Police departments around the world have used DNA to help solve crimes. In most cases, the police compare DNA information with similar information stored in huge databases of other people's DNA info. However, a new method is gaining in popularity: It doesn’t have any matching profiles in police databases but, using analysis of the genetic material, the police departments still find suspects in an investigation.

It sounds like something you might see in a science fiction movie, but the technology is now available to law enforcement agencies like the Australian Federal Police – a powerful new tool for investigators.

Police say the technology, called “massively parallel sequencing”, is more powerful than current DNA profiling methods available to police and can provide more exact detail.

It examines what is known as the nucleotide base sequence in the DNA – the base code for all living things. By using analysis of genetic material, the policed now can deduce the gender, ancestry, eye color and hair color of the potential suspect in the investigation.

While this method does not identify individual suspects, it greatly narrows the list of possible suspects.

You can learn more about what police in Australia are doing with DNA in an article by Fergus Hunter published in The Sydney Morning Herald at https://bit.ly/3rISKgl.

Steve Morse operates a valuable web site for genealogists at at Stevemorse.org. Unfortunately, Meta.com (previously known as Facebook) has crippled Steve's web site. Here is a note from Steve that I received:

"It turns out that facebook is now flagging all facebook postings that mention my website as being spam. I won't even try to convince you of the absurdity of that because I'm sure you are aware that it is false. I've received email from users informing me of this, and one person told me that it is happening at all genealogy facebook groups that she is a member of. There's not much that I can do to fight facebook, but perhaps you might want to get the word out to your readers about this.

"To verify that it is happening, go to the facebook debug tool at

"> https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

and enter stevemorse.org. They respond with

"> We can't review this website because the content doesn't meet our Community Standards.

"-- Steve"

The following was written by the Applied Genealogy Institute (AppGen):

Seattle, Washington: Today Applied Genealogy Institute (AppGen) announced their classes for spring 2022. AppGen will offer the following courses taught by these nationally known instructors during March and April of 2022.:

• “Researching Catholic Records,” Margaret Fortier, CG

• “Genealogy Foundations I: Focus on Using Records,” Lisa Gorrell, CG

• “Applied Genetic Genealogy,” Leah Larkin

• “Getting Lost in Ledgers,” Diane Richard

• “Advanced Swedish Research,” Jill Morelli, CG

Mary Roddy, CG, founder of Applied Genealogy Institute stated, “We received many fine proposals and it was difficult to make a decision. We picked the ones that met the criteria of unique topics, taught by proven instructors and which lent themselves to the practicum approach. We look forward to launching our second series in the Spring of 2022.”

AppGen is a virtual practicum-based educational opportunity for intermediate and advanced genealogists. Courses are characterized by small classes with a high degree of interaction; knowledgeable instructors who offer unique content; and personal instructor feedback to homework---a unique combination.

The latest offerings are presented by instructors who are experts in their field with proven teaching experience. Lisa Gorrell, CG taught “Land Records” in AppGen’s inaugural semester to rave reviews from the students. Margaret Fortier is a known expert in French Canadian and Italian records and has had deep experience working for and with Catholic dioceses and their records. Leah Larkin is the author of the outstanding blog, “The DNA Geek,” and lectures nationally. Diane Richard has been “mining” ledgers for familial relationships whenever she finds herself in a burned county. Jill Morelli, CG is a national expert on Swedish research with numerous publications and a deep knowledge of the mantals tax records

Registration will be open after the first of the year. Specific dates and times for the March and April courses will be announced as they are made available. Sign upon the AppGen Mailing List to receive notifications first at https://appliedgen.institute/mailing-list.

The following is an announcement written by JRI-Poland.org:

Highlights:

• • JRI-Poland.org announces that researchers on its website will now be able to go directly to Pages of Testimony search results within Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names

  • This Partnership will streamline JRI-Poland.org users’ experience and provide the ability to add to the Yad Vashem Names Database new Pages of Testimony substantiated with biographical documentation.

  • Family Historians researching the current or former territories of Poland can now more easily determine whether their relatives have been memorialized or whether they can elaborate on the known life events for a Shoah victim using the JRI-Poland database.

