Disclaimer: I certainly am not an expert in OPMD or any other medical conditions. However, I became very interested in OPMD when I realized it is frequently found amongst my relatives on the French-Canadian side of my family. (My mother's ancestry is 100% French-Canadian.) Several of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and more distant relatives appeared to have symptoms of OPMD although several relatives are now deceased so testing of those individuals is not longer possible. I am simply comparing my knowledge of their symptoms with what I have read in medical journals.

I simply have done a lot of reading about OPMD and can offer references to documents written by medical professionals who do have expertise in OPMD. For details, always refer to these articles or to qualified genetics professionals.

If your ancestry is from France, the French-speaking families of Canada, Jewish, Spanish, or Japanese families, and if you or someone in your family is having symptoms of the upper eyelids and/or the throat or muscle weakening, you might want to get tested for OPMD.

Oculopharyngeal Muscular Dystrophy (OPMD) is a genetic disorder characterized by slowly progressing muscle disease (myopathy) affecting the muscles of the upper eyelids and the throat. Onset is typically during adulthood, most often between 40 and 60 years of age. Symptoms may include: eyelid drooping (ptosis), arm and leg weakness, and difficulty swallowing (dysphagia).

According to information on the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) website, OPMD is most common among a population of Bukharan Jews living in Israel, where an estimated 1 person in 600 is affected. OPMD is additionally estimated to occur in 1 in 1000 individuals of French-Canadian ancestry and 1 in 100,000 individuals in France. In the United States, the number of people with OPMD is not known, however the majority of diagnosed individuals are of French-Canadian, Ashkenazi Jewish, or Spanish American background.

I don't have statistics but amongst my mother's relatives, there certainly are many more than "1 in 1,000 French Canadians" in this family with these symptoms!

In short, there are two types of OPMD, distinguished by their patterns of inheritance. They are known as the autosomal dominant and autosomal recessive types. Both types are caused by mutations in the PABPN1 gene.

If you or any of relatives have droopy eyelids, difficulty swallowing, arm or leg weakness, or related symptoms and if you or your relative have French-Canadian, Bukharan Jewish, Ashkenazi Jewish, or Spanish American ancestry, you might want to start reading about OPMD.

NOTE: OPMD is found in Spain and in the U.S.A. amongst families of Spanish ancestry, but it does not seem to be common among the Latin American countries. Therefore, it is possible the inherited problem was spread amongst the families who moved directly from Spain to present-day New Mexico in the late 1500s and into the 1600s but not amongst the families that spent generations in Latin America along the way. However, be aware this is conjecture, not a proven fact.

A small number of Japanese families also reportedly have inherited OPMD but I am not able to find much information about them published in English.

Diagnosis

According to the NIH website,:

"The diagnosis of OPMD is established in a proband with a suggestive phenotype in whom either of the following genetic findings are identified: a heterozygous GCN trinucleotide repeat expansion of 11 to 18 repeats in the first exon of PABPN1(~90% of affected individuals) or biallelic GCN trinucleotide repeat expansions that are either compound heterozygous (GCN[11] with a second expanded allele) or homozygous (GCN[11]+[11], GCN[12]+[12], GCN[13]+[13], etc.) (~10% of affected individuals)."

Diagnosis for you or your family should be made by genetics professionals, not by directly contacting a laboratory. The genetics professional will first screen the individual's symptoms, along with family heritage, and then will send a DNA sample to a genetics laboratory if he or she believe OPMD to be a possibility.

Treatment

Treatment depends on the signs and symptoms present in each individual. Ptosis and dysphagia can be managed with surgery; however, recurrence of symptoms commonly occurs 5-15 years after intervention.

Summation

Again, I am not a OPMD expert. I offer this article simply as an introduction about why you might want to learn more about OPMD.  Always learn from the true experts.

There is a LOT more information available on the NIH website at https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/7245/oculopharyngeal-muscular-dystrophy and in the GeneReviews website at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK1126/.

French-Canadian families also will be interested in Genealogy and "The French Canadian Disease": OPMD by Mary Holmes at http://www.cantley1889.ca/english/echo/echocantley_2015-09.html. That article even lists the probable ancestors of thousands of present-day French Canadian families who brought OPMD to New France.

