From an article by Kimmy Yam published in the NBC News web site:

“The stories of so many who unjustly lost their freedom, lost property, and were forcibly uprooted from their homes should be a constant reminder of our duty to uphold the rights of every American,” said co-author Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.

A new law signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday will help memorialize the history of the U.S. government's incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. 

The legislation, spearheaded by Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., and Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, would reauthorize funds that help preserve the sites in which tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were detained, including Manzanar in California and Rohwer in Arkansas. 

“The internment of Japanese American citizens remains one of the darkest and most shameful periods in our history,” Schatz said in a statement about the law. “The stories of so many who unjustly lost their freedom, lost property, and were forcibly uprooted from their homes should be a constant reminder of our duty to uphold the rights of every American.” 

The Norman Y. Mineta Japanese American Confinement Education Act was introduced in the House in March 2021 and passed without objection this year before gaining Senate approval. Mineta, a former secretary of transportation who died last May, was the first Asian American to become a Cabinet secretary and had spent two years in an incarceration camp.

The act will not only renew funding for the 2006 Japanese American Confinement Sites Program, but also designate $10 million for grants to understand the “use and abuse of power,” and promote awareness around this dark period in American history. 

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/8mm9vfkf

When:  January 22, 2023, at 2 pm
Where: 525 Telfair St.  Augusta, GA 30901

The Community is invited to Join the Rev. Pierre Robert Chapter of the Colonial Dames 17^th Century and the Board and Volunteers of the new Augusta Jewish Museum on, Sunday, January 22, 2023, at 2 pm for the historical marker dedications of the 1860 Court of Ordinary of Richmond County and the 1869 Congregation Children of Israel, which is the oldest standing synagogue in Georgia.  In 2015, these buildings were to be demolished but were saved by the Community and Historic Augusta efforts. 

The Honorable Garnett Johnson, Mayor of Augusta, Mr. Erick Montgomery, Executive Director, Historic Augusta, Inc., and Mrs. Amelia Pelton, State President Colonial Dames 17th Century, will attend this historic event. Mr. Jack Weinstein, President of the Augusta Jewish Museum Board, will accept these historical markers.

As a preview to the upcoming exhibit displays of AJM, at the January 22 event, there will be a special showing of “The AJM Stories: Remembering Our Place in History.” These video and audio compilations, initially recorded by a partnership with Jessye Norman School of the Arts, are funded by a grant from Georgia Humanities with production by respected Augusta videographer Mark Albertin and noted historian LeeAnn Caldwell. A light reception will follow the marker dedication and tours of both historic buildings.

Established on July 15, 1915, the National Society Colonial Dames XVII Century is a non-profit organization with its headquarters in Washington, D.C. To uphold and continue the values and ideals of their ancestors, the work of Colonial Dames 17^th Century is dedicated to the preservation of historic sites and records, promotion of heraldry and coats of arms, and support of charitable projects and education.

The Augusta Jewish Museum and its programming chronicle the life, history, and contributions of the Jewish community in the Augusta GA/Aiken SC areas. The museum also educates about Jewish life and traditions, Remembering the Holocaust and Israel–the land and its people. Visit augustajewishmuseum.org for more information.

MyHeritage just published a huge new collection covering immigration to Israel from 1919 onwards, with 1.7 million records! And the best news is that we’ve made it completely FREE! This collection is the Israeli equivalent of the famous “Ellis Island” immigration database for the United States. This is probably the biggest news in Israeli genealogy in the last decade! For a period of more than a year, MyHeritage painstakingly indexed thousands of public domain images made available by the Israel State Archives that include all surviving records of all those who immigrated to Israel by ships and by planes from all over the world starting in 1919. MyHeritage is the first organization to create a searchable index for this valuable collection and associate it with the scanned images. The collection is available for all to search and view for FREE, without even having to sign up, making the information more accessible than ever before for anyone researching their Jewish roots in Israel. Almost every genealogist in Israel is expected to find direct ancestors and other relatives in this valuable collection and to know for the first time the precise circumstances of their arrival to Israel.

The records in this collection include the name of the immigrant and the names of relatives who immigrated with them, country of origin, the name of the ship they arrived on, the date of arrival, names of parents, names of relatives who are expecting them in Israel, and their destination city in Israel.

