Elizabeth Lotts has published an article that I think should be required reading to all newcomers to genealogy... and also can be very useful to old-timers as well. 

Before you spend money on your research, check into these ten genealogy resources.

You can find the list at: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/10-ways-to-research-your-family-tree-for-free/ar-AA1gRC0Q 

The National Center for Biotechnology Information is excited to introduce Pebblescout, a pilot web service that allows you to search for sequence matches in very large nucleotide databases, such as runs in the NIH Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and assemblies for whole genome shotgun sequencing projects in Genbank – faster and more efficiently!  

Pebblescout uses short segments of your query sequences to identify database records with matches. Matches are based on the frequency of a segment’s occurrence in a database. Result produced for each query is a ranked list of matching records where the ranking utilizes informativeness of matching segments. 

You can read more at: https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2023/09/14/introducing-pebblescout/ 

How many languages do you speak? Thanks to AI, that number could be as many as seven. Los Angeles-based AI video platform HeyGen has launched a new tool that clones your voice from a video and translates what you’re saying into seven different languages. If that wasn't enough, it also syncs your lips to your new voice so the final clip looks (and sounds) as realistic as possible.

Called Video Translate, the tool allows you to upload a video of yourself speaking in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Hindi or Japanese. The requirements are pretty basic so you don’t need any fancy cameras, microphones or software. The clip has to be at least 30 seconds long and should ideally feature just one person. But other than that, you just upload your video and in a single click HeyGen can translate what you’re saying.

You can choose whether you want the output to be in Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese or English. Support for even more languages is also expected by the end of September.  

You can read more in an article by Christoph Schwaiger published in the Tom's Guide web site at: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ai-video-tool-clones-your-voice-in-7-languages-and-i-almost-tried-it 

On Wednesday, September 13, two projects were presented in the library's lecture hall by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts.

Trausti Dagsson from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies and Luke O'Brien presented Speech Analysis of the website Ismus.is and the construction of a text library for older speech that was done in collaboration with the Árni Magnússon Institute and the technology company Tíró and handled about the creation of speech that was trained with audio recordings from the Folklore Museum. The recordings have now been made searchable and accessible.

Bragi Þorgrímur Ólafsson from the National and University Library of Iceland and Unnar Ingvarsson from the National Archives of Iceland presented the Icelandic database in Transkribus. The Transkribus software is made for the purpose of creating an Icelandic base for handwritten texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. The project was carried out in collaboration with experts from the National Archives of Iceland and the National and University Library of Iceland. You can access the Icelandic base by downloading the Transkribus software.

In addition, history student Una Haraldsdóttir told about her project about the diaries of Svein Þórarinsson and the experience of using Transkribus in that project. You can learn more about Una's project (in the Icelandic language) on the website Akureyri.net.

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

I have a question. None of my living relatives knows the answer to this question. I have not found the answer to this question in any public records, nor have I been able to find the answer in cemeteries. I have read a few magazine articles and Internet pages about the topic, but none of them have directly answered the question.

The question is…  “Why do we study genealogy?”

What makes anyone so curious about his or her family tree? What drives us to dedicate time, effort, and sometimes expenses to go find dead people?

What is it inside of us that makes us spend hours and hours cranking reels of microfilm, then we go home and report to our family members what a great day we had? 

I must admit that I have asked that question of many people and have received several answers. Some people report that it is simple curiosity… and I tend to believe that is a part of the answer. Others report that it is part of an intriguing puzzle that they wish to solve.

The theory on the puzzle bothers me. First of all, I am devoted to genealogy, but I could care less about other puzzles. I don’t do the daily crosswords in the newspaper, I don’t put together those picture puzzles, and I do not seem very interested in any other form of puzzles. If genealogy is solely a puzzle, why would I be attracted to it and yet not to other puzzles? That doesn’t make sense to me. In short, I think there is more to genealogy than there is to a crossword puzzle.

The simplest and most direct answer for many people is because it is a religious requirement. Indeed, members of the LDS Church are encouraged to find information about their ancestry for religious purposes. And yet, of all the LDS members that I meet at most genealogy conferences, most met their religious requirements years ago but continue to look further and further back. In fact, many of them become so addicted that they help others do the same.

Yes, I can accept that religion is a major motivator, but I believe there is still more. I constantly meet people, LDS members and non-members alike, who keep searching and searching, further and further back. Why?

I do not have all the answers, but I do have an observation or two. I believe that most all humans have a natural curiosity. We are curious about many things, but for now, I will focus on our curiosity about our origins and ourselves.

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/13255212.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

Another whole county’s worth of Irish parish records now bolsters the record collections of TheGenealogist! Today, one of the leading providers of family history resources has added the records of 510,007 individuals from County Laois to its site in their latest release.

[County Laois, once known as Queen's County from 1556 to 1922]

County Laois, once known as Queen's County from 1556 to 1922, is a double landlocked county in the Eastern and Midland Region of the Republic of Ireland. As the Irish diaspora has spread out across the globe, especially during the terrible events of the Great Famine of 1845–49 which devastated the county at the time, many people from across the world will be able to trace their roots back to this part of Ireland.

