Zoominar Series! IIJG Bi-Monthly Jewish Genealogical Online Presentations

“A Moroccan Jewish Genealogical Journey: Tracing Roots through DNA and the Paper Trail” with Dr. Raquel Levy-Toledano (France)

When: Sunday. Jan. 12, 2025, at 8:00 PM Israel / 1:00 PM EST (NY)   Sessions will last 1-hour, featuring a 45-minute presentation followed by a 15 minute Q&A period   Registration: Click here to reserve your place

Upcoming Zoominars:   * Baghdadi Surnames (Amb) Jacob Rosen, IIJG Deputy Chair (Israel) March 16, 2025   * History of the Farhi of Damascus and their involvement in Ottoman finance and politics Mr. Alain Farhi (USA) May 11, 2025

We look forward to seeing you!

To learn more about IIJG, please visit our website at https://www.iijg.org

The following is a press release written by folks at TheGenealogist:

Today TheGenealogist, a leading online family history and genealogy resource, announced the release of the complete 1910 Lloyd George Domesday survey records for Kent, a groundbreaking digital collection that offers unprecedented insights into early 20th-century British land ownership, properties and occupancy.

Smallhythe Place, Home of Actress Ellen Terry (Mrs Carew) in these new records 

This extensive record set covers over 1,400 square miles of Kent and documents nearly half a million individuals and organisations, providing genealogists, historians, and researchers with a detailed snapshot of the county's social and economic landscape at the turn of the 20th century.

The Lloyd George Domesday survey, officially known as the Finance Act 1910 valuation, was a comprehensive land and property assessment conducted to implement a new land taxation policy. The records represent a unique historical resource that captures intricate details about land ownership, property values, and local demographics during a pivotal period in British history.

Key Features of the Release:

- Comprehensive coverage of Kent's 1,400 square miles

- Detailed records of nearly 500,000 individuals and organisations

- Geolocated maps providing precise geographical context

- High-resolution digital images of original survey documents

"These records offer an extraordinary window into the social fabric of Kent in 1910," said Mark Bayley, Head of Online Development at TheGenealogist. "Researchers can explore detailed property information, trace land ownership, and uncover fascinating historical insights about communities across the county."

These records are now available to TheGenealogist subscribers, offering researchers an invaluable tool for understanding the historical landscape of Kent during the early 20th century.

This release brings the total coverage of the Lloyd Geoge Domesday to 8,600 Square miles and over 3.7 Million individuals and organisations covering London, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Oxfordshire, Middlesex, Northamptonshire, Surrey, and Wiltshire.

In these records is Robert Dyas, founder of the famous Ironmongors - read his story here:https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2024/the-untold-story-of-robert-dyas-a-century-of-customer-service-and-innovation-7910/

Explore the new records and start your genealogical journey today with TheGenealogist. To celebrate this release, for a limited time you can get a Diamond Subscription with a £25 S&N Genealogy Supplies Voucher and 12 Month Subscription to Discover Your Ancestors Periodical for just £119.95, saving over £69! You can claim this offer here: 

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/MGBLGD1224

The offer expires 31st January 2025.

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!

The National Library of Finland has reached another milestone: it has now digitised all Finnish newspapers published in the 1940s. The newspapers offer a glimpse into an interesting turning point in Finnish history: the period after the Continuation War and the post-war ‘years of danger’ from 1944 to 1948 when issues covered in the press included the terms of peace, the Finnish weapons cache case and the Soviet-led Allied Control Commission in Finland.

In the 1940s over 200 Finnish-language newspaper titles were published, with a combined total of some 1.4 million pages. “We are pleased to add more newspaper material to our digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi service. The 1940s were an interesting phase of Finnish history, and the digitisation of the material provides many new opportunities for its use,” says Director of Services Johanna Lilja. Swedish-language newspapers were digitised earlier with separate project funding under an agreement with the copyright management organisation Kopiosto. This means that both Finnish- and Swedish-language newspapers are now available in the digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi service.  