Following the end of World War I, the British occupied Palestine from 1919 until Israel declared its statehood in 1948. During that period, there were four waves of immigration, or aliyot in Hebrew. There were many reasons why people made aliyah: some were fleeing antisemitism, some leaving for political or religious reasons, many searching for new hope and a new life following the World Wars.

Historians have defined several waves of aliyah between 1882 and the beginning of World War II. This collection starts with the Third Aliyah period. The first two waves took place from 1882 to 1918 under Ottoman rule, and are not covered in this collection. 

The Third Aliyah took place between 1919 and 1923 and was primarily composed of Eastern European Jewish immigrants called halutzim, or pioneers, who left Europe after World War I to create a new future for themselves. 

The immigrants who arrived during the Fourth Aliyah, from 1924 to 1929, were mostly Jewish people who arrived as a result of the rise in antisemitism throughout Europe and the Middle East. Most came from Eastern European countries like Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania and Lithuania but there were also Jews from Yemen and Iraq.

The Fifth Aliyah, from 1929 through 1939, saw the influx of 250,000 immigrants, the largest wave yet. Most were fleeing Poland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Greece in response to growing antisemitism and the rise of Nazism. There were also Jewish immigrants from Turkey, Iran, and Yemen.

From 1933 to 1948, the British enforced immigration quotas, limiting the number of Jews who could move to Palestine. Many Jews found ways to enter Palestine illegally. The collection does not include lists of illegal immigrants, but there are several lists of children who arrived as part of the youth immigration during this time period.

The collection was created from scanned books stored by the Israel State Archives with lists of immigrants (most of them in Hebrew), arranged in chronological order according to the arrival dates of the ships or planes to Palestine or the State of Israel. These registers were previously used by the Jewish Agency’s Relatives Search section. The records also include the arrival of tourists to Israel, or the return of Israeli residents from a trip abroad. Pedestrian arrivals are also listed, i.e. those who came in through border crossings in the north or south.

You can read a lot more in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/01/myheritage-publishes-exclusive-huge-collection-of-israel-immigration-records/.

History often reappears in unexpected places. A 135-year-old time capsule was discovered in November in Edinburgh , Scotland by a plumber who, by chance, opened up the floor at the exact spot where it had been left in 1887.

Since then experts and historians from the genealogy service Findmypast have looked up censuses and pored over dozens of newspaper archives to uncover the story behind the men who left the note - as well as those who lived in the house.

The entrance to Riddles Close in the early 1900s where John Grieve lived with his family

Its inhabitants included the Reverend Archibald Eneas Robertson, who is thought to have been the first mountaineer to climb all 282 Munros.

The two joiners who left the bottle were John Grieve and James Ritchie.

You can read more, including the identity of the men who left the message in the bottle and their families, in an article by Angie Brown published in the BBC News web site at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-64162667.

Researchers say that the Viking Age left an imprint on the genetics of present-day Scandinavians.

In an international study published Thursday in the journal Cell, scientists found that DNA from archeological remains shows exceptional immigration to Scandinavia during that era.

The Viking ship Havhingsten af Glendalough (the Sea Stallion of Glendalough), a replica of a Viking warship, sets out from the Viking Museum in Roskilde July 1, 2007.  (REUTERS/Scanpix/Bjarke Orsted/File Photo)

The authors analyzed 297 ancient Scandinavian genomes dating back two millennia with the genomic data of 16,638 present-day Scandinavians.

"As the geographical origin and the datings were known for all these individuals, it was possible to resolve the development of the gene pool to a level never realized previously," the University of Stockholm, where many authors were listed, said in a press release.

The university noted that the analysis found a surprising increase of variation during the Viking period that indicates gene flow into Scandinavia was especially intense during this period.

Women from the east Baltic region and, to a lesser extent, the British and Irish isles contributed more to the gene pool of Scandinavia than the men from those regions during that time.

You can read a lot more in an article by Julia Musto  published in the Fox News web site at: https://tinyurl.com/y8atk5aw

The following was written by FamilySearch:

What a year 2022 has been at FamilySearch! In 2022, FamilySearch.org added billions of new, freely searchable records to help its millions of visitors make important new family discoveries.