Jerusalem — December 6, 2021 —JRI-Poland.org, an independent non-profit organization, announces a new partnership initiative with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, to display a direct link to matching Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony search as part of a genealogical search on the Jewish Records Indexing – Poland website. Recognizing the importance of the family historian for advancing Yad Vashem's mission to memorialize each one of the 6 million Shoah (Holocaust) victims, Yad Vashem will now allow a surname search on JRI-Poland.org to simultaneously search the Yad Vashem repository of documents and display a link to those search results through an API (Application Programming Interface) on the JRI-Poland users' search results screen.

The choice of JRI-Poland.org for this promotional feature stems from JRI-Poland's 26-year success in utilizing its long-standing agreement with the Polish State Archives to document the largest pre-war European Jewish community, the Jews of the current or former territories of Poland. Alexander Avram, Director of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names in Jerusalem observed that "while many shelves remain empty, bearing witness to more than one million individuals who have yet to be memorialized, we hope that partnerships like this with JRI-Poland can and will play an important role in helping us fill those vacant shelves and add a large number of Pages of Testimony in the years to come."

JRI-Poland Executive Director, Stanley Diamond of Montreal, Canada, remarked, "JRI-Poland is honored to assist Yad Vashem with its sacred duty by facilitating the preservation of a Shoah victim's memory and improving the retelling of major events in a Shoah victim's life. We do this by presenting the documentation of the vital events and at the same time indicating either the existence of - or the lack of - a tribute for these individuals in the Yad Vashem Hall of Names."

JRI-Poland Assistant Director, Robinn Magid of Berkeley, California, added, "Correlating vital records with a mention in the Hall of Names is the first step in presenting a more complete biography of people like my great-grandmother who were lost in the Shoah”. She added, “Yad Vashem and JRI-Poland are collaborating to increase the likelihood that our audiences will find something new, perhaps overlooked, and maybe even life-changing."

JRI-Poland Co-founder, Michael Tobias of Glasgow, Scotland commented, "Providing this new service to Yad Vashem is a natural extension of our core objective of providing our fellow researchers with the ability to recover details of their families' lives in Poland."

About Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, is the ultimate source for Holocaust education, documentation and research. From the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem's integrated approach incorporates meaningful educational initiatives, groundbreaking research and inspirational exhibits. Visit us at: yadvashem.org

About JRI-Poland.org

JRI-Poland.org is a collective of global volunteers preserving the details of our ancestors’ lives in a form that will remain accessible forever to the greatest number of researchers. We have built the largest database representing the lives of the Jews who lived in the current or former territories of Poland, their families and their communities. Visit us at: jri-poland.org

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

Over 4.6 million new records from “the garden of England” have been added to Findmypast in their latest Findmypast Friday update.

Kent electoral registers, 1570-1907

This brand-new collection contains over 4 million records spanning 337 years and dating back to the reign Elizabeth I. Documenting both parliamentary and local voters' lists, these transcripts provide the names, parishes and, in later records, addresses of voters across the county as well as the nature of their qualification to vote and the date they were recorded.

The earliest records are from the Boroughs of Faversham and Dover – countywide coverage does not really begin until the 1830s when electoral reform widened the franchise.

Kent Burials

Over 16,000 new additions from the Watling Street Cemetery have been added to our collection of Kent Burials. The amount of information listed in each record may vary, but most will reveal a combination of the deceased’s burial date, age at death, residence, occupation and dedication. Some records may also include additional notes such as their marital status, parent’s names or if they were a foundling.

Kent Burials now contains over 4 million records spanning over 400 years. The collection constitutes a valuable resource for researching ancestry in Kent and is provided in association with Canterbury Cathedral Archives, The National Archives, Kent County Council, Medway Archives, the North West Kent Family History Society, Val Brown and the College of Arms, the official heraldic authority for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and much of the Commonwealth including Australia and New Zealand.

Newspapers

This release sees a week of tens, with ten brand new titles and ten updated papers. This include 114,064 new pages, from the aptly-named agricultural paper Leek Times to local news segment The South London Journal.

