There is a fascinating story about a genealogist (and an employee of MyHeritage). The MyHeritage staff was able to orchestrate the recent safe passage of a MyHeritage employee (who was employed at MyHeritage's Kyiv office) and his family out of Ukraine.

You can read the full story in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/04/myheritage-employee-escapes-ukraine-thanks-to-his-grandfathers-heroic-rescue-of-jewish-refugees-during-wwii/.

In a boost for open justice, court and tribunal judgments are now freely available from The National Archives.

• The preservation, storage and publication of court and tribunal judgments is now managed by The National Archives
• Judgments can be found via the free caselaw service on The National Archives website
• Users can now search and browse records making it easier to find specific judgments

As the official archive and publisher for the UK Government, The National Archives has long-standing experience in storing and publishing information securely. Under the Archive’s expertise, they will be preserved, managed and made widely accessible for years to come.

New court and tribunal decisions from the superior courts of record – The Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, and Upper Tribunals – will now be available on The National Archives Find Case Law site.

This free online service will be easy for anyone to use, from lawyers to members of the public. Records will be secure and easily searchable, even on mobile phones.

Justice Minister, James Cartlidge, said:

"As we continue to build a justice system that works for all, the National Archive’s new service is a vital step towards better transparency. It will ensure court judgments are easily accessible to anyone who needs them.

"Our first official Government record of judgments is a modern one-stop-shop that will benefit everyone, from lawyers and judges to academics, journalists and members of the public."

Dr Natalie Byrom, Director of Research at The Legal Education Foundation, said:

"The launch of the new judgments service at The National Archives is a hugely significant step for open justice. For the first time, the retention and preservation of judgments from courts and tribunals in England and Wales is guaranteed under primary legislation, as is the right for the public to obtain access to these documents.

"The investment in modernising the processes whereby judgments from courts and tribunals reach publication puts in place the infrastructure needed to build towards a complete record- something which is vital for research and policy.

"We are excited and encouraged by the progress made to date and look forward to seeing how the service develops over coming weeks and months."

Judgments provide invaluable information for anyone who requires them for case preparation or research purposes.

Over the coming months and years, The National Archives will work with the Ministry of Justice and the judiciary to expand coverage of what is published and made accessible to the public, including judgments from the lower courts and tribunals.

The following book review was written by Bobbi King:

The Foundlings

By Nathan Dylan Goodwin. Published by the author. 2021. 252 pages.

Outside a small set of shops in Haywards Heath in West Sussex, a lone woman steps into a telephone box, sets down a large cloth shoulder bag, and within a few moments, walks away. She leaves the bag and an infant.

Nearly forty years later, Morton Farrier is drawn into the case of three children, foundlings, all similarly abandoned as babies, and the mysterious circumstances of who their mother might be. And as much as Farrier loves a good genealogical mystery, now the secrets are going to hit close to home as he determines that his own half-aunt Margaret may be connected to the unsettling events of long ago.

The revelations jump back and forth between chapters set in the past and those set in the present, but the back-and-forth style of writing doesn’t lose us, and the threads of the past and the present weave together as the tale proceeds.

Mr. Goodwin’s books never fail to please the reader who likes mystery fiction along with a healthy dose of genealogy tossed in. This is the ninth saga in The Forensic Genealogist series, and each is as pleasurable to read as the others.

The author has not lost his magic touch. The Foundlings is an easy read, an engaging read, and nice way to pass the time.

The Foundlings is available from the author at https://www.nathandylangoodwin.com/ as well as from Amazon.

Researchers, historians and genealogists now have an additional 1.6 million pages of The Salt Lake Tribune, at their fingertips. The recent digitizing process added issues dating from 1920 to 2004, to the existing online collection of issues between 1871 and 1919. All 133 years are now keyword searchable and available to the public thanks to a partnership between the U’s J. Willard Marriott Library, Newspapers.com, a division of Ancestry and The Salt Lake Tribune.

The issues can be accessed through Utah Digital Newspapers, a collaborative project based at the J. Willard Marriott Library since 2001. The site now has over 6.7 million pages and another 2 million will come online in the next two to three years. Users can enter a name, place or event and retrieve individual newspaper pages on which that term appears. Powerful searching options allow users to find terms in combinations or terms that appear in proximity to one another.

Twitter has accepted Elon Musk’s offer to purchase the company for $44 billion, the company announced in a press release today. Musk purchased the company at $54.20 a share, the same price named in his initial offer on April 14th.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” said Musk in a statement included with the release. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal also applauded the deal in the release. “Twitter has a purpose and relevance that impacts the entire world,” Agrawal said in an accompanying statement. “Deeply proud of our teams and inspired by the work that has never been more important.”

Musk laid out his plan for funding the deal in an SEC filing on Thursday, which includes $25.5 billion in loans and $21 billion in personal equity. Analysts believe the loans could cost Twitter as much as $1 billion a year in servicing fees, or roughly 20 percent of the company’s annual revenue.