Tutkain agreement enables remote research use of Finnish 1940s newspapers 

As Finnish-language newspaper content from the 1940s is partially protected by copyright, the National Library cannot make it openly available online. However, the online research use of newspapers published until the end of 2021 is permitted to researchers and both seminar and master’s thesis students. This right is based on the Tutkain agreement concluded by the National Library, Kopiosto and Finnish higher education institutions. The agreement provides a foundation for research using digital methods.   
 
For Finnish-language newspapers, open online use is possible for those published until the end of 1939. In addition, the National Library’s digital material can be accessed in full at legal deposit libraries, where anyone can study, for example, the digitised newspapers from the 1940s.   

The digitisation of newspapers has continued at the National Library since the 1990s. At present, almost 20 million pages of newspapers are available in the digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi service. We are currently digitising newspapers issued in the 1950s. 

From: DigitalNC:

Interested in learning more about the War of 1812? Thanks to our new partners at the North Carolina Society Daughters of 1812, now you can! For the first time ever, six scrapbooks chronicling historic preservation, research, and reenactment are now available. Each scrapbook records written histories, historic banquets, and a variety of materials gathered by daughters of War of 1812 veterans in or around North Carolina. The scrapbooks date from as far back as 1940, to as recently as 2012, covering almost a century of historic engagement.

Each scrapbook contains a variety of records related to the operation of a historic preservation society. These range from letters written by Senators, to awards granted to members for their service in historic programming and outreach. A personal highlight are the colorful photographs of the Daughters’ reenactment events, where each member would dress in period-appropriate attire (often including their husbands, children, or even grandchildren!). Each members’ dress is evidence of their breathless devotion to historical accuracy, as well as their skill in sewing and tailoring! 

The written histories in each scrapbook are also an amazing way to find out more about North Carolina’s involvement in one of the lesser recognized aspects of American history. North Carolina witnessed several historic battles during the course of the war, and its coast bore witness to a rogues’ gallery of privateers, pirates, and buccaneers. Many histories are concerned with one Johnston Blakely, captain of the Wasp. During the War of 1812, Captain Blakely captured many British boats and disrupted countless others. He was a graduate of the University of Chapel Hill in its early days, and remained in North Carolina after his service. Another prominent name mentioned in the scrapbooks is Theodosia Burr, the daughter of Aaron Burr. Theodosia went missing off the coast of the Carolinas around the War of 1812, and several oral histories in the scrapbooks speculate on her fate. 

You can read these histories and discover North Carolina’s involvement in the War of 1812 online now here. Thanks again to our amazing partners at the North Carolina Chapter of the Daughters of the War of 1812 for making this collaboration possible. You can find their partner page on DigitalNC here, or visit their website online here.

After more than four years of litigation, a closely watched copyright case over the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of library books is finally over after Internet Archive officials decided against exercising their last option, an appeal to the Supreme Court. The deadline to file an appeal was December 3.

With a consent judgment already entered to settle claims in the case, the official end of the litigation now triggers an undisclosed monetary payment to the plaintiff publishers, which, according to the Association of American Publishers, will “substantially” cover the publishers’ attorney fees and costs in the litigation.

“While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review,” reads a December 4 statement posted on the Internet Archive’s blog.“We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests.” The post added that the IA would continue work with supporters "to advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend, and preserve digital books.”

The end of the case comes after a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court in September delivered a swift and unequivocal decision that unanimously affirmed judge John G. Koeltl’s March 24, 2023, summary judgment ruling, which found the Internet Archive's program to scan and lend print library books to be copyright infringement.

“This appeal presents the following question: Is it ‘fair use’ for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no,” the 64-page decision reads.

The infringement lawsuit was first filed on June 1, 2020, in the Southern District of New York by Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley, and organized by the AAP. The suit specifically involved 127 works from the plaintiff publishers—a sample of the more than 33,000 plaintiff publishers' works said to be included in the Internet Archive's library—with initial court filings suggesting that the lA's collection included more than a total of 3.6 million works potentially under copyright.

Publisher and author groups had long been troubled by the IA's program and the concept of controlled digital lending. But a lawsuit did not appear imminent until March 2020, when the Internet Archive rattled publishers and authors by unilaterally launching its now shuttered National Emergency Library initiative, which temporarily removed restrictions on the IA's collection in response to the pandemic closures of schools and libraries.