The following is a press release written by the University of Maine at Fort Kent:

Newspapers, documents, pictures, scrapbooks, and other records are now available online for people in Maine and across the U.S.

Even though northern Maine is still the most Francophone region of the state, there's been an effort in the past few years to help preserve and teach our state's Acadian history throughout Maine.

To do that, different federal agencies, state officials including Gov. Janet Mills, and the Maine State Library are all working together to digitize historical records focused on French heritage in Maine. 

The Maine State Library provided the Acadian Archives with a book scanner and software to make these collections easily available online. 

Patrick Lacroix, the director of the Acadian Archives at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, said they're currently digitizing some of the maps, drawings, scrapbooks, photos, films, and other French records. That also includes 100,000 pages of historical French-language newspapers.

"They'll be able to digitize newspapers that are currently out in physical format, or on microfilm, and put those on the Library of Congress website, where they'll be machine-searchable, keyword-searchable, and so it'll open up horizons, giant horizons, for people who are doing research or trying to connect with their own roots," Lacroix explained.

Lacroix said these collections tell the hardships and stories that Franco-Americans experienced all over New England. 

The goal is to highlight and expand access to show some of the great contributions these communities have made throughout our state's history and the present day.

"Donc, c'est surtout au niveau de la numérisation. Donc, c'est très important pour nous d'être représentés ailleurs au-delà de notre petit patelin ici, donc de mettre plus de ressources en ligne, qui seraient accessibles par Internet aux gens nonseulement de la communauté du Haut Saint-Jean, mais ailleurs dans l'état et ailleurs aux États-Unis, au Canada, de manière international, aussi," Lacroix said in French. 

Translation: "So, it is especially at the level of digitization. So, it's very important for us to be represented elsewhere beyond our little village here, so to put more resources online, which would be accessible by internet to people not only from the Upper Saint-John community, but elsewhere in the state and elsewhere in the United States, Canada, internationally as well."

“People of Franco-American, including Acadian, ancestry are at the heart of Maine. I am proud to join the Maine State Library in announcing these projects, which will preserve their history for future generations,” Mills said. “Going forward, anyone will be able to easily access these historical records online, protecting the original documents and supporting public education at the same time.”

Click here to access the documents that have been digitally uploaded so far.

Click here to learn more about the Acadian Archives at UMaine Fort Kent.

“Digitization is an important tool in terms of both access and preservation,” Adam Fisher, director of collections development and digital initiatives at the Maine State Library, explained. “When historical materials are scanned and made available online, they can easily be viewed by anyone with access to the internet and searched by keyword. By making the information available in digital form, it also spares the print originals from some of the wear that comes from repeated use.”

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

Still another company has left the microfilm business: Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection some time ago. As part of the plan to save the company, Kodak management has announced the company will no longer manufacture cameras. Actually, Kodak previously had stopped the manufacture of film and cameras that use film. In recent years, Kodak has only manufactured digital cameras, and those, too, are now being dropped. The company is dropping all film products, including microfilm. The changes will have a major impact on genealogists.

For years, genealogists, historians, and many others have relied on records recorded on microfilm. Some years ago, as the volume of paper created by government and industry became too great to store economically, government and industry welcomed microfilm, microfiche, and other micro-imaging techniques. Indeed, these tiny images have served us well. Millions of cubic feet of paper records have been compressed by microfilming and have been stored in much smaller (but expensive) filing cabinets. 

If microfilm had never been invented, the Social Security Administration alone would have needed to build dozens of warehouses for records storage and also would have needed to hire an army of clerks to sort, file, and retrieve those pieces of paper. The cost of all that would have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The conversion to microfilm and microfiche literally made record storage possible.

Now we are seeing another conversion: from micro-imaging to even smaller digital imaging. Indeed, storing millions of documents on computer disks requires even less space than does microfilm. Fewer records storage warehouses need to be built and fewer clerks need to be hired. Digital records, even with multiple off-site backups, require significantly less space than do microfilmed records and a LOT less space than the same records stored on paper.