The individual wartime journeys of over 330,000 Australian men and women who volunteered to serve overseas in the First World War are revealed for the first time in an ambitious family history project.

Australian War Stories by Memories enables descendants to search for a loved one at australianwarstories.memories.com.au and receive a free online memorial of their wartime journey: from enlistment, to training, embarkation and beyond.

The memorials are delivered via a link sent free-of-charge by email and mobile text. They can be shared among extended family and posted to social media.

An estimated 5 million Australians have a relative who served overseas during the First World War. Many more will wish to honour a local ANZAC hero by registering their details to receive and share an online memorial.

Australian War Stories is a collaboration between leading family memorial platform memories.com.au and media services company Mediality.

You can read more in an article at: https://www.miragenews.com/for-nation-330000-online-memorials-unlock-766147

The National Archives of Australia has ramped up the digitisation of its at-risk records after securing a government funding lifeline last year. The agency has handed out millions in contracts to digitise parts of its collection this year but failed to properly disclose the largest deal.

A $2 million contract for outsourced digitisation services was only published this week, despite work beginning in November and government ministers promoting the supplier’s project earlier this year.

You can read more in an article written by Joseph Brookes and published in the InnovationAus we site at: https://www.innovationaus.com/national-archives-ramps-up-digitisation-of-at-risk-records/.

NOTE: The following article has nothing to do with genealogy. However, I have written about telephone cost reduction methods before, and some people seem to appreciate the articles; so, I'll publish one more.

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

Do you need your telephone? Is it worth the price you pay for monthly service? I stopped using a regular telephone 22 years ago, and don't miss it. Even better, I don't miss the monthly bills I used to pay. Still better yet, I have a working telephone with me all the time wherever I am: at home, in the automobile, at the grocery store, at the doctor’s office, and even while walking down a street in Singapore. (Yes, I used the phone a number of times the last time I was in Singapore.) Now it seems that many Americans agree with me.

A survey by the National Institute of Health reports that the majority of US residents still have both a home phone and a mobile phone, but many are increasingly snipping the wires on their traditional home phone service in favor of a cell phone. The NIH survey reports that almost one in six households (15.8 percent) are wireless-only, meaning that the family in the household owns a cell phone, but there is no landline telephone.

COMMENT: I don't think this is a good time to invest in stock issued by your local telephone company. Old-fashioned wired telephone service appears to be going the way of buggy whip manufacturers.

Above and beyond the cell-phone only families, even more Americans are switching to VoIP phones.

NOTE: A VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone is a telephone system that places telephone calls over the Internet. A VoIP phone may or may not use your existing computer to place the call, but you do need a broadband Internet connection. VoIP telephone systems include Skype, magicJack, Vonage, and others. I have written about those systems in past newsletters.

In a different study, TeleGeography.com reports that VoIP usage in the US has now reached 16.3 million subscribers. That's 13.8 percent of all US households and 27 percent of all broadband customers.

If we add those percentages up, the studies would indicate that nearly 30% of all American households do not have a standard telephone; they use either a cell phone or VoIP phones or both.

I am one of those 30%. I used to have all three: a standard landline phone supplied by the local phone company, a cell phone, and a VoIP phone that I used mostly for placing long distance calls. (I make a lot of long distance calls in support of this newsletter, including frequent overseas calls.)

One day when paying the landline phone bill, I suddenly realized that I hadn't used the landline phone in months. I use the cell phone daily and did use the VoIP phone occasionally but was not using the traditional landline phone at all. It took a few more months for me to talk myself into removing that phone, but I did so eventually.

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/12730271.

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 MyHeritage:

To make Anzac Day even more meaningful, MyHeritage is pleased to offer free access to our collections of 95 million records from Australia and New Zealand, between 20 April and 26 April 2022 (inclusive).

Search free Australian and New Zealand records on MyHeritage 

MyHeritage can help you discover and preserve the stories of your Australian and New Zealander relatives who fought for freedom, or any of your relatives from the region – so seize this excellent research opportunity when the records are free of charge.

MyHeritage is home to several important historical record collections from Australia and New Zealand, including a number of military collections such as the Anzac Memorial records, the Australian World War II Nominal Roll, 1939–1945, and more. Additional records, such as vital records, newspapers, and government records can help fill in more details to paint a full picture of your relatives’ lives.

Normally, a Complete or Data plan is required to view these records, but for 7 days only, you’ll be able to search and view them for free. To access these free records, you’ll be asked to create a free MyHeritage account.

Search free Australian and New Zealand records on MyHeritage

Who are the heroes in your family? Whether you already remember their names at a dawn service or you have yet to learn their identities, MyHeritage can help you discover and preserve the stories of your Australian and New Zealander relatives who fought for freedom.

Lest we forget.

The following announcement was written by Findmypast: