The Virtual Record Treasury is recreating much of what was lost in a Dublin fire a century ago.

On June 30, 1922, MORE than 700 years of Ireland’s history went up in flames.

After the explosion at the Public Record Office of Ireland in June 1922, Dubliners rushed to rescue smoldering scraps of history. COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY, TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

Handwritten parish records noting centuries of baptisms, marriages, and burials; courtroom files laying out the details of lawsuits and criminal cases on brittle parchment; census data; parliamentary transcripts; wills; deeds; and financial ledgers—nearly all were lost when an explosion and fire tore through the Public Record Office in Dublin at the start of the year-long Irish Civil War. The war, which pitted the newly formed Irish government against a rebel faction that opposed a treaty with Britain, would leave hundreds dead, along with a bitter legacy that affected Irish politics for decades. Meanwhile, its impact on the country’s history would also remain an open wound.

“The history of a country is founded upon its archives,” wrote a doleful Herbert Wood, who was serving as deputy keeper of the Public Record Office of Ireland—the country’s de facto chief archivist—at the time of the fire. “Accordingly, the destruction of a great accumulation of records… comes as a tremendous shock to those who were anxious to wrest the truth from these memorials of the past.”

Thanks to international collaboration and 21st-century technology, a good portion of what was lost has finally been restored.

Supported by a €2.5 million grant from the Irish government and employing 14 full-time archivists, Beyond 2022: Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury is a massive effort to recreate as much of the archive as possible. Begun five years ago, as the centenary of Irish independence—and of the fire—approached, it went live online this summer, with a searchable database, a selection of curated stories, and a 3D virtual-reality recreation of the building itself as it would have looked in the days before the fire.

You can read the full story in an article written by Amy Crawford and published in the Atlas Obscura web site at: https://bit.ly/3S9tJ95

My thanks to newsletter reader Leslie Rubinson for telling me about this story.

If you have stored files on Amazon Drive, you need to be aware of this announcement today by Amazon:

"Over the last 11 years, Amazon Drive has served as a secure cloud storage service for Amazon customers to back up their files. On December 31, 2023, we will no longer support Amazon Drive to more fully focus our efforts on photos and video storage with Amazon Photos. We will continue to provide customers the ability to safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos with Amazon Photos."

The same announcement also states:

"If you rely on Amazon Drive for your file storage, you will need to go to the Amazon Drive website and download your files by December 31, 2023."

If you have a small number of files that should be stored off-site (for backup or other purposes), you can find other free file storage services listed at:  17 Best Free Cloud Storage Services for Backup in 2022 at https://www.lifewire.com/free-cloud-storage-1356638.

You also might want to read my earlier article, Best Cloud Storage Service in 2021, at https://eogn.com/page-18080/10184053.

If you don't yet have any files stored in a cloud service, you probably should read What Is Cloud Storage, and Why Should You Use It at https://www.howtogeek.com/775235/what-is-cloud-storage-and-why-should-you-use-it/.

The $470,000 grant will support research based on Yiddish-language testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation.

Isaac Bleaman, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to study the speech of native Yiddish speakers who survived the Holocaust.

The five-year $470,000 grant will support research that documents the Yiddish language as it was spoken by survivors who were interviewed for the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation, an organization that was founded by film director Steven Spielberg in 1994.

The goal of Bleaman’s project is to analyze the grammatical and phonetic properties of European Yiddish and to address the impact of the Holocaust on the development of the language. The award will finance the construction of a new digital language corpus containing transcripts, media files, and metadata.

These materials will be made available to researchers, Yiddish language instructors and students, as well as the general public for free online. Currently most of the Yiddish interviews can only be viewed at institutions that subscribe to the full Visual History Archive, and none are available with transcripts.

You can read more in an article in the Forward.com web site at: https://bit.ly/3zhlcrZ.

Historic photographs of World War Two Jewish refugees who started new lives in Suffolk have been donated to the county archives in Bury St Edmunds.