Of course, digital imaging has other benefits as well. If properly scanned and stored, high resolution digital images can be sharper and easier to read than those stored on microfilm. Digital images can have less "fuzziness." In addition, distribution and display is much easier with digital images than images on microfilm. Microfilm readers are rare in homes and in many offices while low-cost computers are available most everywhere, even in a purse or briefcase. When was the last time you carried a microfilm reader in your purse or briefcase?

For years, one of the big arguments against digital imaging was that of the storage media. The argument has been phrased, "Who will be able to read floppies in 8-inch, 5 1/4-inch or 3 1/2-inch formats twenty or fifty years from now?"

Now we are seeing the same argument being used against the use of microfilm: who is going to be able to read microfilm or microfiche twenty or fifty years from now? That will be long after the last microfilm viewer has been relegated to a museum.

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/13303486

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. 

Hanging from a clothing line stretched across two sets of ladders, dozens, if not hundreds, of film negatives from The Newport Daily News archives dry out in the lobby of the Newport Historical Society’s headquarters on Touro Street, just a portion of the photo archive that was impacted when the organization’s basement unexpectedly flooded on Tuesday.

“It’s really Newport’s stories,” Executive Director Rebecca Bertrand said. “It’s the stories of locals – and it's the stories of your newspaper that’s being preserved and the wonderful thing is that though it’s damaged, it's not lost.”

The rest of the 150,000 photo negatives that had to be rescued from the flooded basement are being stored in a freezer to stave off mold growth, Bertrand said. This collection of photos, dating from around the 1950s to the 2000s, was donated to the Historical Society by the Sherman family, the publication's previous owners, and relocated prior to the paper moving from the former Newport Daily News building on Malbone Road in 2019.

You can read more at: http://tinyurl.com/yjsxf9n5.

Comment by Dick Eastman: Have you ever read any of my articles about the need to store MULTIPLE copies of your important data and store them in MULTIPLE locations? If not, maybe it is time for me to blow the dust off some of those articles and republish them.

The following announcement was written by the folks at Findmypast:

There are over 30,000 new records to explore this Findmypast Friday.

If you've got roots in Yorkshire, this week's 32,437 brand new Sheffield records may just help you to build the branches of your family tree. We've added 29,000 workhouse admission records to our collection, spanning over 200 years, in addition to 2,175 crime and courts records. 

We've also added social and institutional records from Sheffield, and over 70,000 new newspaper pages.

Yorkshire, Sheffield Workhouse Admissions 1700-1915

This exciting brand-new set consists of 29,003 workhouse records from Sheffield in Yorkshire. These transcriptions span an impressive 215 years.

Yorkshire, Sheffield Crime Courts and Convicts 1737-1938

Next up we're staying in Yorkshire with an existing collection of court records, to which 2,185 transcriptions have been added, spanning from 1769 to 1938.

Yorkshire, Sheffield Social and Institutional Records 1558-1939

We also added 1,259 records to our Sheffield social and institutional collection this week, consisting of exam records from the Norton Free School.

Over 70,000 new pages to discover

We added a brand new Scottish title to our newspaper collection this week and updated six existing publications. Explore new pages from Sussex to Selby...

Here's a full rundown of all that's been added:

New titles:

Updated titles:

Have you made a surprising family history discovery? Whatever you've uncovered about your past, we'd love to hear about it. You can now get in touch and tell us using this handy form.

Last week, we added Derbyshire baptisms, Boer War records and much more. Explore the full release for yourself here.

Could the latest U.S. Census records be inaccurate? No! Really?

Illinois is adding tens of thousands of people to its population total, and California is getting misplaced sailors on an aircraft carrier put in the right location, after successfully asking for a review of their 2020 census figures.

New York City also appears to have gotten an additional 1,090 people added to its population total recently, after asking the Census Bureau to double-check the city's numbers from the head count of every U.S. resident, city officials said.

The once-a-decade census produces population figures that help determine political power and the annual distribution of $2.8 trillion in federal funding. The Census Bureau has two programs giving state governments opportunities to have their population totals reviewed and adjusted if need be. Nearly 200 requests for reviews were filed by tribal, local and state governments for the 2020 census.

