every day or every week and even send any newly-found results to me as email messages. Google remembers these tasks far better than I do. If I forget, Google still remembers and sends me an email message with the results, if any. Even better, Google only sends each new piece of information one time. I never see repeats. Each new email message contains only new results that Google has found since the last email message was sent.

The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user's search term(s)

Google Alerts will monitor almost anything on Google that you specify. You choose the search terms in exactly the same manner as a normal search on Google. You specify if you want to search only Google News, only blogs, only videos, only discussions, or the option that I use most of the time: search everything. You can also specify to search once a day, once a week, or "as it happens." However, if you search for popular topics, the "as it happens" option can generate a lot of email messages! I'd suggest starting with the DAILY option at first, then experiment later.

You can enter your search terms and then click on PREVIEW to see an example of the results you'll receive. If you are overwhelmed with too many results, you can change the search terms and click on PREVIEW again to see the modified search. Once you are satisfied with the results, click on CREATE ALERT. From then on, you simply check your email messages occasionally to see the results.

Should you later change your mind, you can modify the search terms at any time or even stop the email messages completely. You remain in control.

Google Alerts are great for many purposes, including:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• keeping current on a company in which you have made an investment
• getting the latest updates on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams
• searching for ancestral information
• and probably a few thousand other uses.

The best feature of Google Alerts? It is available FREE of charge.

Here are some typical Google Alert search terms I use:

"Washington Harvey Eastman" (That is my great-great-grandfather and I know little about him)

"Eastman family"

"Eastman genealogy"

"Dexter, Maine"

"Red Sox"

MyHeritage.com

"National Genealogical Society"

RootsTech

"Family Tree Maker"

Eastman newsletter

I'd suggest you use your imagination to create the search terms that interest you.

To create your own Google Alerts, go to http://www.google.com/alerts.

Comment: I always enjoy reading the engagement announcements and birth announcements of those cousins with the unusual surname. I also appreciate reading their obituaries, although I guess "enjoy" is not the appropriate word for obits. I often know about family news before the other family members do, thanks to Google Alerts. That even includes arrest records. (You'd have to know my relatives to appreciate that information.)

Unfortunately, the search for relatives works best for unusual surnames. Don't try it for John Smith!

However, I have had some success by combining common names with towns or occupations, such as:

"John Williams" "Fountain Hills" Florida

or

"Peter Johnson" electrician

I then receive occasional email messages from Google with alerts containing those words. However, many of them are "false hits" about articles containing all of those words but referring to someone other than my relative. Even though I have to throw away some of the references by "eyeball," I still often find mentions of my relatives in the alerts. You can experiment with such searches yourself easily. If it doesn't work out, you can always delete the search. With a few carefully created search phrases, you should be able to save a lot of time and keystrokes by regularly using Google Alerts for genealogy and other topics of interest.

The following announcement was written by the (U.S.) National Genealogical Society:

FALLS CHURCH, VA, 7 June 2022—The National Genealogical Society (NGS) is pleased to announce the publication of two, new books as part of its Research in the States series, which now covers research in thirty-one states and the tribal records of Oklahoma’s American Indians. The newest volumes are Research in New Mexico by Karen Stein Daniel, CG, and Research in Oregon, 3rd Edition, by Connie Miller Lenzen, CG, FNGS. The books are available in the NGS store in both PDF and print versions.

Both guidebooks offer family history researchers detailed information about each state’s many genealogical resources, including archives, atlases, and gazetteers; census, county, and court records; military, naturalization, and vital records; and more. The authors include the website address, physical address, and telephone number for each resource.

In Research in New Mexico, author Karen Stein Daniel discusses where to find records of both indigenous and non-indigenous people. The state is home to three Apache tribes, the Navaho Nation, and nineteen Pueblo tribes. Since 1598, Hispanics including Crypto-Jews have settled in New Mexico. By the late 1860s, Black Americans began to arrive along with French, German, Greek, Italian, and Jewish immigrants; Los Árabes from the Middle East; and South African Boers. Research in New Mexico offers readers an extensive review of genealogical resources of the people who have populated America’s 47th state.

In Research in Oregon, 3rd Edition, Connie Miller Lenzen introduces family historians to a wealth of repositories and other archival resources throughout the state. The book covers both Oregon’s many Native American tribes as well as its non-indigenous population, including White pioneers who settled in Oregon in the 1840s. Chinese began to arrive in the 1850s. They were followed by Japanese. By law, Blacks were excluded from the state until 1868 when the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution was ratified. Ethnic groups from Europe included Basques, Greeks, Irish, Swedes, and Volga Germans. Hispanic and Jewish Americans and later Iranians, Russians, and Vietnamese also settled in Oregon. Research in Oregon provides genealogists with a concise guidebook for researching their ancestors.

Research in the States series is edited by Barbara Vines Little, CG, FNGS, FUGA, FVGS. Its newest books, Research in New Mexico and Research in Oregon, 3rd Edition, are available for purchase in the NGS online store.

The Cooper Union introduces Voices from the Great Hall, an extraordinary new public resource that tells the history of New York and the nation through the words of the people who helped to shape it from the stage of the storied Great Hall. Voices from the Great Hall is a digital archive, free and accessible to anyone, and generously supported by The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation. This growing collection presents all known sound and video recordings made in Cooper Union’s historic Great Hall dating back to 1941 and continuing to the present, as well as 8,900 objects, such as photographs, tickets, and fliers, related to more than 3,000 Great Hall programs dating to 1859.

“Our Great Hall, once the largest gathering place in New York City, has been an important destination where people from all walks of life have organized and presented their views on the pressing matters of their time, a legacy that continues today,” says Laura Sparks, President, The Cooper Union. “We are so grateful for the Gardiner Foundation’s leadership and commitment to preserving essential New York history. Their support has made this digital Great Hall archive possible. There is so much that we, as an engaged citizenry, can draw on and learn from these historical perspectives, and that is precisely our hope for the Voices from the Great Hall archive—that it will serve as a resource for shaping the future of our shared civic and cultural life.” 

You can read more in an announcement in The Cooper Union web site at: https://bit.ly/3axCx7r.