On Monday, July 25, Claire Duncan, from Bungay, donated the family photographs to the archive after recognising people featured in the 'We Have To Move On' exhibition at the National Horse Racing Museum, in Newmarket.

The exhibition looked at refugees living in the Palace House Stables hostel in Newmarket during the 1939-45 conflict.

You can read much more in an article by Toby Lown published in the East Anglican Daily Times web site at: https://bit.ly/3Jgh8wT.

Fritz and Eva Ball – Originally from Berlin, Fritz and Eva arrived at Palace House Stables in May 1939 and lived there until 1943. - Credit: William E Barton

Roots Ireland has announced the addition of 8,388 new Monaghan / Clogher census substitute records to their online portal.

Over 8,000 census substitute records from the Monaghan/Clogher region dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries have been added to the Roots Ireland database.

Roots Ireland holds over 23 million records, and the database is being added to continually. In 2022 so far over 57,000 records have been added to the Roots Ireland database from Monaghan, Tipperary, Westmeath, Galway and Kerry.

Now the group has announced the addition of 8,388 new Monaghan / Clogher census substitute records to their online portal.

The new records are as follows:

- 361 Inquisitions for County Monaghan dating from 1591. These list the properties held by people in Monaghan upon their death.

- 1,435 records from "Book of Survey and Distribution for County Monaghan" dating from 1641.

These records list the landowners of Monaghan at the time of the outbreak of the 1641 Rising.

- 833 records from "Book of Survey and Distribution for County Monaghan" dating from c. 1650s. These records list the landowners of Monaghan from the mid-1650s.

- 5,128 records from the index of wills for the diocese of Clogher, dating between 1659-1857.

- 631 records from an index of those who died intestate in the diocese of Clogher, 1793-1821. These list people who died without leaving a will in the Clogher diocese.

An up-to-date list of sources for Monaghan can be found at monaghan.rootsireland.ie.

A press release from the American University of Armenia:

YEREVAN — The Armenian Genealogy Conference is pleased to announce the addition of two prominent names to the list of speakers — Dr. Panov Dmitri Arkadievich and Andranik Nahapetyan — who will present at the first-ever annual assembly to be held in Armenia, September 23-25, 2022.

Dr. Arkadievich is a Russian historian, genealogist and archivist. He is chief of research and genealogical study at The DST Kristian (The House of Family Tradition). Dr. Arkadievich will present a survey of the Armenian genealogical research sources available in the Russian archives.

Nahapetyan is an independent researcher and member of the Council of Experts of the SFU ISRS Center for Armenian Studies (Southern Federal University, Institute of Sociology and Regional Studies). Nahapetyan will give a talk on the genealogy and origins of Simon Vratsian, the fourth prime minister of the First Armenian Republic. The presentation will also explore the resources available for researching Nor Nakhichevan (Crimean) Armenian genealogies.

In addition to these speakers, George Aghjayan, founder of the Armenian Genealogy Conference, will be exploring the use of DNA testing in Armenian genealogical research. The Armenian people have been subjected to multiple traumatic events over the past 200 years that have caused inordinate ruptures in family histories. DNA testing provides a modern scientific tool that can enhance our ability to determine ancestry, bridging existing generation gaps to reconnect families. A limited number of DNA kits will be available to participants of the conference.

Participants in the fifth Armenian Genealogy Conference can register online.

Since 2016, four conferences devoted to Armenian genealogy have been held in the United States. This year, for the first time ever, the Armenian Genealogy Conference will be hosting the annual assembly in Armenia. The conference is cosponsored by the Hamazkayin Cultural Association and the American University of Armenia (AUA).

American University of Armenia

Founded in 1991, the American University of Armenia (AUA) is a private, independent university located in Yerevan, Armenia, affiliated with the University of California, and accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission in the United States. AUA provides local and international students with Western-style education through top-quality undergraduate, graduate, and certificate programs, promotes research and innovation, encourages civic engagement and community service, and fosters democratic values.

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

Researching your family history has just got a little easier as six million historic records spanning 457 years is now available online.

