This has to be one of the niftiest new products available from MyHeritage (the sponsor of this newsletter). I have experimented with this for a bit and fell in love with it immediately! 

Here is the announcement from MyHeritage:

(You can also read more and see examples in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/11/introducing-ai-time-machine-transform-yourself-into-a-historical-figure-using-everyday-photos/):

TEL AVIV, Israel & LEHI, Utah--MyHeritage, the leading global service for discovering your past and empowering your future, announced today the release of AI Time Machine™, a cutting-edge, fun feature that creates images of a person in different time periods throughout history using text-to-image AI technology. The stunning, hyper-realistic results can easily be shared on social media and used as profile photos to amaze friends and family.

AI Time Machine™ is based on Stable Diffusion and technology licensed by MyHeritage from Astria, an innovative company specializing in tailor-made AI image generation. The feature is very easy to use: simply upload 10 to 25 photos of the same individual taken in a variety of settings and poses. A model of the individual is then created and cast as a protagonist in dozens of predefined themes set in different historical eras. With only a few clicks anyone can see themselves as an ancient Greek warrior, an Egyptian pharaoh, a medieval knight, a Victorian lady, a hippie from the 1960’s, or an astronaut in space. Images can be downloaded as a set of 8 or individually, for easy sharing.

“At MyHeritage, we’re constantly developing cool new ways to connect people to their family history,” said Gilad Japhet, Founder and CEO of MyHeritage. “Over the past 3 years we released many successful features that use the power of AI to bring historical photos to life. AI Time Machine™ is a new twist on this theme, inviting you to travel to the past and see yourself as you might have looked at the time of your ancestors. While developing this feature, the recurring question among our team was when it would be released so we could finally share our own mind-blowing images!”

“We are delighted to collaborate with MyHeritage to apply our technology to the field of family history,” said Alon Burg, Co-founder and CEO of Astria. “Generative AI is an exhilarating new frontier, and we’re very excited that this integration will create fun and meaningful experiences for millions of people worldwide.”

AI Time Machine™ is the latest addition to the suite of cutting-edge photo technologies that have positioned MyHeritage as the market leader for improving old family photos. The company’s suite of photo features includes Deep Nostalgia™, which animates the faces in still photos and took the world by storm, catapulting MyHeritage to the top of the app store charts in dozens of countries; Photo Repair, which automatically fixes scratches and creases; MyHeritage Photo Enhancer, which brings blurry faces into focus; MyHeritage In Color™, which automatically colorizes black and white photos and restores the colors in faded photos; and DeepStory, which makes your family photos speak. Collectively, these features have been used more than 200 million times since their release. MyHeritage’s photo features resonate deeply with consumers, increase interest in history in general and family history in particular, and introduce new audiences to the fascinating domain of genealogy.

While highly realistic, images generated by AI Time Machine™ are created by artificial intelligence; they are not authentic photographs. As per MyHeritage’s commitment to responsible AI, watermarks are added to all images generated by AI to distinguish them from authentic photos. AI Time Machine™ images are perfect for sharing on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and other social media.

AI Time Machine™ is currently available on desktop and via mobile web browser. The feature is free at launch for a limited introductory period (with a limit of one model and 50 themes per user, for a total of 400 images), following which it will become a paid feature. A one-time purchase will then allow you to upload photos to create a model of one person and generate 160 images with up to 20 themes. Users with a MyHeritage Complete plan will enjoy a higher usage quota at no additional cost.

Try AI Time Machine™ now at myheritage.com/ai-time-machine.
Watch the demo video of AI Time Machine™.

About MyHeritage

MyHeritage is the leading global discovery platform for family history. With billions of historical records and family tree profiles, and with sophisticated matching technologies that work across all its assets, MyHeritage allows users to discover their past and empower their future. MyHeritage DNA is one of the world’s largest consumer DNA databases, with 6.3 million customers. MyHeritage is the most popular DNA test and family history service in Europe, and is trusted by 104 million users worldwide. Since 2020, MyHeritage is home to the world’s most advanced AI technologies for animating, repairing, enhancing, and colorizing historical photos. www.myheritage.com

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

From an article in the  Medievalists.net web site:

Work has begun on examining and analysing a genealogical roll from the 15th century which has not been seen publicly for over 20 years.

