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!

Personal comment by Dick Eastman: I refuse to take any statin drug due to a personal history of undesirable side effects of the drug. This new announcement from 23andMe describes a possible diagnosis of side effects in advance of taking the drug.

The following announcement was written by 23andMe:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted 23andMe 510(k) clearance for its pharmacogenetics report for the SLCO1B1 genetic variant to provide interpretive drug information for simvastatin. 

Simvastatin is a medication in the statin family of drugs, commonly prescribed to lower cholesterol to help reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. In 2020, simvastatin was the second-most commonly prescribed statin and the thirteenth-most commonly prescribed medication in the U.S.

A variation of a particular gene, SLCO1B1, influences the body’s response to simvastatin. 

In certain ethnicities, up to 38% of people have a SLCO1B1 genotype that increases the possibility of experiencing side effects related to taking simvastatin, particularly statin-associated musculoskeletal symptoms risk.

In addition to providing interpretive drug information, the new FDA clearance also removes the requirement for confirmatory testing. 

“This is an important win for consumers, as they will have access to critical information on how they may respond to a commonly prescribed medication, based on their genetics,” said Noura Abul-Husn, M.D. Ph.D., Vice President of Genomic Health at 23andMe.

“A complete health picture requires a number of inputs, including genetics, which too often is left off the table in healthcare. With this clearance, we are continuing to champion access to actionable health information so that everyone can benefit from a personalized health care experience and avoid negative side effects of medications where possible.”

Note: This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, thousands of genealogists are also frequent users of Google Docs so I am posting this brief article to inform them of recent upgrades:

The Google team has been hard at work polishing our favorite blank documents to look at, Google Docs. While some of the changes are merely cosmetic—I mean, look at all those pretty new icons in the menu—others added new functionality. And if, like most humans, you dismiss every notification for a new feature, you might have missed them.

So, whether you're a Google Docs power user or just a casual (no judgment!), dive into the most recent batch of features, and get a feel for how these Google Docs tips can improve your workflows.

Details may be found at: https://zapier.com/blog/google-docs-features/. 

I normally do not like to publish articles involving politics. However, in this case, the article revolves around the actions (or technically, the inactions) of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administation, a major supplier of genealogy information):

The National Archives is denying Republican accusations that its decision to refer Donald Trump’s handling of classified records to the Justice Department had anything to do with an inquiry from a top House Democrat.

House Republicans have been raising questions over the timing of the referral, which occurred on Feb. 9 — the same day House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) wrote to the agency to raise questions about Trump’s handling of sensitive documents that he retained at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But that timing is “entirely coincidental,” Acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall wrote in a letter to congressional Republicans on Tuesday.

The Archives’ inspector general operates with complete independence from the broader agency, Wall said, and did not receive Maloney’s letter, which was directed to the Archivist.

“At no time and under no circumstances were NARA officials pressured or influenced by Committee Democrats or anyone else,” Wall wrote.

Wall directed congressional inquiries about the ongoing investigation to DOJ, which is spearheading the probe into Trump’s handling of documents. DOJ had requested NARA “not share or otherwise disclose to others information related to NARA’s recovery of the 15 boxes at this time in order to protect the integrity of DOJ’s ongoing work,” Wall wrote.

You can read more in a rather lengthy article by Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu published in the Politico.com web site at: https://tinyurl.com/2p85eesv

(Continued from previous message)