In a statement, AAP reps celebrated what they characterized as a complete legal victory.

“After five years of litigation, we are thrilled to see this important case rest with the decisive opinion of the Second Circuit, which leaves no room for arguments that ‘controlled digital lending’ is anything more than infringement, whether performed by commercial or noncommercial actors, or aimed at authorship that is creative or factual in nature,” said AAP president and CEO Maria Pallante, in a statement. “As the Court recognized, the public interest—and the progress of art and science that is the mandate of the Constitution’s copyright clause—is served best when authors and their publisher licensees can decide the terms on which they make their works available.”

Meanwhile, the Internet Archive’s legal battles are not quite over. The IA is facing a similar, follow-on suit filed by a group of major record labels over its "Great 78" program, which collects vintage 20th century 78 RPM recordings, digitizes them, and makes them freely available to the public.

Since it opened in the 1930s, Devil’s Den State Park has attracted generations of Arkansans for its natural beauty. So much of what people love about the park, though, was carefully planned and made by the men of the Civilian Conservation Corps. They built the cabins and laid stone steps on the trails. They aligned roads with the landscape to create dramatic vistas, and even strategically cleared trees to improve the views. 

“The CCC came to Arkansas during a crucial time when state parks were just getting established. They were instrumental in building the infrastructure of key parks like Devil’s Den and Petit Jean,” said Angie Payne, principal investigator on the project, which was led by the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas. 

CAST, in collaboration with the U of A Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, has documented the CCC’s work at Devil’s Den in a new website, ccc.cast.uark.edu, with a detailed history of the park supplemented with maps, documents and archival photos. 

“The Civilian Conservation Corps not only built the foundation for which Arkansas State Parks is known, but also established a legacy of craftsmanship and environmental stewardship that continues to inspire us today. This new website by CAST and the Fay Jones School brings their story to life, showcasing how their work has shaped beloved places like Devil’s Den State Park,” said Shea Lewis, secretary of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism. 

The website is part of a project that aims to eventually document all CCC-built parks in Arkansas. The work was completed in close coordination with Arkansas State Parks and was funded by a grant from the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council. 

“It’s a resource that not only honors the past but also informs how we preserve and adapt these treasures for future generations,” Lewis said. 

DOCUMENTING THE PAST 

Hundreds of young men arrived at Devil’s Den in 1933. They had struggled during the Great Depression, but as members of the CCC they would be fed, housed and paid $30 a month. They set to work immediately clearing roads and creating the park. 

In an illustrated, multimedia history or “story-map,” visitors to the website can learn about “parkitecture,” the design style for America’s state and national parks that uses local stone and timber. They can listen to a video interview, recorded in 2003, with a man who was part of the Devil’s Den CCC crew. They can see how workers built the Lee Creek dam or explore a 3-D model of the overlook shelter. 

In another section, an interactive map lets visitors explore Devil’s Den across space and time. Long-vanished CCC camp buildings are marked on the map next to structures that still exist today. Click on a building, and a window appears with a description, historic and contemporary photos, blueprints and related documents.   

“One of the more unique aspects of our site is that the maps are directly connected to our archive. Users can easily go back and forth between the two,” said Manon Wilson, lead archivist on the project from CAST. 

The centralized archive currently features over 600 items (historical photos, documents and more) that have been contributed to the project by key partners including Arkansas State Archives, Arkansas State Parks, the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History and the personal collection of Karen Rollet-Crocker. 

The man suspected of killing an 18-year-old Federal Way woman in 1988 was identified eight months after he died of cancer, closing the cold case.

On Nov. 30, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department revealed in an online post that a suspect had been found in the 1988 cold case murder of Tracy Whitney. According to the post and an accompanying video, DNA swabs were taken from her body, and multiple people who knew or dated her were interviewed, but the case went cold for years.

In 2005, the DNA was sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigations Combined DNA Index System, but no match was found. However, after the Washington State Attorney General offered a grant in 2022, the sheriff’s department submitted the DNA found on Whitney to a lab for genetic genealogy, and a match was found for the suspect.

