Whether it’s seeing what your ancestors may have worn in a bygone age or having a picnic on the lawn, there’s plenty to see and do at a marvelous museum in Dumfriesshire, Scotland.  The Shambellie House Museum of Costume is set in a Victorian house in beautiful wooded grounds. 

Designed by renowned Scottish architect David Bryce, the house presents a fascinating look at fashion and social etiquette from the 1850s to the 1950s. The museum features room settings with accessories, furniture, and paintings that complete a graceful Victorian and Edwardian environment of well-to-do living. As you wander through the house, you will see parasols, party dresses, linens, lavender bags, samplers, and shoes. The museum provides an interesting view of fashion and society through the ages.

You can learn more at Shambellie House Museum of Costume web site at: https://www.shambelliehouse.org/.

From an article by Andrea Honaker and published in the Mercer University web site:

"Nine hundred and eighty slave transactions — and counting.

"For years, Bibb County deed books from the 1800s sat unopened, collecting dust inside the courthouse. But since 2018, a team of researchers has been studying and cataloging their contents, which include the sale and lease of enslaved people alongside transactions of land, horses and other property.

"Now, those records have been digitized and a searchable database is in the works, which will allow the untold stories of these African Americans to be shared and the public to learn more about the history of their ancestors as well as Macon. 

“'We have to be transparent, and this project is the epitome of transparency, whether we like it or not. We’re giving accurate primary source records of this county,' said Bibb County Superior Court Clerk Erica L. Woodford, who holds a juris doctor degree. 'We’re proud of the project and know it’s going to be of benefit to the community and the world.'

"Woodford, who earned bachelor’s degrees in African American studies and political science at Mercer in 1997, discovered slave records within the deed books while conducting inventory after taking office in January 2013. She shared her findings with Dr. Chester Fontenot Jr., director of Mercer’s Africana studies program and Baptist Professor of English. By 2018, the Clerk’s Office, Department of Africana Studies and Mercer University Libraries had launched an ambitious project to digitize Bibb County historical documents related to slavery.

"The team focused on property deeds from 1823, the year in which Bibb County was incorporated, to 1865, the year slavery was abolished. Led by Research Services Librarians Adam Griggs and Stephanie Miranda Harkins, Mercer library staff were instrumental in establishing the methodology of the research, Dr. Fontenot said."

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/ma44k24c.

Today is the first day of the month. Today is an excellent time to back up your genealogy files. Then test your backups!

Your backups aren't worth much unless you make a quick test by restoring a small file or two after the backup is completed.

Actually, you can make backups at any time. However, it is easier and safer if you have a specific schedule. The first day of the month is easy to remember, so I would suggest you back up your genealogy files at least on the first day of every month, if not more often. (My computers automatically make off-site backups of all new files every few minutes.)

Given the events of the past few months during the pandemic with genealogy websites laying off employees and cutting back on services, you now need backup copies of everything more than ever. What happens if the company that holds your online data either goes off line or simply deletes the service where your data is held? If you have copies of everything stored either in your own computer, what happens if you have a hard drive crash or other disaster? If you have one or more recent backup copies, such a loss would be inconvenient but not a disaster.

Of course, you might want to back up more than your genealogy files. Family photographs, your checkbook register, all sorts of word processing documents, email messages, and much more need to be backed up regularly. Why not do that on the first day of each month? or even more often?

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

(+) How to Safely Send a Secret E-mail Message on the Spur of the Moment

Beware of "Your Family's Coat of Arms" Scams!

New and Improved Family Statistics on MyHeritage

Not Everything Online is Free

AGRA Announces Major Rebrand

Make Obituary Searches Easier with Obit Magnet

Introducing Democracy’s Library

New Collection of Military Notices from the London Gazette

Museum of Northwest Colorado Project Preserves Local Newspapers for Public Access

The Times Newspaper Historic Collection Launches on TheGenealogist

U.S. National Archives Tops 200 Million Digitized Pages in Online Catalog

Here's Why You're Afraid Of The Dark (Blame Your Ancestors)

Do Slave Schedules Accurately Report Owners?

New from Nathan Dylan Goodwin: The Sawtooth Slayer

Ancestry CEO Deb Liu Honors Family Ties And Redefines What Leadership Is Today

Findmypast Expands Their Global Offering This Week

Findmypast Expands Their Global Offering This Week (Part 2)

23andMe Receives FDA Clearance to Provide Drug Information for Common Cholesterol Medication

Meghan Markle Reveals She Is ’43 Percent Nigerian’ After Genealogy Test

10 New Google Docs Features Worth Trying Out

Google Is Giving Workspace Individual Subscribers a Big Storage Bump

Passkeys Are Finally Here

Free App Helps You Keep in Touch, Even With Limited Cell Service

National Archives denies Trump referral to DOJ was connected to Democrats

An interesting interview of Ancestry CEO Deb Liu may be found at: https://tinyurl.com/yknttmpc.

In the interview, Deb Liu discusses the difficulties and adventures of being one of the few Asian American corporate CEOs.

The Museum of Northwest Colorado is working toward digitizing an archive of newspapers from 1945 to 1982 in an effort to better preserve that period of local history and make the records more available for research. 

The museum is home to more than a century’s worth of original newspapers, containing local records of happenings and history that are often requested by different kinds of researchers. 

A proposed project — earmarked in Craig’s 2023 budget for $24,000 — will digitize Craig Empire-Courier newspapers from 1945 to 1982 on to the Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection, which is a free website provided by Colorado State Library. 