Changes from the reviews will be applied only to future annual population estimates used for the rest of the decade in determining federal funding. They cannot be used to change how many congressional seats each state was allotted during the apportionment process, nor for the data used for redrawing political districts.

You can read more about this issue in an Associated Press article published in the Fox News web site at: http://tinyurl.com/cpvmn88j.

Here is an article that is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I suspect mzny computer users will be interested in this information:

There are some major differences between JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, and other image file types. Nolen Jonker has written an easy-to-read article that explains all the common file types and published the information in the makeuseof web site at: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/jpeg-gif-png-image-filetypes-explained-tested/. 

Among many developments, FamilySearch plans to digitize millions of more genealogical records, improve computer-assisted indexing and provide more volunteer experiences.

Advances in computer-assisted indexing and other digital innovations, new volunteer experiences, the largest family history conference in the world and, of course, more genealogy records — are all part of what FamilySearch is planning for patrons in 2024. 

FamilySearch, an international family history website sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offered a preview of its plans for the coming year in a news release on Jan. 17.

Here is what Latter-day Saints can expect to see at FamilySearch:

Access to more family history records

FamilySearch will continue to work with record custodians and other organizations worldwide to digitize millions of more historical records, to preserve them and make them more widely available.

FamilySearch will continue to digitize records in more than 75 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Oceania, with significant new additions coming for collections in Peru and Portugal.

Last year, FamilySearch collaborated with Ancestry and the Library and Archives Canada to make the 1931 Canada census available for free research. FamilySearch will add the full 1921 Canada census this year.

FamilySearch will also continue to gather oral genealogies from Africa, as well as other unique record sets, and make them digitally searchable. This search feature will allow patrons to explore the oral genealogies from more than 15 African countries by tribe, village and surname with access to photos, audio recordings and lineages preserved through interviews.

Computer-assisted indexing

In 2024, FamilySearch plans to improve its computer-assisted indexing algorithms to recognize and index historical genealogical records in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English. This handwriting recognition technology, combined with the contributions of online volunteers, will make millions of document images text-searchable faster and enable more people to discover their family heritage.

Full-text search

On a related note, FamilySearch has been leveraging its AI-powered handwriting recognition technology to also improve its record search experience. 

In 2024, FamilySearch hopes to make the search experience more powerful by adding full-text search capability to select record sets.

You can read a lot more about future plans in an article by Trent Toone published in the thechurchnews.com web site at: http://tinyurl.com/mr4622r3.

From the wvnews.com web site:

The Harrison County Genealogy Society is moving to the Clarksburg History Museum, located at the Board of Education building at 445 W. Main St., Clarksburg, West Virginia.

The move will offer space at the History Museum for individuals to research their family ancestry. The Genealogy Society has been collecting information for over 50 years.

The Genealogy Society also has awarded scholarships for the past 20 years. Recent awards have been two $500 scholarships per year to local high school seniors. The application consists of an essay about their family with supporting documentation of a family tree.

The Society’s web page is available at: https://www.facebook.com/HarrisonCountyGenealogicalSociet/. 

Back in the old days of home computers, say thirty years ago, most of us had one free-standing computer in the house, and the whole family shared it. Those days are now long gone. Many families, perhaps most, now have multiple computers. As computers have become more affordable, portable, and necessary, it’s now common to find multiple computers scattered throughout a home. There is often one desktop or laptop or tablet computer per family member. In fact, most of our cell phones are also computers these days. With today's technology, the in-home computers are easily connected together by a network, sharing one Internet connection. 

If you already have a broadband connection with a router, you probably already have a network installed whether you know it or not. If you have wi-fi installed at home, you definitely have a network.

While many people may not realize it, once the network is installed, it is easy to also share printers, disk drives, and more. It’s even easy to share the resources among different operating systems. For instance, in my home we have Macintosh, Chromebook, Linux, Windows, iPad, Android  and “smartphone” computers all connected together via a mix of wired and wi-fi wireless connections. (Yes, we do own too many computers!) All the computers share the same Internet connection, the same two printers, and the same file server for storage of backup files.

