Starting tomorrow, I will leave home and fly to Salt Lake City. I plan to attend RootsTech, the big genealogy conference. 

RootsTech has been noted in the past as being the largest genealogy gathering in the world. I suspect the same will be true this year, despite the fact that the world is recuperating from the covid pandemic. While the attendance may not be as large as past years, I suspect it will still be the largest genealogy conference of 2023.

I'll be traveling with a MacBook laptop computer and I'll also be carrying an audio recorder, and a camera. I hope to capture some of the show's highlights digitally and will provide them in this newsletter's web site in the following days.

I expect to spend most all day Wednesday in the air and will be rather busy at the conference on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Sunday will again be spent in the air as I fly home. 

Since I will be busy, I expect to post fewer articles to the newsletter during the next few days. Most of the articles I do post will probably be about the RootsTech conference. 

If you are planning to be at the RootsTech conference, I'll see you there! If you see me walking through the hallways, flag me down and say “Hello!” (I’ll be wearing “the hat.”) If you are not at the conference, you can read about it at http://www.eogn.com.

Economics professor Joseph Price said he believes it is possible to love a billion people. He grows that love one day, one handwritten to-do list and one census record at a time.

Price and his team of more than 50 students work at the BYU Record Linking Lab to grow FamilySearch’s genealogical tree through record attachment, the development of auto-indexing technology and other projects.

Price’s passion for family history began several years ago as a hobby. “I was at BYU Education Week, gave it a try and just fell completely in love,” he said.

Before long, he was spending 10 to 15 hours per week working on family history, he said. It was not until a conversation with a colleague at an economics conference that he said he realized the potential of technology to accelerate family history work.

“This little light went on in my head. I just wondered what would happen if we brought the two approaches together,” he said.

Price said he created the Record Linking Lab in response to this perceived gap at the intersection of economic research, machine learning and genealogy. 

The RLL partners with FamilySearch, a genealogical database operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to grow the site’s family tree.

One of the lab’s earliest projects was focused on linking records of families with children in the 1910 census, which Price said is “getting really close to complete coverage.”

Since then, the lab has expanded its reach to other censuses and other continents. One of Price’s recent and fast-growing efforts has been with BYU-Pathway students in Papua New Guinea and nine African countries. 

You can read more in an article by Emma Everett published in the BYU web site at: https://universe.byu.edu/2023/02/27/byu-professor-connects-the-human-family-with-research-lab/.

Plans are moving ahead to create the Peter and Mary Kalikow Genealogy Research Center at Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Lower Manhattan following a visit by Peter Kalikow and his daughter, Kathryn Kalikow, with Museum President and CEO Jack Kliger. The three reviewed plans for the Center, a new facility that will allow Museum visitors to access Jewish genealogy resources and discover their own unique Jewish history.

The new facility will use the Museum’s respective collections and JewishGen, the Museum’s wholly owned affiliate and the world’s largest and most significant resource for Jewish genealogy, to give visitors the opportunity to preserve their Jewish family history and heritage for future generations.

HJ Kalikow president Peter Kalikow said, “My family believes that knowing and embracing one’s family history is one of the most powerful connections we have to our heritage. By utilizing the latest technology, coupled with the enormous data resources of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, this new research center will have the means of connecting Jews with their own personal history that would have otherwise been lost to time or the infamy of the Holocaust.”

A new chapter in Black American history is unfolding at the Newberry Library, courtesy of a recently acquired glass slides collection highlighting the significance of Chicago and several other Northern cities during the Great Migration in the early 1920s.

The Great Migration was the movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Midwest, Northeast and West.

The slides are believed to have been produced between 1922 and 1923 by the Methodist Episcopal Church and, according to the Newberry Library, “are the most complete set known to survive, and few, if any, of the images have ever been published.”

Will Hansen, 43, the Newberry Library curator, says the slides were purchased at auction in October.

“We had our eye on an auction of African Americana and knew that would be something incredibly fascinating for the Newbery and to have in Chicago,” Hansen says.