The Historic Newspaper Collection already contains images of local publications from 1891 to 1945, which are optimized on the website by optical-character recognition, which makes the printed words searchable on a computer. 

“It’s a game-changer to a golden era of research — we have access to newspapers during a piece of history and a part of the region where people moved around a lot,” said Paul Knowles, assistant director for the museum. “It helps connect dates in other stories that have been written and explains exactly how events went down and what dates they occurred.”

Currently, to research newspapers published after 1945, museum staff have to pull the original copies from large binders in the museum’s basement. 

You can read more in an article by Amber Delay  published in the craigdailypress.com web site at: https://tinyurl.com/4ub249bk.

Fold3 has announced a new collection of UK records:

The UK, London Gazette WWII Military Notices 1939-1945 contains 1.3 million indexed records for service members found in the Military Notice sections or supplements of the London Gazette newspaper.

The London Gazette is Britain’s oldest continuously published newspaper. It is the authoritative source of government news and publishes notices related to elections, Royal proclamations and other declarations, appointments to public office, and more. Issues of the Gazette also include notices on military matters. This new collection consists of a searchable index of service members and the awards or mentions they received in the Gazette during the WWII years of 1939-1945. These notices include military awards or commendations, reports of people leaving service due to illness, appointments, promotions, and other military matters.

Ordinary Seaman Bennett Southwell posthumously receives the George Cross

In some cases, the award notice also includes the story behind why the recipient received an award or commendation. The notices in this collection may contain information such as name, rank, regimental number, occupation, military dates of service, commendation dates, regiment, and unit. They provide clues to help unlock stories of bravery and sacrifice.

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

I hope you are familiar with the warning, “Normal email is sent plain text and can be read by many different people when it is sent or when it is residing in the recipient’s in-box. Never send confidential information (such as credit card numbers or Social Security numbers) via normal email!” Network sniffers can spy on your email traffic. Using Secure Sockets helps, but there is no guarantee the recipient is taking the same precaution.

I would never send credit card information or stock brokerage account information or my Social Security Number or any other sensitive information in an e-mail message.

In fact, there has been a safe and secure method of sending sensitive information for years: encrypt the information before sending it. Of course, the recipient then will receive a message that is unreadable and must decrypt it in some manner before being able to read your message.

NOTE: I will point out that many years ago I spent my military service as a crypto technician. I spent at least eight hours a day encrypting and decrypting digital messages and voice traffic (telephone conversations, aircraft two-way transmissions, etc.). While that was more years ago than I care to admit, I have always maintained an interest in cryptology and have tried to keep up-to-date with the unclassified information available.

I have experimented with all sorts of encryption methods over the years. There are many to choose from, and almost all of them meet their objective of securing communications. However, most of them have been awkward to use and require technical expertise on both ends: both the sender and the recipient needed to know and understand the use of cryptology. 

So what do you do if you suddenly have a need to send sensitive information to someone else? Here are several suggestions. Pick one.

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/12970638.

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.

Nathan Dylan Goodwin has published a new book: The Sawtooth Slayer. It is available either as a Kindle book or a paperback. Here is the description:

April 2020, Twin Falls, Idaho. A serial killer is on the loose. A nameless man is kidnapping young women from their own homes, taking them out of the city to kill them before returning their bodies to random locations around the city. Detective Maria Gonzalez heads up the investigation but has very few leads to pursue. As time passes and fears rise that the killer might strike again with a fifth victim, Maria turns to Venator—an investigative genetic genealogy company—in the hope that they can identify the killer from his DNA alone before he has the chance to take yet another life. Despite her initial reticence to take on the company’s first ever live case, Madison Scott-Barnhart and her team in Salt Lake City agree to try to reveal the identity of this barbaric serial killer. In the midst of the global pandemic that has closed the Venator office and posed both personal and professional problems for Madison, time is running out on this case.

This is the second novel in the Venator Cold Case series. Although it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone story, for the best experience, begin your journey with The Chester Creek Murders.

It is available from Amazon (search for B0B8ZP2V6C) as well as other book stores.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

The Times Newspaper Historic Collection Launches on TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist launches fully searchable copies of The Times, to join its ever growing Newspapers and Magazines Collection. This release sees 3,129 editions from the 1870s decade join the many other newspaper publications already available to search on TheGenealogist. Keep a look out for further decades to be released in the coming months of this famous name-rich newspaper of record.

The Thunderer, as it was nicknamed, like many other newspapers carried Birth, Marriage and Death announcementsand so is a great resource for finding details of our ancestors and where they lived.

Discovering our forebears recorded in this newspaper may surprise some researchers. Inclusion in its pages may be because our ancestor was the victim or a witness to a crime. They may have worked as a police officer, lawyer or been a member of the court that had been a part of a legal case reported on by The Times.

Some ancestors may have warranted their name in print in this hallowed publication on being newly qualified and joining a professional body, for example The Royal College of Surgeons.

But it is not just the great and the good that appear in The Times as all sorts appear in its pages. For example the parties to divorce cases are ordinary people from across the country. You can read who was the petitioner, respondent and co-respondent, giving a researcher some useful information. Often included is the county in which the couple had lived and an occupation for the man.

For example, in the edition for Friday 10 June 1870 is a case where a man’s wife had left home to live with another. We discover that the petitioner was employed “at some works at Burslem, in Staffordshire'' while the co-respondent in the case was a grocer’s assistant.

Read TheGenealogist’s article: Times Past https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/times-past-1629/

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!