This is the first time the entire Sussex Parish Registers collection has been digitised and brought online, in an exclusive collaboration with Ancestry, allowing people to discover information about baptisms, confirmations, marriages, deaths and burials within the historical county of Sussex.

The 125,700 records in this collection can range in date from the early 1500s to the mid- to late-1800s.

Working with the East and West Sussex Record Offices, the records on Ancestry hold detailed information about the ancestors of many of the counties families and will be searchable by parish on the Ancestry website.

You can read more in an article by Charlotte Harding published in the SussexExpress.co.uk web site at: https://bit.ly/3BtHsS7.

This is for advanced DNA experts only:

Opening and processing gene expression data files in Excel runs into the inadvertent risk of converting gene names to dates. As pathway analysis tools rely on gene symbols to query against pathway databases, the genes that are converted to dates will not be recognized, potentially causing voids in pathway analysis. Molecular pathways related to cell division, exocytosis, cilium assembly, protein ubiquitination and nitric oxide biosynthesis were found to be most affected by Excel auto-conversion. A plausible solution is hence to update these genes and dates to the newly approved gene names as recommended by the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC), which are resilient to Excel auto-conversion. Herein, we developed a web tool with Streamlit that can convert old gene names and dates back into the new gene names recommended by HGNC. The web app is named Gene Updater, which is open source and can be either hosted locally or at https://share.streamlit.io/kuanrongchan/date-to-gene-converter/main/date_gene_tool.py. Additionally, as Mar-01 and Mar-02 can each be potentially mapped to 2 different gene names, users can assign the date terms to the appropriate gene names within the Gene Updater web tool. This user-friendly web tool ensures that the accuracy and integrity of gene expression data is preserved by minimizing errors in labelling gene names due to Excel auto-conversions.

See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17104-3 for all the details.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

The Crystal Palace, Penge, in the Bromley Valuation Office records

More than 109,000 new IR58 Valuation Office land tax records for owners and occupiers have been added by TheGenealogist to its Lloyd George Domesday Survey records.

Researchers can now discover all types of interesting details about the homes of their ancestors from the Lewisham and Bromley areas. Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist can find what their forebears' property was like in the years before WWI using the scanned images of the field books. These documents reveal what the surveyor from the years between 1910 and 1915 recorded about the size, state of repair and value of the house.

Detail from a Field Book from Lewisham Valuation Office area

As all the records are linked to the large scale Ordnance Survey maps that were used at the time, each property is shown plotted on detailed mapping on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™. This exceptionally useful tool, with its ability to show the same point on a variety of modern and historical maps, allows the house or family historian to see how the area may have changed over time and to explore their ancestors' locality.

In the case of this release we can see how in Bromley the Crystal Palace was still standing in fine parkland with fountains and other features. The Palace, having burnt down in the 1930s, its footprint is today given over to trees and grass on the modern map views. Across the road from its entrance had been a railway station in 1910 which today has subsequently been completely built over with new homes.

Lloyd George Domesday Survey linked map on Map Explorer™

• • TheGenealogist’s Lloyd George Domesday records link individual properties to extremely detailed maps used in 1910-1915 viewed on the powerful Map Explorer™

• • Fully search the records by person’s name, county, parish and street

• • Maps zoom down to show individual properties where they were plotted in the 1910s

• • Georeferenced to a modern street map or satellite map underlay to more clearly understand what the area looks like today

Total number of Owners and Occupiers in the current release: 109,177

Areas covered in Lewisham (63,451 Owners and Occupiers): Blackheath, Brockley, Catford, Deptford North, Deptford South, Forest Hill, Hatcham, Lee, Lewisham, Lower Sydenham and Upper Sydenham.

Areas released for Bromley (45,726 Owners and Occupiers): Beckenham, Bromley, Chelsfield, Chislehurst, Mottingham, Orpington, Penge, St Mary Cray

Read TheGenealogist’s article: From a Crystal Palace to the home of a Lord Mayor embroiled in scandal https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/from-a-crystal-palace-to-the-home-of-a-lord-mayor-embroiled-in-scandal-1593/

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!