The printers and the Internet connection are items we already had. Sharing them was done at no extra expense. However, adding shared disk storage was a bit trickier. In our case, we added storage at very little cost. All the computers, even the handheld devices, can access the eight-terabyte disk drive that I bought on sale recently. That's a lot of storage for a six-ounce handheld computer!

OK, that last statement might be considered to be technically incorrect. The eight-terabyte hard drive is not directly connected to any of the handheld devices. Yet the tablet computers and smartphones all can access the eight terabytes of storage space on that hard drive, as can the Chromebook, the Macintosh desktop, the Macintosh laptop, the Windows systems, and even cell phones. If I purchase another hard drive, that storage space also can be added to the mix. The maximum amount of storage space I can add is limited only by the money in my checkbook and, luckily, the cost of hard drives continues to drop every year.

I can even access all that storage when I am traveling in another part of the country or overseas. However, that's a story for a different day.

Technology changes quickly. Sooner or later, you will replace one of the computers in your home with a faster or lighter model, one with more disk drive capacity, one with greater capabilities. What will you do with the old computer? Will you give it away? Or perhaps simply put it in a closet where you will forget about it and let it gather dust?

I have a better idea: convert it into a server. 

Let that one machine serve all the other computing devices in the household, providing on-site backup for each device’s files, supplementing functionality that other devices may lack, and allowing everyone in the family to share the same printer(s), scanner(s), hard drives, CD or DVD drive(s), and more. 

The following works with old Windows, Macintosh, or Linux computers. It will work with desktop or laptop computers.

One of the first things you should consider is turning that old computer into a backup server. Doing so isn’t a very expensive proposition, and it’s relatively easy to set up, run, and maintain. You can use the old computer, now called the "new file server," as shared disk space, available to all family members. You may or may not need to install new software. If you do, the required software is available free of charge.

As for the old hardware, the same stuff that was used as a personal computer is now re-purposed to become a server. No change in hardware is required. 

Of course, the first use of a file server that pops to mind is making backup copies of files, just in case one of the active family computers falls victim to a hardware failure or human error. (Probably the most common cause of lost files is human error – when something is erased accidentally.) Having disk space on a separate computer, or file server, provides redundancy and protection from all sorts of problems.

You can elect to share part of the disk drive in the old computer as well as leave other sections private, one for each family member. Want to review your child's homework papers? Have that child save the files in the family's shared space where you can access them. You can then access the files from your computer, even if it is in a different room or even if you are traveling in a different country. In other cases, you might want to keep some files private, invisible to other family members. Today's file sharing software allows for both shared and private sections, even on one server. Security is always under the control of the person who administers the server.

Of course, your old computer probably has only one small disk drive. The disk may have appeared to be huge when you purchased that computer a few years ago, but the same storage space may seem puny by today's standards. However, you can easily add more disk space by plugging in an external USB drive. Two-terabyte drives are now available for $50 to $100, and that is probably more than enough storage capacity for most families! I must admit that my re-purposed file server has an external disk drive that stores much more than two-terabytes!

Eight terabyte external disk drives now sell for $100 to $200. The family's teenagers can easily keep their entire MP3 collections and a lot more besides on an eight-terabyte drive.

Some family members may be using inexpensive Chromebook computers. These are very popular amongst children and adolescents. The family can keep dozens of cartoons or full-length movies on one server in the home and everyone can watch those videos on their own computers, tablets, and smartphones. 

Today’s laptop computers typically do not have CD-ROM drives. How do you load new software or access data that is only available on CD? Simply share the CD-ROM drive in the server, and then allow every family member to access it remotely – that is, from the networked computer in the playroom or perhaps their bedroom. Sharing is easy to accomplish and is available at no extra charge. Every family member can access the same CD-ROM drive in the server (although only one person at a time).

Many of today's computer games are multi-player; that is, participants play against each other. Some of these games require a game server someplace, either in the home or someplace out on the Internet. Your new file server can be used as a game server. Speed on an in-home network should be lightning fast, even on a ten-year-old Windows machine.