The slides are glass sheets with an image placed between them. They are based on black-and-white images that have been hand-colored.

“They are a series of lantern slides, also known as sort of magic lantern slides,” Hansen says. “These slides were most likely created to raise funds for the Methodist Episcopal Church’s operations supporting migrants as well as Black communities.”

Miriam Thaggert, a former Newberry research fellow, says the images create a strong connection between the viewer and the people pictured in the slides.

You can read more in an article by Vanessa Lopez published in the Chicago Sun-Times web site at: https://tinyurl.com/2p8hpe8h

The following announcement was written by the folks at Trent Park House (located at Trent Park, Cockfosters Road, Barnet, EN4 0PS, England).

People who have a connection to the incredible history of Trent Park House will have their memories recorded for a new museum.

Memories and stories from people connected to the history of Trent Park House will be recorded and “brought to life” thanks to a new lottery-funded project.

The Grade 2-listed Georgian mansion – which played a key role in the Second World War when the conversations of captured Nazis were recorded by a team of ‘secret listeners’ – is currently being restored. A new museum had been due to open this year, but this has now been put back until 2025.

Last year The National Lottery Heritage Fund announced it was giving £225,000 to Trent Park Museum Trust for an oral history project which would “bring Trent Park to life”. This week the Cockfosters charity announced it was now launching the project, with the aim of preserving the rich history of the house through the collection of stories and memories from those who have a personal connection to it.

The personal stories will be shared through a variety of mediums, including audio recordings and transcripts. They will form an online archive that will explore the history of the Second World War secret listeners as well as being used for the museum and website, which are currently under development.

The oral history project will be led by Rib Davis, who has been actively involved in the collection and dissemination of oral history for over 40 years.

Anyone with a personal connection to Trent Park House are encouraged to get in touch with the museum trust: Visit trentparkhouse.org.uk

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com:

(+) Essential Things I Never Travel Without – Part

Jerome E. Anderson, R.I.P.

Family History Knowledge Helps American Adolescents Develop Healthy Sense of Identity

Could There be a Royal Title in Your Family Tree?

Limerick Historian 'Blown Away' by Discovery of Documents

University of New Hampshire Library Digitizes Town Reports for Entire Granite State

Webinar: The Seven Phases of African American Genealogy

Genealogical Society of New Jersey (GSNJ) Spring Conference, 22 April 2023

YIVO to Digitize Millions of Documents From Jewish Labor Bund

UArizona Helps Launch Archive Sharing Stories of Detained Immigrants

‘Inaccessible’ RTÉ Archives in Ireland to be Made More Open to the Public Under Proposed Legislation

San Francisco State Bay Area Television Archive Is a Treasure Trove of History on Film — and Streaming Online

WWII Love Letters Hidden Behind Wall in New York Home Delivered to Family 80 Years Later

Vatican Secretariat of State Publishes Full "Jews" Series of Historical Archive Online

OGS Call for Lecture Proposals for 2024 Annual Conference

More Than 355 Square Miles of Additional Lloyd George Domesday Records Released on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™

Findmypast Adds More Than 200,000 Unique Records

The Unusual Cause of Death of Allan Pinkerton

Make Old Low-Resolution Images Look Great on Linux With Upscayl

Storj Next Could Make Decentralized Storage More Appealing to Both Supply and Demand Sides

4 Things Genetic Counselors Want You to Know About At-Home DNA Tests

For almost half a century, the pulse of much of the Jewish Diaspora was the Bund, a combination labor union, political party and social organization. 

But for years the only way to see those signs of life — the summer camps, schools, music ensembles and the picket lines — was to visit the archives and know what you were looking for.

