The following announcement was written by the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG):

At its annual meeting on 9 October 2022, the Board for Certification of Genealogists trustees approved two new scholarships.

• • A scholarship for an applicant under the age of 40 (must be under age 40 on 15 March)
  • A scholarship for an individual who is currently “on the clock” having submitted the preliminary application to become a Certified Genealogist. 

These two new scholarships are in addition to The Paul Edward Sluby Sr. African American Scholarship.

Applications for scholarships to participate in national genealogical institutes are due annually on 15 March.

Scholarships will award up to $1,700 of the tuition, travel, and lodging expense of attending one of four premier national institutes. BCG will also waive its final application fee of $300 for scholarship recipients who submit portfolios of work to be considered for certification within three years of the announcement of an award. 

Applicants are required to submit an essay and a sample of their genealogical research. Scholarship recipients will be awarded in May, so that recipients can take part in institutes scheduled for the following year. Those wishing to apply should fill out the required application form (available in the PDF Library) and submit with supporting materials as required to office@bcgcertification.org.

Four institutes are eligible for all three scholarships for tuition, travel, and lodging expenses (where applicable). The Sluby Scholarship is also eligible for the Midwest African American Institute.

• • Genealogical Institute on Federal Records (Gen-Fed), held annually at the National Archives and other locations in Washington, DC, and College Park, Maryland. The 2023 session is scheduled for the week of August 7th.
  • Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP), held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, provides two separate week-long sessions in June and July.
  • Institute of Genealogy & Historical Research (IGHR), held in Athens, Georgia, in July, under the auspices of the Georgia Genealogical Society.
  • Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG), sponsored by the Utah Genealogical Society, Salt Lake City held in January each year.

Applicants should exhibit intermediate or higher skills that have prepared them for an in-depth learning experience. With the exception of the under-40 scholarship, there is no age limit or income requirement.

Download application form here and submit with the supporting materials to office@bcgcertification.org.

The words Certified Genealogist and letters CG are registered certification marks, and the designations CGL and Certified Genealogical Lecturer are service marks of the Board for Certification of Genealogists^®, used under license by board certificants after periodic evaluation.

The title says it all. I can only add that the collection contains historical materials dating from 1850 to 2022 that come from a diverse group of Jewish creators, including youth, women, clergy, fraternities, and congregations that offer unique insights into the greater Augusta, Georgia region’s Jewish life, philanthropy, foodways, and experiences.

You can read more at: https://blog.dlg.galileo.usg.edu/?p=8408.

The Digital Library of Georgia is available at: https://dlg.usg.edu/ (although I suggest you start first at https://blog.dlg.galileo.usg.edu/?p=8408 to learn more about this one new addition to the site).

The digital database “Holocaust Memorial Monuments”  has been launched as a partnership project of the Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies/The George Feldenkreis Program in Judaic Studies, University of Miami, Florida; and theInternational Survey of Jewish Monuments, Syracuse, New York.

The new database – still in a developmental stage – has been created to collect and preserve digital documentation about Holocaust memorial monuments worldwide, including standardized mapping, photography, description, and historical research.

It also includes a growing bibliography on Holocaust and memorial monuments. The database records searchable and comparative information for educational, public policy, and academic use. It is a component of the Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art – the world’s largest repository of documentation on Jewish material culture — and will also be accessible from the Miller Center and ISJM sites.

The total number of Holocaust memorial monuments in the world is unknown, but the project team estimates that it may be above 10,000.

The first stages of the project include, in addition to developing the database itself, research about and photography of a wide selection of different types of Holocaust memorial monuments in various places; compilation of a bibliography; and preparation of a master list of memorial monuments that will be further documented in years to come.

You can read more at: https://jewish-heritage-europe.eu/2022/12/01/new-resource-holocaust-monuments/

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I have written a number of times about the advantages of Chromebooks, the low-cost computers that do most everything that higher-priced computers can do (although not everything).

If you have already purchased a Chromebook, or are contemplating such a purchase (perhaps as a Christmas present?), you probably will be interested in a new article by Joshua Goldman published in the MSN web site 

You can find Actually, Your Chromebook Can Run Microsoft Office at: https://tinyurl.com/2p9fdy54.