Searching TheGenealogist’s transcriptions provides an easy way to find records which then provides a handy link to the National Library of Ireland (NLI) in order to see the digitised image of the actual register. TheGenealogist’s transcription greatly benefits from its powerful SmartSearch that can be used to identify possible siblings, as well as parent’s potential marriage details.

To find out more about how to use these records see TheGenealogist’s article: Searching for ancestors in the Laois parish records https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/searching-for-ancestors-in-the-laois-parish-records-5099/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, which puts 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!

From the "Dear Amy" column by Amy Dickinson:

Dear Amy: As an adopted person, I have found genealogy an extremely interesting way of learning about my families.

DNA directs to family histories on maternal and paternal sides.

By adoption I am connected to many different branches on many trees.

I recently connected to my grandfather, who came from Denmark at age 17.

I now am learning so much more about the beauty of his home country and the family he left behind.

Other histories take me all over the world to places and people I would not have known about.

My own outlook on my life has changed beyond measure.

The resources are almost unlimited.

– Choosing My Wholeness

Dear Choosing: Your perspective is beautiful. I’m happy for you.

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I have frequently written about the many advantages of Chromebooks. This article is about one (new) advantage:

If you want to keep using your Chromebook for as long as possible, Google has some news you’ll want to hear. The company is making a few changes that will help your Chromebook last a little longer.

Google’s Chrome OS team announced it is upping Chrome OS commitments. Currently, Chromebooks get regular automatic updates every four weeks for eight years. These updates include security and stability improvements as well as new features. But starting in 2024, any Chromebook released after 2021 will now get ten years of regular automatic updates.

Owners who have Chromebooks that were released before 2021 aren’t being left out, either. Google says those older Chromebooks will be offered the option to extend automatic updates to ten years after they receive their last update.

Another interesting part of the announcement is the mention of incoming energy-efficient features. In the coming months, Google will begin rolling out an adaptive charging feature to Chromebooks. 

Could the lives of the eight billion people currently on Earth have depended on the resilience of just 1,280 human ancestors who very nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago?

That is the finding of a recent study which used genetic analysismodeling to determine that our ancestors teetered on the brink of annihilation for nearly 120,000 years.

However, scientists not involved in the research have criticized the claim, one telling AFP there was "pretty much unanimous" agreement among population geneticists that it was not convincing.

None denied that the ancestors of humans could have neared extinction at some point, in what is known as a population bottleneck.

But experts expressed doubts that the study could be so precise, given the extraordinarily complicated task of estimating population changes so long ago, and emphasized that similar methods had not spotted this massive population crash.

It is extremely difficult to extract DNA from the few fossils of human relatives dating from more than a couple of hundred thousand years ago, making it hard to know much about them.

But advances in genome sequencing mean that scientists are now able to analyze genetic mutations in modern humans, then use a computer model that works backwards in time to infer how populations changed—even in the distant past.

The study, published in the journal Science earlier this month, looked at the genomes of more than 3,150 modern-day humans.

The Chinese-led team of researchers developed a model to crunch the numbers, which found that the population of breeding human ancestors shrank to about 1,280 around 930,000 years ago.

You can read a lot more in an article by Daniel Lawler published in the phys.org web site at: https://phys.org/news/2023-09-skepticism-human-ancestors-extinct.html. 

The Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, Quebec, or the United States.
Second Edition. 
by Gary Boyd Roberts. Publ. by Genealogical Publishing Co. 2022. 1723 pages in 3 volumes.

The series is subtitled: Who Were Themselves Notable or Left Descendants Notable in American History. So the collection represents distinguished immigrants, or descendants who became notable in their own right.

Volume I contains the introduction, acknowledgements, and descents from kings or sovereigns who died after 1307.

Volume II contains descents from kings or sovereigns who died in 1307 (Edward I) or earlier, French-Canadian immigrants, an Hispanic royal descent, coda, and abbreviations.

Volume III is the index, postscript, and comments on “Toward an RD 1000.”

“Notable” as defined by the author are persons listed in the American National Biography, the Dictionary of American Biography, the Who Was Who in America, the Who’s Who in America, and the National Cyclopedia of American Biography. 

Some notables with extensive genealogies depicted are Gary Boyd Roberts (the author), Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, Dag Hammarskjöld, Sir Ferdinando Gorges (founder of Maine), and a daughter of Leo, Count Tolstoy. 

Ancestries go back to the times of barbaric chieftains, feudal kings, and families of inherited nobility. Their progeny and in-laws became landed gentry whose offspring became merchants, ministers, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and soldiers. From these prominent factions came the founders of the American colonies.

Genealogists who avidly follow the histories of royal-descended luminaries will find great satisfaction from this sterling resource put together by an exceptionally capable author.

The Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, Quebec, or the United States is available from Genealogical Publishing Co. at: https://genealogical.com/2018/04/09/announcing-the-royal-descents-of-900-immigrants/.