Now, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research will digitize the Jewish Labor Bund archive, some 3.5 million pages of documents, photos, flyers and correspondence from revolutionary leaders like Emma Goldman and David Dubinsky. The digitization will make these artifacts accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

The Bund Archive was established in 1899 in Geneva, Switzerland, two years after the Bund was founded in 1897 in Vilna, Lithuania (now Vilnius). Rehoused in 1919 at the German Social-Democratic Party building, it came under threat with Hitler’s rise to power. The archive’s caretakers smuggled its contents into France in French Diplomatic pouches, nominally selling it to the French government.

Remarkably, though the Nazis seized the archive in 1944, much of it survived the war. The Bund Archives have been at YIVO since 1992.

You can read more in an article by PJ Grisar published in the Forward.com web site at: https://forward.com/culture/536338/yivo-yiddish-jewish-labor-bund-archive/.

Jerome E. Anderson of Easthampton, Massachusetts, formerly of Warren, MA, and Boston, died on February 13, 2023, at age 81. 

Genealogist, book collector, and former chemist, Jerome was a longtime member and staff member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, delivering lectures around the country, preparing exhibits, and carrying out valuable research for patrons and colleagues, for publications and his own projects. He was an editorial consultant for the NEHGS Register and contributing editor for The American Genealogist (TAG). 

He was known as a specialist in early handwriting on Anderson family lines and the Scotch-Irish of early New England and Canada with a particular interest in Maine ancestry. 

He was also an enthusiastic member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. As a book collector, Jerome concentrated on American and New England history and science, and the history of books, bookbinding, and printing. With memberships such as in the Ticknor Society of Boston, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Friends of the Houghton Library, he contributed uniquely to research and collections in early New England book and printing history. 

You can read his obituary at: https://tinyurl.com/4nrsynv7.

This online webinar by Tony Burroughs will provide an overview of the methods and sources in the seven distinct phases that are the building blocks of African American genealogy. It progresses from beginning to advanced research, highlighting some of the problems and complexities of African American genealogy along the way. It is valuable for beginners, intermediate, and advanced researchers.

Tony Burroughs is an internationally known genealogist who researched Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Johnson's family history and consulted on genealogies for Oprah Winfrey, Smokey Robinson, Al Sharpton, and Billy Porter. He has appeared as a guest expert in African American Lives with Henry Louis Gates, Oprah's Roots, Who Do You Think You Are?, The Real Family of Jesus, the History Channel, CBS Sunday Morning, and the BBC. His book, Black Roots, was number one on Essence Magazine's Best Seller List.

The Live online webinar will be held Tuesday, February 28, 2023, from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm CST, (7-00 pm to 8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time). The fee is $30.00 USD.

Register now at: https://bookme.name/tonyburroughs/the-seven-phases-of-african-american-genealogy-1

Teenagers struggling to develop a healthy sense of identity must walk a tightrope, balancing commitment to their family’s values with their own exploration of what matters, most psychologists agree.

A new BYU study suggests that studying family history may help older adolescents find this sweet spot. From a survey of 239 18-to-20-year-old students at seven U.S. universities, researchers found that individuals who had the healthiest identity development — both a sense of connectedness to family and adherence to their own beliefs — also had high levels of family history knowledge.

“Family history knowledge is particularly good at keeping us grounded,” said BYU experience design and management professor Brian Hill, an author of the paper that was published Wednesday in the journal Genealogy. “There are kids who go off and explore their own paths without settling into a value system that can guide them going forward. We need knowledge of where we come from along with individual differentiation from family to find a steady path.”

The surveys in the study assessed whether students knew about the major events and important anecdotes from their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, as well as how developed the students’ identity was based on standard measures — whether they were close with family, how they had arrived at their political and religious views, how they had explored occupational options and how committed they were to their values.

The results indicated that many adolescents have high levels of family history knowledge. About 77% of the participants knew the answers to three-quarters of the family history questions. The more they knew, the more likely they were to have developed a healthy sense of identity. 

You can read more in an article by Christie Allen published in the BYU News at https://news.byu.edu/intellect/family-history-knowledge-helps-american-adolescents-develop-healthy-sense-of-identity.

The full study can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/7/1/13.