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

I received a somewhat frantic e-mail recently from a reader of this newsletter. She mentioned a specific genealogy CD-ROM disk that was produced a few years ago, but her question could apply to any CD or DVD disk of any topic. She wrote (in part):

"Help! I have a CD-ROM disk of [name deleted here] and it cracked. I want to replace it, but can't seem to find it anywhere. The company that produced it no longer appears to be in business. Any suggestions? Is there any other CD-ROM that has equivalent materials?"

Sadly, I was not able to offer much help. A cracked CD disk is useless, except maybe as a coaster for your coffee cup. Even a scratch the size of one human hair can render a CD-ROM disk useless; if it has visible physical damage, the problem is even worse. To make matters worse, the company that produced her disk is now out of business, so I doubt if she can find a low-cost replacement. I referred her to to eBay to see if she can find a used copy of the same CD for sale.

With a bit of hindsight, anyone can quickly determine what my correspondent SHOULD have done: she should have made a backup copy while the CD was still usable. Then again, how many of us ever do that? I know that I occasionally create CD backups although not as often as I should.

Such a solution would not have been practical a few years ago. To make it worse, many of today’s computers don’t even contain CD-ROM or DVD-ROM disk drives (although you can still purchase EXTERNAL CD-ROM drives that plug into modern computers’ USB connectors). 

Blank CD disks cost 40 cents or less when purchased in quantity at most any discount store. Making backups of your CD disks should be a trivial exercise. After all, how much would it cost you to replace a CD-ROM disk that becomes defective?

Most new computers or new CD-ROM drives include software to write to the CDs. In fact, most have an option to copy the entire contents of a disk to a new, blank disk. This is true for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems. Check the software already installed on your computer; I suspect you will find that you already have everything you need. If not, you can download free software that will make copies for you.

Macintosh users already have the required software: open FINDER, click on APPLICATIONS, click on UTILITIES, and then click on DISK UTILITY. In fact, the Macintosh Disk Utility will duplicate Macintosh, Windows, and Linux disks alike. If you would like a more robust disk duplicating program but one that is available free of charge, look at Burn at http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net.

Linux users have a variety of free CD-ROM utilities to choose from. I normally use K3B but can find others.

A Second Backup Plan

With today's hard drives typically having a storage capacity of a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) or more, it is now practical to create backup images of CD disks and to store them on a hard drive or, perhaps even better, on USB flash drives. After all, one large hard drive can now store hundreds of CD-ROM disk images. Probably the best method is to create .ISO images of the original CD disks. An .ISO "image" file is a method of merging all the files on a CD into a single compressed file according to a defined format. 

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/13020107

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 has been extending its ever growing Military records collection with a fascinating new record set for its Diamond subscribers, with high quality scans of the document pages and boasting more than 629,527 historic records for Chelsea Pensioners from 1702-1933.

The records in this release include registers, admission books, ledgers and so on that relate to army pensioners and the payment of pensions to these individuals. The majority of the records relate to pensions payable by the Commissioners of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, to either in-pensioners or out-pensioners.

The Royal Hospital Chelsea from the Image Archive]

The bulk of the registers and admission books will give a researcher the name, rank and regiment, rate of pension, date of admission to pension, and residence of the army pensioner. Additionally, many of the records will provide a date and place of birth, a record of service and complaint or reason for discharge.

101 year old John McKay, a veteran of Waterloo and the Peninsular War, is just one of the Chelsea Pensioners found in this record set

Read TheGenealogist’s article: The Old Soldier

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/the-old-soldier-1641/

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:

From an article by Miryam Naddaf published in the Nature web site:

More than 3,500 genetic variations that potentially affect smoking and drinking behaviour have been identified in a study involving almost 3.4 million people with African, American, East Asian and European ancestry.

The findings, published in Nature on 7 December¹, highlight how increasing the sample size and ethnic diversity improves the power of such genome-screening analyses — called genome-wide association studies (GWASs) — to reveal how various traits are linked to genes, combinations of genes or mutations.

Smoking and drinking are important risk factors for several physical and mental illnesses, including cardiovascular diseases and psychiatric disorders. Although both behaviours are influenced by environmental and social factors, there is evidence that genetics can affect tobacco and alcohol consumption. “We’re at a stage where genetic discoveries are being translated into clinical [applications],” says study co-author Dajiang Liu, a statistical geneticist at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “If we can forecast someone's risk of developing nicotine or alcohol dependence using this information, we can intervene early and potentially prevent a lot of deaths.”