RootsTech 2022, hosted by FamilySearch, was a phenomenal success with more than 3 million joining the celebration online during the 3-day live event. Millions more have accessed free, recorded content from the conference throughout the year.

The cadence of gathering and publishing the world’s genealogical records online increased with a focus on select countries or homelands and a major US Census project. In addition, a new online volunteer tool was introduced, which, coupled with artificial intelligence and handwriting recognition technology, will vastly increase the searchability rate of non-English documents.

Read on to learn more about these accomplishments and new product features and discovery experiences added by FamilySearch in 2022.

You can read a lot more at: https://www.familysearch.org/en/newsroom/familysearch-2022-genealogy-highlights

Volunteers have now tracked down at least one photo for every one of the more than 58,000 U.S. military service members who died in the Vietnam War – for an online Wall of Faces project that took more than two decades to complete.

The goal was to help a new generation of Americans grapple with sacrifice and inspire them to reflect, perhaps, on “why we have a wall” with names inscribed on it, say organizers from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), the nonprofit that spearheaded the digital project as well as the national monument on which all these names are engraved.

More than half of the visitors to the memorial in Washington, D.C., today weren’t alive when it was commissioned in 1982, they add.

Over the years the picture-gathering process could be fraught: Relatives were sometimes reluctant to share photos of loved ones killed in battles picked by a government their survivors had come to distrust.

And stock photos taken straight out of, say, boot camp graduation can be surprisingly tough to come by. “The military doesn’t just sit there and funnel pictures to you,” says Herb Reckinger, a volunteer. 

So tracking them down often involved investigative dedication, reaching out to local librarians, scouring yearbooks, and, at one point, combing through microfiche for a grainy image of a high schooler orphaned and homeless before he was drafted. 

You can read a lot more in an article by Anna Mulrine Grobe published in The Christian Science Monitor web site at: https://tinyurl.com/8wspeb6x

The following is a press release from The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding:

SANDY, UT: A major upgrade for The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (or “TNG”), is now available from Next Generation Software. TNG 14 includes many enhancements and new features, plus a variety of improvements to the administrative interface. Existing users can purchase the upgrade at a discount by returning to their previous download page.

Some of the most notable changes include a general style facelift, plus improvements to image tagging, the relationship finder, and the GEDCOM import. The advanced search, the mod manager, and the report generator have also undergone significant overhauls. 

In addition, many adjustments have been made to keep TNG compatible with the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. A more detailed summary of all the new features can be found at http://tngsitebuilding.com/features.php.

For those already running TNG, upgrading to the new version should be fairly easy and should take less than 15 minutes. A helpful video is also available to walk users through the process, but users can also pay a small fee to have someone perform the installation remotely.

TNG makes it easy to put your genealogy on your web site in a dynamic fashion. It uses a database to store your information, so the pages are created at the time they're requested. When you want to make a change, you only need to upload your GEDCOM file again, or enter the new facts directly online. TNG also allows you to link photos and other media to the people in your tree. You're in total control, so you can update your information or customize the look and feel any time you want. 

TNG is commercial software ($34.99 USD one-time license fee). In order to run TNG, your web site must support PHP (a programming language) and MySQL (the database). Existing users may upgrade to the latest version online starting at $17.99. The first version of TNG was published by Darrin Lythgoe in 2001.

The following was published in the Federal Register:

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

[OMB Control Number 1615–0016]

Agency Information Collection Activities; Revision of a Currently Approved Collection: Application for Relief Under Former Section 212(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act

AGENCY: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Department of Homeland Security.

ACTION: 60-Day notice.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) invites the general public and other Federal agencies to comment upon this proposed revision of a currently approved collection of information. In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) of 1995, the information collection notice is published in the Federal Register to obtain comments regarding the nature of the information collection, the categories of respondents, the estimated burden (i.e., the time, effort, and resources used by the respondents to respond), the estimated cost to the respondent, and the actual information collection instruments.

DATES: Comments are encouraged and will be accepted for 60 days until March 7, 2023.

You can read more at: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-01-06/pdf/2023-00004.pdf (scroll down the page a bit).