A team of historians and heritage science researchers at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) will be using cutting-edge scientific imaging in a rare and precious genealogical roll that was made in England between 1447 and 1455. The new spectral imaging method developed by NTU for scanning manuscript rolls will produce not only high-resolution colour images given by traditional digitisation but also material and ‘hidden’ information.

The roll – MS 501 which is located at Burlington House with the London Society of Antiquaries – is almost 50ft long and is considered to be one of the finest late-medieval chronicles in the world. Because of its unusual size and length, the roll cannot currently be accessed and presents unique challenges when it comes to digitisation.  It contains a series of beautiful images thought to have been created by William Abell, a well-known fifteenth-century manuscript illuminator based in London. When, in 2021, The London Society of Antiquaries started a campaign to raise the profile of the society led by historian Michael Wood, they chose this roll as a key example in their collection, and sourced charitable donations to carry out its digitisation.

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/yuw2bzsr.

Evernote is one of my favorite apps for storing random bits of information that I might want to refer to later. I believe Evernote is also used by thousands of other genealogists for many purposes, both genealogy-related and other reasons as well.The following information therefore will probably be of interest to many genealogists:

From an article written by Ian Small and published in the Evernote Blog:

Evernote’s Next Move: Joining the Bending Spoons Suite of Apps

Today we are pleased to announce that Evernote has agreed to join Bending Spoons, a leading developer of stand-out mobile apps.

In the deal signed between Bending Spoons and Evernote, Bending Spoons agrees to take ownership of Evernote in a transaction expected to complete early in 2023.

For Evernote, this decision is the next strategic step forward on our journey to be an extension of your brain. The path we’ve taken in recent years—rebuilding our apps in order to expand Evernote’s utility and deepen its appeal—has made possible new features, deep focus on our customers, and ultimately, an #everbetter productivity solution on the cusp of the next stage of innovation and growth. Teaming up with Bending Spoons will speed that journey, accelerating the delivery of improvements across our Teams, Professional, Personal, and Free offerings.

As I write this blog post, our new collaborative editing capability, which allows multiple people to edit the same note simultaneously, and individuals to edit the same note on multiple devices without note conflicts, is in early days of beta testing around the world. At the same time, we are within weeks of beta-ing our new support for Office 365 calendars—another much anticipated step forward for our customers. Of course, our drive to improve Evernote includes smaller changes, too. Whether you’ve wanted mini-sidebars on tablets, new preference menu options, iOS and Android widgets, drag & drop for tags, or even the ability to choose where to start a new note (Hint: it’s either in the title or the body; you now get to set the default), customer-centric innovation continues with every release.

While ownership is changing hands, our commitment to keeping your data safe and secure remains as steadfast as ever, and the Evernote you know and love will continue to thrive. Joining Bending Spoons allows us to take advantage of their proven app expertise and wide range of proprietary technologies. Even a small glimpse into their vibrant suite of apps, including Splice for video editing and Remini for AI-assisted photo editing, demonstrates why about 100 million people rely on Bending Spoons products every month. Bending Spoons has built a remarkable business with strong financials and has the ability and resources to propel Evernote forward.

Together, we share a vision for Evernote as a powerful, intuitive extension of your brain. Everything we do at Evernote is focused on helping our customers remember everything and accomplish anything. We look forward to the continued pursuit of that mission with you, our customers and partners, now as part of Bending Spoons.

More than 2,200 Chinese Exclusion Act case files held by the National Archives at Riverside are now available online in the National Archives Catalog, thanks to a collaboration with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California.

The project began in 2018 after a fortuitous meeting at a local American Archives Month event. Shortly thereafter, professors and students from California State University, San Bernardino, and the University of California at Riverside joined the team.  

National Archives at Riverside staff trained the student interns, who digitized 56,507 documents using donated scanners. 

These records document the movement of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans in and out of the United States during the exclusion era, when a series of acts passed by Congress between 1882 and 1943 severely curtailed Chinese immigration to the United States.

Around 10 percent of Riverside’s Chinese Exclusion Act case files have been digitized.