Ancestral diversity

Scientists use GWASs to find genetic ties to diseases or behaviours by comparing genetic sequences in large numbers of people. But so far, most of these studies have focused on European populations. Liu and his colleagues constructed a model that incorporated the genomic data of 3,383,199 people, 21% of whom had non-European ancestry.

They identified 3,823 genetic variants that were associated with smoking or drinking behaviours. Thirty-nine of these were linked with the age at which individuals started smoking, 243 with the number of cigarettes smoked per day and 849 with the number of alcoholic drinks consumed per week.

Of the total number of associated variants, 721 were identified only by the multi-ancestry GWAS, and not by an ancestry-naive model that the authors used for comparison. This suggests that large and diverse population samples significantly increase the power of such studies.

The researchers found that the majority of genetic associations for drinking and smoking have similar effects across the different ancestries. “We also find similar heritability estimates [for the traits] across the ancestries … suggesting that generally, the genetic architecture of these behaviours is similar across ancestries,” says Gretchen Saunders, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and co-author of the paper.

You can read more at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04378-w.

The following announcement was written by the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG):

FREE BCG-SPONSORED WEBINAR
“Wayward Girls: A Context Case Study”
by Stephanie O’Connell, CG  
Tuesday, December 20, 2022, 8:00 p.m. (EDT)

Young women who rebelled against nineteenth-century moral conventions were deemed delinquent. For some, seeking social independence resulted in a reformatory sentence. This case study highlights strategies used to overcome missing records and the importance of historical context. 

Stephanie O’Connell, CG, is a genealogy researcher and lecturer. She began looking into the secrets of her ancestors in 2010 and has been discovering their true stories ever since. She lectures frequently on various genealogical topics in the Seattle area and at conferences across the country. Her personal research has focused on her female ancestors and writing them into their rightful place in history.

BCG’s next free monthly webinar in conjunction with Legacy Family Tree Webinars is “Wayward Girls: A Context Case Study” Stephanie O’Connell, CG.   This webinar airs Tuesday, December 20, 2022, at 8:00 p.m. EST. 

When you register before December 18 with our partner Legacy Family Tree Webinars (http://legacy.familytreewebinars.com/?aid=6799) you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. Anyone with schedule conflicts may access the webinar at no charge for one week after the broadcast on the Legacy Family Tree Webinars website.

"We appreciate the opportunity to present these high-quality educational webinars," said President Faye Jenkins Stallings, CG. "At BCG, our purpose is to promote public confidence in genealogy by supporting uniform standards of competence. These webinars help to achieve that by providing educational opportunities to family historians of all levels of experience." 

Following the free period for this webinar, BCG receives a small commission if you view this or any BCG webinar by clicking our affiliate link: (http://legacy.familytreewebinars.com/?aid=6799).

To see the full list of BCG-sponsored webinars for 2022, visit the BCG blog SpringBoard at https://bcgcertification.org/bcg-2022-free-webinars.  For additional resources for genealogical education, please visit the BCG Learning Center (https://bcgcertification.org/learning).

Reverberate is an oral history project developed by Éireann and I, a black migrant community archive, in collaboration with members of Galway’s African diaspora.

The project invited Black migrants settled in Galway to recount their journeys to Ireland, their relationship with the city, and to reflect on whether or not they have developed a sense of belonging. It opens on Saturday December 3 in the Galway Arts Centre, with music and performances by Church and Wally Nikita and food by Melting Pot Luck. The exhibition will run until Thursday 22 December.

Reverberate documents the legacies of migration as they happen, giving narrative agency and equal centering to each perspective. The testimonies gathered here come from eight individuals of varying age and origin, whose stories touch on parenting, politics, the effects of the asylum system, and the communities and organisations they have built.

The narrators share obvious commonalities, but in between each story is woven more implicit threads of connection that make evident the ways in which we are all affected by the same global and local tensions that cause people to leave where they are from and build new lives elsewhere.

This project consists of a series of radio broadcasts and a listening library and recording room installed in the Galway Arts Centre. By using oral history as a parallel to African storytelling tradition - which functions to pass past beliefs, counsel, morals, and myths down to new generations - we are seeking to challenge the fixedness of the archive, restructuring it as an active and living space that accommodates multiple voices, that responds, repeats, and echoes between places and perspective. One which invites others to add to the record too.

The listening library invites you to listen, read transcripts and other resources which connect and expand on the subjects shared by the participants. The recording room is offered as an activation of the archive where you can enter to record your own oral history.

You can read more in an article at: https://tinyurl.com/t99nm6rx.