New titles:

• • Folkestone Chronicle, 1855-1857, 1859-1869, 1871-1872, 1875-1877, 1879, 1886-1892, 1897
  • Hinckley News, 1861-1871, 1874-1875, 1877, 1879-1887, 1889-1892
  • Hucknall Morning Star and Advertiser, 1889-1896, 1898-1913
  • Leek Times, 1877, 1879, 1888-1889, 1894, 1913-1922
  • South Gloucestershire Gazette, 1913-1914, 1919-1935
  • South London Journal, 1856-1868, 1877, 1889, 1893
  • Sutton Coldfield and Erdington Mercury, 1887-1895, 1898-1904
  • Sydenham Times, 1862-1870, 1873-1883
  • Tees-side Weekly Herald, 1904-1918
  • West Ham and South Essex Mail, 1888-1900, 1916-1941

Updated titles:

• • Birmingham Mail, 1889, 1902, 1907, 1910
  • East Kent Times and Mail, 1872, 1944
  • Essex Times, 1866, 1908
  • Fenland Citizen, 1975
  • Hull Daily News, 1874
  • Liverpool Daily Post, 1892
  • New Milton Advertiser, 1994
  • Newark Advertiser, 1859-1878, 1896-1898, 1900, 1902, 1904-1909, 1911, 1913-1918, 1958-1968
  • Saffron Walden Weekly News, 1998
  • Westerham Herald, 1892

U.S. census records are kept private for 72 years to protect respondents' privacy, then released to the general public. However, most genealogists are not aware that it is possible to obtain information from newer census records.

The fact is that records from the 1950 to 2010 Censuses are available but can only be obtained by the person named in the record or their heir after submitting form BC-600 or BC-600sp (in Spanish).

NOTE: Publications related to the census data collected from 1790 to 2010 are available at https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html. However, none of those records list names and other personal information given by the respondents.

You can learn more in Availablity of Census Records About Individuals (a PDF file available at: https://www.census.gov/prod/2000pubs/cff-2.pdf).

The Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA partnered with a film foundation to create an image archive to recognize and celebrate decades of Armenian photography.

The Promise Armenian Institute signed an official memorandum of understanding with the Armenian Film Foundation in April, said Hasmik Baghdasaryan, deputy director of the Promise Armenian Institute, in an emailed statement. This led to the creation of the Armenian Image Archive.

The project is interested in Armenian photographic collections and photographers with photos of Armenian subjects and is not bound by a particular time period or geographical region, Baghdasaryan said.

“The Armenian Image Archive has three goals: preservation, research, and exhibition of Armenian photographers and photography related to Armenian subject-matter,” Baghdasaryan said in the statement.

You can read more in an article by Lori Garavartanian published in the Daily Bruin web site at: https://dailybruin.com/2021/12/02/armenian-image-archive-aims-to-illuminate-armenian-experience-via-photography.

How do you store information in DNA? Well, the concept isn't all that difficult to understand.

The "traditional" method of storing digital information was as ones and zeroes. As a result, this requires a measurable amount, although a small amount, of physical space to record and store the information. Flash drives, hard drives , and other methods of storing ones and zeroes can do so in a small space but the space requirements are not zero.

That becomes significant when storing terabytes and terabytes of information, such as in today's cloud-based data centers. Some of today's cloud-based storage facilities require computer rooms the size of a football field. Or larger. Much of that space is required to store information.

Originally developed to analyze blood, DNA uses a different method to store our genetic information. Where hard drives use ones and zeros, DNA storage uses four chemical bases, adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). Remember elementary school science class? These compounds connect in pairs (A to T; G to C) to create rungs on a double helix ladder. It turns out that you can use DNA to convert ones and zeros into those four letters for storing complex data. Not only can you copy the method used in DNA, the result is less physical space required.

In other words, you can pack more information into a (small) physical space by copying DNA's four chemical bases than you can when using ones and zeros.

Microsoft, one of the pioneers of DNA storage, is making some headway, working with the University of Washington’s Molecular Information Systems Laboratory, or MISL. The company announced in a new research paper the first nanoscale DNA storage writer, which the research group expects to scale for a DNA write density of 25 x 10^6 sequences per square centimeter, or “three orders of magnitude” (1,000x) more tightly than before.