While the pandemic may have temporarily disrupted the digitization efforts, it did not stop the momentum to increase access to these records, which are invaluable to family and historical research. 

You can read more in an article written by Angela Tudico and published in the archives.org web site at: https://www.archives.gov/news/articles/riverside-digitizes-chinese-heritage-records.

Archives New Zealand has indefinitely removed access to its widely used online search system for its collections after restricted records containing private information became publicly visible.

Now the only way people can access Archives’ collections is by going into physical Archives offices and requesting physical copies of records.

On Friday, the Government record-keeping authority discovered that brief record titles containing private information were publicly visible. The full records were not available digitally and have never been accessible to the public.

“We take the privacy of the material we hold very seriously,” chief archivist Anahera Morehu said in a statement.

You can read more in an article by André Chumko published in the stuff.co.nz web site at https://www.stuff.co.nz/about-stuff/94800421/contact-details-for-stuffs-newsrooms-and-editors .

If you are a Facebook (now called Meta) user, you might be interested in this:

 

This week, a federal judge in California gave final approval to a $90 million privacy settlement granted to Facebook users in a decade-old class action suit. The case, originally filed in 2011, claimed that Facebook tracked the activity of users via a “Like” button installed on countless pages around the web.

The suit also claimed that this tracking violated the Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and several other California laws. However, while the case was filed in California, it consolidated similar complaints from users in 10 other states. Notably, the class includes all Facebook users who visited non-Facebook websites between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, that displayed the Facebook “Like” button. That means that millions of people could potentially benefit from this action. The lead counsels for this privacy class, David Straite and Stephen Grygiel, echoed that point, noting that the suit “benefits all class members whether or not they also submitted a claim for a portion of the $90 million settlement fund.”

You can read more at: https://facecrooks.com/Internet-Safety-Privacy/90-million-facebook-privacy-settlement-approved-by-judge.html. 

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) has digitized and is making accessible through its online library catalogue a collection of more than 100 rare and fascinating taregirks (տարեգիրք) or “yearbooks” and taretsoyts (տարեցօյց) or “almanacs” from the holdings of its Mardigian Library. This project was undertaken through the generous support of the SJS Charitable Trust.

The collection of digitized volumes spans from the 1890s to the 1960s and includes titles published in Alexandria, Athens, Beirut, Boston, Constantinople, Paris, Tehran, Venice and elsewhere. NAASR has one of the most substantial collections of these extraordinary publications outside of university libraries, which are often not available to the public. NAASR selected these as priorities for digitization because they are a treasure trove of information, written to inform Armenians at the time about what was going on in various communities both politically and culturally.  These yearbooks serve as important resources for any scholar or member of the public looking into a particular time and place in Armenian history.

The terms “yearbook” and “almanac” do not fully convey the significance of these publications, which are vital sources of information on the affairs of particular communities and contain important literary and artistic works often not otherwise available elsewhere. Many of them are also strikingly designed and impressive visual works in their own right. For example, the still little-studied Gavrosh (Կավռօշ) yearbooks, published between 1906 and 1933 in Constantinople and Paris by Yervant Tolayan, was a feast for the eyes and specialized in humor. Navasard (Նաւասարդ), a Yearbook of Literary and Fine Arts published in Constantinople in 1914 and overseen by Daniel Varoujan and Hagop Siruni, is both beautiful and loaded with writings from some of the leading Armenian writers of the time and also contains translations into Armenian of works by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). Many others are more prosaic in appearance but no less rich in information.

You can read more in an article in the Armenian Weekly at: https://armenianweekly.com/2022/11/14/naasr-digitizes-collection-of-yearbooks/

Each year, thousands of researchers look for records, photographs, and maps that tell Michigan’s accounts to tour the Archives of Michigan in Lansing, which is part of the Department of Natural Resources Michigan History Center. In addition, tens of thousands of guests visit the archives’ online collections. This year Michigan genealogy got a huge boost with a new archival website that has gone online this fall. 

The archives launched Michiganology.org, a new Michigan genealogy website that makes more than 10 million records available online, free of charge. These documents include death and naturalization records, which family researchers use to learn more about their family’s history.

