As we near the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays, and also as we begin the thought processes of dealing with income taxes shortly after New Years', the idea of giving gifts to family members and to friends become major consideration in your formulation of plans. In the United States, this also can impact the idea of minimizing your upcoming income tax considerations.

I would suggest you include planning for a gift to a good friend of all U.S. genealogists: the National Genealogical Society.

NGS, a non-profit founded in 1903, is the premier U.S. national society for beginners to advanced family historians. Indeed, the NGS is "For generations. Past. Present. Future." 

As stated in the Society's mission statement, "Our mission is to inspire, connect, and lead the family history community. We foster collaboration and best practices in advocacy, education, preservation, and research. We enable people, cultures, and organizations to discover the past and create a lasting legacy."

Why not help out our good friend and help make sure the organization can continue to provide services for future genealogists? You can make a big difference with your financial support to NGS.

There are several things you can do, both at this time of year, and especially over the next two weeks that can make a big difference come tax time in April.

Charitable contributions can be donated until the end of the year

Of course, donations by anyone are always appreciated at any time of year. However, if you are 70 1/2 years of age or older, there are additional things to consider. If you "qualify," you can give to charity through a qualified charitable distribution or QCD. By gifting your retirement withdrawals directly to charity, you can avoid paying taxes on next April 15th as well as on income taxes every year thereafter.

One option (or perhaps I should say "an additional option") is to remember NGS in your will. Of course, the best option of all is to remember NGS every year PLUS in your disposition of assets to be mentioned in your will. Legacy giving lets you leave a monetary donation or item of value to a charity using your last will and testament. While you may not be able to donate a large amount of money or item of value to a charity right now, chances are you will accumulate wealth throughout the remainder of your life. You obviously need to have a home and method of transportation while you’re alive, but you can’t take them with you when you pass away. If you don’t have a loved one you’d like to leave your property to, you can donate the proceeds of its sale to a registered charity, making for a substantial donation, such as to NGS.

Think of any properties you own and the savings you accrue over time as your living costs decrease, such as vehicle and mortgage payments. Why not specify in your will that such assets be given to the NGS?

It doesn’t just have to be a property either. The same goes for auctionable items of value, stocks, and cash. The best part is leaving a legacy doesn’t take away from your current assets. This gives you a chance to support the charity of your choice when you can afford to — instead of trying to make small donations here and there that affect your budget. 

By leaving a charitable bequest to an organization you care about, you’re honoring yourself in relation to a cause that is near and dear to your heart. Depending on the size of your donation (and the type of charity you support), you may even have a chance to memorialize yourself in some way. For example, the charity may plant a tree, make a plaque, or even name a building in your honor. I will suggest that NGS probably will not name a building in your honor (NGS doesn't own buildings) but a substantial donation may well result in a scholarship or perhaps recognition of future accomplishments may be named for you for many years after your passing. I cannot think of a better recognition of you and your gift.

Perhaps even better, if your net worth is high when you pass away, your estate may also be subject to estate taxes, which can significantly reduce the net amount your heirs receive. The U.S. federal estate tax calculated during the probate process must be paid before your remaining assets are distributed to your family members and loved ones. 

Consider leaving a gift in your will to maximize your assets’ potential, do some good for the world, and create a legacy for yourself. Consult with your attorney now to further discuss these issues.

2022 NGS Giving Days are Here! 

Quoting the NGS web site at: https://www.ngsgenealogy.org/donate/:

We are so thankful to everyone who “answers the call” to support the great programs the National Genealogical Society provides for family historians. In Fiscal Year 2022, we raised over $56,000 to support NGS.

We greatly appreciate our members and other contributors who support NGS financially throughout the year. We particularly thank everyone who makes NGS Giving Days a success!

We hope our plans for the coming year will inspire you to renew your support during our 2022 #NGSGivingDays campaign. Please donate whatever amount you can. Whether your gift is $100, $250, or $500, be assured that your generosity is greatly appreciated.

Please join us in helping the #NewNGS continue its important work with individual genealogists and genealogy societies and organizations! Donate now on our secure website or call 703-525-0050.

Your contribution helps us strengthen our education and records preservation work. New courses and new books are developed each year to help everyone interested in researching their family. We also continue to support record preservation projects at the National Archives through the Stern-NARA fund and projects like Preserve the Pensions.

We greatly appreciate your support! Your generosity truly makes a difference.

Tax ID 52-0745713

Thousands of Hampshire’s records, spanning back 500 years, are now available on Ancestry® and in the county’s libraries and record office.

Hampshire County Council has collaborated with Ancestry, the global leader in family history, to make nearly 100,000 of Hampshire and Isle of Wight wills and probates available online for the first time.