If adopted by future data warehousing facilities, the result could be much smaller data centers, resulting in lower electricity, air conditioning, and similar requirements.

Microsoft is one of the biggest players in cloud storage and is looking at DNA data storage to gain an advantage over the competition by using its unparalleled density, sustainability, and shelf life.

You can read a lot more about this new technology in an article by Phillip Tracy published in the Gizmodo web site at: https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-makes-breakthrough-in-the-quest-to-use-dna-as-1848149522.

23andMe is best known for at-home genetic tests primarily for inheritance testing. However, the company has long been planning on using their genetics expertise to develop drugs. The idea was to use its genetic database to identify and create new treatments. 23andMe now has a database filled with genetic information from approximately 11.9 million people.

In June 2021, 23andMe went public via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), VG Acquisition Corp., which is backed by British billionaire Richard Branson. 23andMe raised $592 million in proceeds from the IPO and, as of September 30, had about $700 million. With that cash in hand, it plans to push faster and deeper into drug development.

The company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has two immuno-oncology compounds under development. One is via a partnership with GlaxoSmithKline, which is currently in clinical studies. The second drug is expected to enter the clinic by the end of March 2022.

The GlaxoSmithKline deal was inked in July 2018 and marked a four-year collaboration. At the time, they said they expected to progress several targets per year jointly, and would initially split evenly the development activity expenses. GSK made a $300 million equity investment in 23andMe.

The first compound from the partnership entered the clinic in July 2020. They described it as a “potential first-in-class cancer treatment that was discovered by GSK and being co-developed by the two companies.” It was genetically validated by 23andMe using a proprietary algorithm that compared potential drug targets to data from its research platform.

Steve Schoch, 23andMe’s chief financial officer, told the Wall Street Journal that if the two cancers drugs are effective, it will help the company show a profit for the first time. In the quarter that ended September 30, it reported a net loss of $16.5 million, compared to a net loss of $36.2 million in the same period in 2020.

But profitability from drugs that are only entering the clinic is several years down the road. The cash from the SPAC-IPO deal will provide funds to run on until they can generate meaningful clinical data, which would allow them to raise more capital.

“Once you have meaningful efficacy data on the biotech side of things, the ability to raise capital, and the price at which you raise capital, will change meaningfully and will become less expensive and more available,” Schoch said.

Approximately 81% of its revenue comes from its at-home genetic tests. The rest comes from GSK for access to its research database.

At the beginning of the month, 23andMe completed a previously announced acquisition of Lemonaid Health, which is a sign the company is moving into healthcare and pharmacy services. Lemonaid Health is an on-demand platform for medical care and online pharmacy services.

At the time, Anne Wojcicki, chief executive officer and co-founder of 23andMe, stated, “This acquisition marks the first step in 23andMe’s journey to provide our customers with truly personalized healthcare, starting with genetics as the foundation. Lemonaid Health’s telemedicine platform and digital pharmacy will enable us to bring better healthcare to individuals in an affordable and accessible way, and ultimately empower people to take better control of their health.”

Schoch noted, “We only advertise our direct-to-consumer business. We’ve been very, very quiet about the biotech business because [with] that one, you just have to wait until it moves.”

Here is a major announcement: from December 2–7, 2021, MyHeritage is offering free access to one of the company's most important historical record collections: U.S. City Directories.

The U.S. City Directories collection contains over 561 million records in 26,000 public U.S. city directories published between 1860 and 1960. They typically include names, names of spouses, addresses, occupations, and workplaces, which makes them a rich source of information about family members in the United States — especially as an alternative to missing or destroyed census records. The MyHeritage collection is especially valuable because of its advanced indexing and multiple record consolidation, which make it much easier to find what you’re looking for and track your ancestors’ progress over time.

This is amazing news for anyone looking to dig deeper into their roots in the United States. You are welcome to search the collection now to learn more. 

You can read more about this limited time offer in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2021/12/limited-time-offer-free-access-to-u-s-city-directories/.

Happy searching!