Replaces Popular “Seeking Michigan” Website

The new website replaces “Seeking Michigan,” the archives’ first online platform for sharing digital records. SeekingMichigan.org went live in March 2009 with nearly 1 million records.

Over the past ten years, the software used to develop the Seeking Michigan website has become obsolete and difficult to update. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of new digital records overloaded the system. The archives team determined that although Seeking Michigan was unique, it was time to create a new system with more capacity to better serve the public.

You can read still more in an article in the Thumbwind.com web site at: https://thumbwind.com/2022/11/13/michigan-genealogy/.

What is Mastodon? The 'Twitter Killer' attracting hundreds of thousands after Musk's takeover of Twitter.

mastodon

mas·​to·​don ˈma-stə-ˌdän  -dən

1: any of various extinct mammals (genus Mammut synonym Mastodon) of the elephant family existing from the Miocene through the Pleistocene that are distinguished from the related mammoths chiefly by molar teeth with cone-shaped cusps

2: one that is unusually large

After Tesla (TSLA) boss Elon Musk officially took over Twitter on 27 October, dozens of changes were made to the platform, hundreds of employees were abruptly laid off, and thousands of twitter customers have rebelled and moved elsewhere. Most of the rebels have moved to fringe social media network Mastodon.

Mastodon is a non-profit micro-blogging site that was founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko. Rochko's original concept was to build a “user-friendly microblogging product that would not belong to any central authority.”

Mastodon claims to be a decentralised social media network. This means the code that runs the application is open source, so anyone can set up a Mastodon server and run the application and store user data. This means that there is no one server, company, organisation or individual running Mastodon, making it the opposite of Twitter, which is defacto controlled by Musk.

Once Elon Musk started making changes to Twitter, many free-speech advocates reacted with dismay to the prospect of the world's "town square" being controlled by one person and started looking for other options.

For the most part, Mastodon looks like Twitter, with hashtags, political back-and-forth and tech banter jostling for space with cat pictures. But while Twitter and Facebook are controlled by one authority - a company - Mastodon is installed on thousands of computer servers, largely run by volunteer administrators who join their systems together in a federation. Everything on Mastodon os available free of charge. While each "instance" is owned by various individuals who control their own server(s), there is no one person or organization in charge of all servers.

Anyone can create their own Mastodon server and have control over it, giving it its own set of rules, not unlike Reddit sub-pages, but without the overall control of a parent company.

The result is a new social media that works in a very different manner from Twitter but yet has much of the same functionality of Twitter. 

Mastodon servers are called "instances." All instances are owned, operated and moderated by the community that creates them, and not some large corporation which tracks your data to sell to advertisers. In most cases, Mastodon instances are crowdfunded, not financed.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 27, Mastodon has drawn 489,003 new users (as of a few days ago and undoubtedly even more as of today). Total monthly active users on Mastodon are now much more than 1 million, 

"It's a great opportunity for people to finally see that social media can be done differently, that it can be a protocol not under control of any single company," said Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko.

Eugen Rochko was asked about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter during an interview. He said Musk "is not entirely comprehensible" and must now "deal with the fallout" of his purchase.

Are you dismayed by all the recent changes to Twitter? Are you thinking of signing up for Mastodon? If so, here are some web sites to read. (Warning: Mastodon is somewhat more difficult to understand and use.)

The first Mastodon web site and the one that still serves as "the hub" for everything: https://mastodon.social.

How to use Mastodon: create your account, join servers, and more. “The best part about Mastodon is that you can follow users in other Mastodon instances, even if you are not a member of that instance. Think of it as being able to talk with a person in a Facebook Group or a WhatsApp group chat without having to join that group. The rest is a familiar affair. You can write posts worth up to 500 characters in length, share photos and videos, repost someone’s else content, and more.” at https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/mastodon-how-to-sign-up-join-server-twitter-alternative/

An intro to Mastodon from a relative newcomer! at https://skullsinthestars.com/2022/11/07/an-intro-to-mastodon-from-a-relative-newcomer/

Tara Calishain put together a list of information about Mastodon at: Mastodon Tools Part II at https://researchbuzz.me/2022/11/05/a-big-list-of-mastodon-resources/.