As well as being digitised for Ancestry.co.uk the probate records will be freely accessible from Hampshire Record Office in Winchester and in public libraries across the county.

Online and in person visitors will be able to discover Hampshire residents like Thomas Hancock of Hawley, Yateley who died of the plague in 1604. The records show that his will was handed to Alexander Read on a nine-foot pole because Hancock was afraid of passing on the infection to his witnesses.

The registers also features Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials for Hampshire parishes in Winchester Diocese dating from 1536 to 1921.

You can read more in an article by Adele Bouchard published in the Hampshire Chronicle web site at: https://tinyurl.com/223j3fm9.

Selected by statewide cultural heritage stakeholders and funded by the DLG’s competitive digitization grant program, over 3,000 pages of digitized African American funeral programs from Evans County, Georgia, and other Southeastern towns and cities are now freely available in the Digital Library of Georgia and can be seen online here: African American Funeral Programs, 1960-2022.

The collection of 637 individual programs dates between 1961-2022, with the birth dates of the people represented going back to 1870.

You can read all the details at: https://blog.dlg.galileo.usg.edu/?p=8418.

Vail in the 1980s can now be relived by locals online as ColoradoHistoricNewspapers.org. The newspaper is now searchable through the free website, which is a service of the Colorado State Library at: ColoradoHistoricNewspapers.org

The web site presently contains more than 600 newspapers published in Colorado from 1859 up to 2021.

The Vail Trail’s inclusion in ColoradoHistoricNewspapers.org collection has been a major focus of the Friends of the Vail Public Library group for the last decade, said Lori Barnes with the Vail Public Library. The group’s goal is to see the Vail Trail digitized and searchable through 2003.

Barnes said Friends of the Vail Public Library has been fundraising for years to see the project completed. “This is a big way that Friends of the Library dollars have been utilized over the years,” Barnes said this week.

The work has become more expensive as the paper grew — the final digitized edition of the Vail Trail currently available on ColoradoHistoricNewspapers.org is the July 24, 1992 edition, which is 91 pages.

Would you like to keep your genealogy findings in the cloud where you and anyone you allow can access the information from anywhere? An article by Daniel Blechynden and published in the TechRadar web site describes in detail just how to do that with a program called webtrees (apparently always spelled with a lower-case "w".)

Blechynden writes:

"webtrees is a free, super powerful open-source genealogy program. It supports standard GEDCOM files, which means that it’s compatible with most major desktop programs, and it comes with loads of excellent management features. 

"However, webtrees is a self-hosted program, and it can be pretty difficult to get started with—especially if you haven’t used self-hosted software before. In this guide, we’ve provided a complete step-by-step approach to installing and getting started with webtrees.

"Before you can begin using webtrees, you need to choose a web hosting provider (opens in new tab) for installation. Hosting provides the storage space, processing power, and other resources required to use the program."

You can read the full article at: https://tinyurl.com/2fkeycb2

New and Updated

UPDATEDCharlotte County, Virginia, U.S., Births, 1883-1896	12/14/2022
NEWConnecticut, U.S., Excise Tax Lists, 1865-1874	12/14/2022
UPDATEDU.S., Obituary Collection, 1930-Current	12/13/2022
UPDATEDU.S., Cemetery and Funeral Home Collection, 1847-Current	12/13/2022
NEWFernandina, Florida, US, Death and Burial Records, 1896-1916	12/12/2022
UPDATEDWisconsin, U.S., Death Records, 1959-2004	12/9/2022
UPDATEDWisconsin, U.S., Birth Records, 1812-1921	12/9/2022
NEWNew Jersey, U.S., Disabled Merchant Seaman Hospital Records, 1802-1815	12/8/2022
UPDATEDLouisiana, U.S., Compiled Marriage Records, 1851-1900	12/7/2022

NOTE: This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I believe that many readers of this newsletter have an interest in low-cost computing devices. I know that I share that interest and therefore want to share my discoveries.

I have written a number of times about the advantages of Chromebook and Chromebox computers, the low-cost systems that perform almost all the functions that most computer users want from their systems. I use my Chromebook and Chromebox systems almost daily even though a couple of weeks ago I added a new, high-powered Macintosh to my collection of computers. The Chrome OS systems are so much simpler and easier to use when I have a "quickie" use for a computer.

Writing in the Android Authority web site, Rita El Khoury has written an article about a number of recent additions to the Chromebook/Chromebox systems. I thought I knew those systems well but her article showed me a number of new things that I was not aware of previously.

If you have an interest in Chrome Operating System computers, you probably will want to read Rita El Khoury's article at: https://www.androidauthority.com/love-chrome-os-3251538/.

Comment: During the Christmas season, I have seen dozens of ads for Chromebook systems at lower prices than I have ever seen before (and for a lot less than what I paid for mine!). If you are looking for a system for yourself or for a gift for a computer non-expert, you might want to check the current ads.