“Unfortunately our suspect, John Guillot Jr., had died a few weeks prior. Detectives matched the suspect’s DNA to Guillot’s biological son to confirm Guillot Jr. was the suspect,” the post said. “There were no connections between Tracy and Guillot Jr. and detectives believe this was a stranger abduction, rape and murder.”

Details of the murder

On Aug. 28, 1988, Pierce County deputies responded to a call of a body found in the Puyallup River near Sumner. Fishermen had located the body of a woman who was nude where the Puyallup and White Rivers meet, according to the sheriff’s department.

Following the body’s discovery, detectives were called to the scene. An autopsy was performed, revealing that the woman’s cause of death was asphyxia caused by strangulation and probable smothering. She also had several blunt-force injuries and was believed to have been sexually assaulted. Her death was ruled a homicide.

Two months later, the woman was identified as Whitney through dental records. According to a video on the incident posted by the sheriff’s department, Det. Sgt. Lindsay Kirkegaard said that through the investigation, there were many suspects, including current and previous boyfriends, and there were rumors of who could have been involved.

The following is a press release written by MyHeritage:

We’re happy to announce the publication of four huge new collections of names and stories on MyHeritage, extracted from newspaper pages on OldNews.com. The collections contain 658 million records from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi; 998 million records from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska; 1 billion records from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania; and 651 million records from North Carolina, South Carolina, and District of Columbia.

The new collections are searchable on MyHeritage, with the full images of the newspaper pages available on OldNews.com via direct links from MyHeritage.

This treasure trove of genealogical information is just the beginning: these are the first four of 16 similar collections that we are planning to publish in December 2024. The full suite of collections, covering the entire United States and several additional countries, will collectively add more than 10 billion records to MyHeritage’s historical database, expanding it by 50%!

As part of this update, we’re also thrilled to share that OldNews.com now hosts more than 300 million newspaper pages!

Search the new collections now:

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Nebraska

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania

Search Names & Stories in Newspapers from North Carolina, South Carolina, and District of Columbia

The importance of newspapers for genealogy

Vital records like births, marriages, and deaths, are the important building blocks of genealogy, providing names, dates, places and relationships. However, they are typically bare bones and offer no color about the lives of one’s ancestors, their personalities, achievements and hardships. By contrast, historical newspapers are much richer, more detailed, and they do provide all the juicy details that vital records lack, including, in some cases, photographs. Newspaper articles offer glimpses into the daily lives, accomplishments, and challenges of individuals from generations past. For genealogists, newspapers often hold the missing pieces of family puzzles: Obituaries describe the person’s life history and impact on the local community; Community news articles bring to life the context of your ancestors’ lives: where they lived, worked, and contributed to society; Local achievements offer insights into their personalities and legacies. There are many other types of stories that can add much color to the family tree.

What’s special about the new collections

Despite their importance, historical newspapers have often been difficult to search effectively. With MyHeritage’s cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, we’ve turned this underutilized resource into a goldmine of genealogical information.

The new collections allow MyHeritage users to uncover rich information about their ancestors that was previously out of reach. This is because they are indexed and structured, so they can be searched using imprecise names, nicknames and synonyms; whereas searching in newspapers that are not indexed (i.e. raw text, like articles published online that are searchable by Google) is typically done using keywords and requires the user to write the name exactly as it appears in the newspaper.

For example, if your ancestor was named Frederick, you can now find him in an important newspaper article on MyHeritage even if you search for him by the name of Fred and he happens to be mentioned in that newspaper with his original name of Friedrich.

As another example, if a newspaper article describes a marriage that took place “on Wednesday last week”, MyHeritage will analyze the publication date of the article and understand and store the full date of the marriage, allowing you to find it by date. This would not have been possible if you had been searching solely based on keywords mentioned in the article.

As a third example, if an article is about Mr. Wilson and further below it mentions that his wife was named Maggie, MyHeritage will understand that a person named Maggie Wilson exists and index it, and users will be able to find that article when searching for her name.