You may or may not want to attach a printer to the same file server, making it a print server as well. If you leave the server powered on most of the time, the printer will be available to all family members. Purchasing one printer and sharing it will be a lot cheaper than purchasing a separate printer for each family member!

If the old computer runs Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8, it can easily become a file server, sharing its connection with up to ten other computers. Windows XP and later versions of Windows can easily share files, printers, and even CD-ROM drives. Luckily, there is an easy and free solution for users of older Windows systems. Even old laptops can be used as a file server.

For any Windows-based PC, you may prefer to replace Windows entirely and use either a Linux or UNIX operating system. Both Linux and UNIX are safer to use, are resistant to viruses and other malware ("malevolent software"), and are more reliable than Windows. Both Linux and UNIX are available free of charge, and both will run well on older computers with slower processors and limited amounts of memory. UNIX and Linux are "naturals" for use as servers; hundreds of thousands of UNIX and Linux servers are installed around the world.

Any Macintosh running OS X can be used as a server. Older Macs that run OS 9 can also be used, although with limited capabilities. 

I would suggest your server be a computer with at least a 1 gigahertz processor. Having a large internal or external drive is convenient but an older computer with a rather small hard drive can easily have additional, plug-in external hard drives added later, if you wish.

The older computer can be used as a file server and printer server without replacing the operating system. Later versions of Windows and of Macintosh OS X and macOS already have built-in capabilities to share disk drives, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM disk drives as well as printers. The simplest method of creating an in-home “server” is to keep the present operating system and simply enable file sharing and printer sharing. However, switching to a true server operating system adds more functionality, such as controlling who can access which files and how much files space each user may use as well as file mirroring or automated backups of each users’ computer(s).

Either Linux or UNIX can be daunting to install and configure for a person not familiar with the operating systems. However, several free products solve all the technical issues. You can download FreeNAS (which stands for "Free Network Attached Storage") or Amahi or NAS4Free (now renamed to XigmaNAS). Another choice, called ClearOS, is a bit more complicated to install and configure but can result in an in-home server with even more capabilities. ClearOS is designed for use by small businesses but also works well as a home server if there is someone in the home with at least moderate technical skills to keep it running. 

Perform a Google search on any of those names to learn more. 

Once you select an operating system, burn it to a CD-ROM disk, insert that disk into the PC you wish to re-purpose as a server, and re-boot. This will install the software automatically. You will need to perform some very simple configuration. Minimal technical skills are required on FreeNAS or Amahi or NAS4Free and you will soon have a high-reliability server running in your home.

I have used both FreeNAS and Amahi found them to be easy to install and configure by anyone with a bit of technical knowledge. 

My choice would be to use the original Windows operating system, if possible. If not, then I would use OpenNAS. 

If your old computer is a Macintosh and if you possess some technical skills, you can repurpose the Mac as a server. With OS X or the newer macOS, you can easily share files and printers without installing any new software. Macintosh OS X already has file and printer sharing included. 

With both Windows and Macintosh systems, you will need to enable file sharing (and, optionally, printer sharing) in order to allow other computers to connect to the system. Step-by-step instructions to enable printer and file sharing on Windows may be found at http://compnetworking.about.com/od/windowsfilesharing/ht/enable_disable.htm. Similar instructions for Macintosh systems may be found by starting at your favorite search engine and searching for “macintosh enable printer and file sharing”.

All of these servers, Windows and Macintosh alike, can also become mail servers by adding third-party software. Mac users can look at http://cutedgesystems.com/software/MailServeSnow/ for one such solution. Windows users can start at https://cloudzy.com/best-mail-servers-for-windows/.

I recently repurposed an older Mac Mini as a file and print server. However, I decided to start with a clean installation. After making a full backup and storing it elsewhere, I re-installed the OS X operating system. During installation, I gave the Mac Mini a new name of "MiniServer" and have been using it for a few months now. It has worked perfectly. I plugged an eight-terabyte disk drive into the Mac Mini's USB port and now have a lot of storage space available to all the computers on the in-home network. I also share two printers on the same in-home network.

If you have an older computer, Windows or Macintosh, don't let it gather dust. Put it to use! Convert it to a server and save your backups.