Perhaps he was simply a friendly next-door neighbor. Maybe not. Scientists are hoping ‘historical biomolecules’ on a 15th-century missive written by Vlad Dracula, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s vampire count, will reveal more about him.

A 16th-century portrait of Vlad III, more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula. Photograph: Ian Dagnall Computing/Alamy

On a dark and stormy night in May this year, exactly 125 years to the day that Bram Stoker published the definitive vampire novel, two people pored over a document more than 500 years old in a room in Transylvania – signed by Dracula himself.

Gleb and Svetlana Zilberstein’s mission? To extract genetic material from the letters written by Vlad Dracula – the historical inspiration for Stoker’s vampiric count – left there by his sweat, fingerprints and saliva.

And from that, the pair, who have been dubbed “protein detectives” – though they prefer “historical chemists” – can build up a picture of not only the physical makeup of the Wallachian warlord who became known as Vlad the Impaler for his practice of displaying his enemies on stakes, but also the environmental conditions in which he lived.

“It was mystical that we were extracting Dracula’s molecules on the day that Bram Stoker’s novel was published 125 years ago,” said Gleb Zilberstein. “We did not specifically plan this date. All night, after the extraction of Dracula’s molecules, it rained, dogs howled and lightning flashed. It was really a very magical atmosphere. Count Dracula blessed his release from the Romanian archive.”

Zilberstein’s sense of the theatrical belies the pioneering science at the heart of what he and Svetlana do. He said: “Our job is to find the biochemical traces left from the time when the historical object was created or when it was used by some historical figure.

“When ‘historical biomolecules’ are found, we begin to analyse them. That is, to determine the molecular composition and age of historical molecules. We mainly determine proteins and metabolites.”

“These molecules are more stable than DNA and provide more information about the environmental conditions, health, lifestyle, nutrition of the historical person to whom the historical molecules belonged.”

You can read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/11/dracula-vlad-the-impaler-letter-protein-clues.

From the MyHeritage Blog:

AI Time Machine™, our successful new feature that allows you to picture yourself throughout history, keeps getting better. We’re happy to announce that due to popular demand, the available themes in AI Time Machine™ have been expanded to include a new category: AI avatars. In addition to the historical (time travel) themes offered since its launch, you can now create AI avatars in dozens of stunning themes. See yourself rendered as a pencil sketch or animated character, as a World Cup soccer player, and in more original, fun themes. If you’ve already taken AI Time Machine™ for a spin, you can generate the new themes on an existing model, or upload a new set of photos to create dazzling avatars. Avatars are perfect for sharing with your family and friends or for using as your profile photo on social media.

You can read more and also see examples of the new avatars at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/12/new-ai-time-machine-adds-ai-avatars/.

For decades, Nuestra Cosa provided a platform for UC Riverside’s Chicano students to share their stories, poetry, and art with the campus.

After the newspaper stopped publishing in 2012, much of that history became harder to find, with back issues tattered or fading away. A new project has made those voices available once again in a digital collection where readers can browse through the 40-year span of the newspaper.

The project converting almost 100 issues of Nuestra Cosa into a digital format was a collaboration between the UCR Library and Chicano Student Programs, or CSP, as well as student groups Teatro Quinto Sol and the Encuentros, Student Participatory Research Project (ESPARiTU).

It was unveiled last month at a gala celebrating the CSP’s 50th anniversary, which also marks the 50th anniversary of Nuestra Cosa, which published its first issue on Dec. 7, 1972.

A collage of back issues of Nuestra Cosa, the Chicano student newspaper now available online. (Victor Perry/UCR)

The celebration included displays of newspaper covers and was attended by alumni who wrote for the publication. It was a powerful experience to share the project with contributors to Nuestra Cosa and the community it chronicled, said Sandy Enriquez, a special collections librarian who oversaw the effort for the library.

The publication, whose title translates into “Our Thing” in English, was founded by Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MEChA de UC Riverside, a student organization founded in 1969 during the Chicano movement with chapters at universities across the United States. It was created at a pivotal time when student members were active in the social and political issues of the time and were seeking to increase their representation on campus.

The archive also includes a 1969 publication called Adelante by MEChA de UC Riverside that was a precursor to Nuestra Cosa.

The project is the latest step in making documents and records of campus history more accessible. Earlier this year, the library posted the complete archives of the Highlander student newspaper on the same Calisphere database where Nuestra Costa is now available.

Calisphere includes digital records from all 10 University of California campuses along with a variety of historical records from libraries, archives, and museums throughout California.

You can read (a lot) more about Nuestra Cosa at: https://insideucr.ucr.edu/stories/2022/12/13/historic-chicano-student-newspaper-made-available-online.