For these reasons, the new index collections are not only easy to search but also create an excellent foundation for MyHeritage’s powerful matching technologies. Users with a family tree on MyHeritage will soon receive exciting matches with the new collections, notifying them about articles in which their ancestors and relatives appear without having to search for them manually.

The structured records in the new collections were extracted from nearly 200 million English newspaper pages using cutting-edge AI technology developed by the MyHeritage team. This AI is designed to extract not just names from the newspaper articles but also the relatives of every person mentioned, as well as additional fields such as occupations, residences, travel from one location to another, and more.

You can read much more at: https://tinyurl.com/dw59yjcd.

Want to find where people having your last name are found?

“Discover the Origin of Your Last Name” is a web site offering that promises to help you find distribution of names across countries and regions. The site mainly focuses on surnames, because more people with the same surname in a place, means something: either those people are in the region since long ago and the name originates from there or nearby, or members of the same family for some reason relocated there. Want to find where people having your last name are found?

Data from many countries is available, including: Argentina, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and more.

The statistics are very reliable for some countries but not so good for others, primarily because of the quality of public records varies from one country to another. The information about surnames is derived from electoral rolls, birth records, census, and similar publicly-available information. There is good data about: the USA, Canada, and many European countries. However, there is poor to no data about: China, Iran, India and most of the African countries.

The searches are quick and easy. A search for my own surname in the U.S. displays the following results:

2,227 

I had no idea the names was so popular in the United States!

Want to find where people having your last name are found? The "Discover the Origin of Your Last Name" website is mainly used for finding origins of names, curiosity, entertainment and genealogy research. 

You can find this and more at the “Discover the Origin of Your Last Name” web site at: https://lastnames.myheritage.com/.

The key to solving Lela Johnston's murder sat in evidence for nearly 50 years before police had the means to identify her killer.

But DNA alone wasn't enough to find out who assaulted and murdered Johnston, a 68-year-old woman who lived alone on north Robinson Avenue in May 1976. Detectives with the OKCPD Cold Case Unit announced this week that for the first time, they used genealogy research to solve a murder case. Putting a face to the DNA profile finally gave Johnston's family the closure they deserve.

"I thought it would never be finished," Johnston's granddaughter Leslie Sullenger recently told police. "It had been so long."

Finding a killer through genealogy

The technology to analyze and compare DNA didn't exist in 1976. During the police investigation, however, detectives collected enough evidence that a sample could be analyzed decades later.

They couldn't find a match in the national database, said OKCPD Det. Chris Miller.

"It kind of went cold again for several years," he said in a video about the investigation produced by the police department.

In recent years, however, with the popularity of at-home DNA tests to learn more about your ancestry, police have been able to compare a suspect's genetic profile to millions of those voluntarily given to genealogy companies. One of the most high-profile cases solved using genealogy was the Golden State Killer serial murder case.

This allows police and researchers to comb through family trees and identify anyone who might be a suspect. Sometimes it produces a lead, sometimes a dead end.

"We thought we were getting close sometimes, and then find out we're down the wrong path," Miller said.

With the help of DNA Labs International and genealogist Allison Martin-Krensky, police eventually discovered their suspect: Charles O. Droke.

Droke was 28 years old when he forced his way into Johnston's home, raped her and brutally killed her. By now, though, Droke was already dead.

Charles O. Droke

Victim's family feels 'at peace'

Sullenger, the granddaughter of Droke's victim, told police that her grandmother was a loving, caring person.

"She sewed fantastic, she made all my school clothes. She cared for her yard, her home," Sullenger said. "I felt that she was an integral part of my life."

The horrific murder was devastating to the family.

"We were extremely upset and confused because they didn't take anything from the house. They just took her life," Sullenger said.

Droke met his own violent end, however. About 13 years after he murdered Lela Johnston, he was shot and killed by his own brother, Edwin. According to news reports at the time, Edwin Droke shot his brother in the head after a confrontation.

Edwin was eventually given the death penalty but killed himself two days later, all but closing out a violent chapter in Oklahoma City's history.

"I just couldn't believe it. After all these years, to finally have an answer. Are they ever going to pay for doing this? And he has," Sullenger said. "It is very important that this is solved. I feel an inner peace now."