The following is a press release issued by the U.S. Natonal Archives and Records Administration:

The National Archives and Records Administration today announced the upcoming closure of three facilities and relocation of two offices. These changes will allow for the reallocation of more than $5 million in facility costs per year into digital transformation and other critical priorities to advance the agency’s mission.

“The federal government’s transition to electronic recordkeeping requires us to invest significantly in next-generation systems to support preserving, protecting, and sharing the increasingly born-digital records of the United States,” said Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan. “The decision to close facilities was not made lightly. These changes will allow us to invest in digital transformation, expanding access, improving customer service, and increasing public engagement with the history of our nation.”

The following locations will be affected:

National Archives in New York City, NY 

The Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House facility will be open to researchers until Friday, August 16. Over the next several months, records held in New York will be transferred to National Archives locations in Philadelphia and Kansas City. Information about the destination of specific record series will be made available at www.archives.gov/nyc. These records will be available at the new locations and through digital service. Educational programs will continue to be supported by National Archives staff and from other locations.

Barack Obama Presidential Library Temporary Site at Hoffman Estates, IL 

The records and artifacts of the Barack Obama Presidential Library, which have been held temporarily at Hoffman Estates, will be permanently moved to College Park, MD, in late FY 2025. The center of operations for the Library will also shift to College Park, MD, beginning late next year. To learn more about this digital-first Presidential library, see www.obamalibrary.gov/about-us. 

Temporary Records Storage Facility in Fairfield, OH  

This facility is operated by the National Archives Dayton Federal Records Center (FRC) in Ohio. The records in the Fairfield facility are being relocated to other FRCs, including the Dayton FRC and Great Lakes storage facility during FY25. You can learn more about the FRC program at www.archives.gov/frc. 

Office of the Federal Register and Office of Government Information Services, Washington, DC 

The Office of the Federal Register (OFR) and the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) currently located at the Government Publishing Office in Washington, DC, will be relocated in FY 2025. OFR will transition to the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. OGIS will utilize space at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and College Park, MD.  

Accessing databases for genealogical research has gotten a little easier,, thanks to the Norfolk Registry of Deeds new History Come Alive program.

The registry has recently dedicated bank of computers for free genealogical use to the public, dubbed the Genealogy Research and Resource Center.

“The Registry is excited to offer this research service. As we all know, interest in genealogy is growing by leaps and bounds. According to an ABC News report it is now ranked the second most popular hobby. Another survey indicated that approximately 4 out of 5 people want to explore their genealogical roots,” said Register William O’Donnell.

The Register noted that the genealogical workstations at the Registry contain the popular database Ancestry.com, American Ancestors, and the digital records from the Massachusetts Archives, with more to come.

“Besides this wealth of information, the Registry has more than 13 million land-related documents to explore dating back to 1793 when Norfolk County was created through an act of the legislature and signed into law by Governor John Hancock. These records include deeds, liens, foreclosures, mortgages, conveyances, trusts, and mortgage discharges.

“Today thanks to cutting-edge technology, we have taken genealogical research one step further. Our transcription program, the first of any Registry of Deeds in New England, has taken Registry documents written in hard-to-read cursive penmanship by quivers from 1793 to 1900 and transcribed them into clearly readable print,” O’Donnel said l.

This transcription project of over 4500,000 recorded legal land documents was part of the “History Comes Alive” Program.

“It is the Registry’s vision,” O’Donnell said , “that we will continue to take steps in building up our genealogy program including holding public seminars, publishing articles of note on social media, and adding to our database. After all, learning more about ourselves can just be a few clicks away.”

If you would like to use the free genealogy database, please drop by the Registry of Deeds located at 649 High Street, Dedham, or call 781-234-3305 to reserve a time.

The Bible, once a valued possession of a prominent Green Bay couple, has been part of a Kristine Ray's life for decades.

Now she is in the midst of moving from an island off the northern coast of Seattle to Southern California and hopes to return the Bible to the people she thinks could appreciate it most, the descendants of the Bible's original owner.

The original owners, according to an engraved name on the Bible's cover, were Michael and Mary Sutton, a prominent Green Bay couple who moved to the city after they were married shortly after the Civil War. Both Suttons were born in Ireland and immigrated to the United States when they were children, according to the obituaries for Michael Sutton and Mary Sutton. They settled in Upstate New York and were married there.

Mary Sutton died at age 77 in 1926 at the Green Bay home of one of her sons. She moved to the Utica area of New York from "County Claire, Ireland" when she was 2 years old, according to her obituary in a Green Bay newspaper. There is no County Claire, so the story likely meant County Clare.

Her husband died when he about about 70 years old in January 1916. His obituary describes him as a "survivor of war and a pioneer of the city." Michael Sutton immigrated from "County Connaught" in Ireland to the Utica area when he was 12, according to his obituary (Connaught is not a county in that country, but rather a province). He was a Civil War veteran who was wounded in battle, having fought in engagements including Bull Run and Antietam, according to his obituary.

After the war, the couple moved to Wisconsin, where they lived in Shawano, Oconto and Green Bay. Michael Sutton was credited as one of the founders of St. Patrick's congregation in Green Bay.

Ray can't say for sure exactly how her family came to posses the Bible. She believes that her father, a small business owner, took possession of the Bible when he was a winning bidder in an auction for the contents of a disused storage unit in northwestern Indiana. She thinks she was 4 or 5 years old at the time.

The Bible always resonated with her, Ray said.

"There was never a time when I remember this Bible not being around," she said. "Even as a I child I would be looking at it, and it was so old. It was really cool."

Not only the book was cool. There were scads of papers, pictures and other mementoes from the late 1800s and early 1900s, obviously once treasured by the Suttons, stuffed into the book. These things include a lock of hair tied together with a ribbon, a grade school graduation certificate, confirmation notices and more.

Ray was older when the significance of the Bible began to dawn on her. It wasn't that it was just old, it was that it represented someone and a family who obviously once treasured it. "I thought, 'Wow, this is a historical document,'" she said.

Even later, Ray started delving into her own family's history, taking a deep dive into Ancestry.com, and finding documents from her own ancestors, such as shipping manifest which included her grandmother who was fleeing World War II in Europe. She found pictures of other ancestors, she said.

"It was just really special," Ray said. "I wasn't expecting that that stuff would feel so important to me."

That's when the idea that the Bible could be special to the descendants of Michael and Mary Sutton, who had eight children, one who died in the Spanish-American War. The children are listed in the obituary as William of Minneapolis, Harry of Detroit, Thomas of Oshkosh, John of Oshkosh, Mrs. C. Van Dyke, Mrs. J.P. Parmentier, Matthew and Henry F. Sutton, all of Green Bay. Mary Sutton also had 15 grandchildren and one great-grandchild when she died.

Ray said she reached out to a number of Suttons via email through Ancestry.com. But she never heard back from any of them, and once again, she set the Bible aside and to the back of her mind.

Now, as she prepared for her move from Washington state to California, the Bible once again became an issue. She wondered what she should do with it; should she take it on the move? "It's not something you can really throw away," she said.

Anyone who might have information about a descendant of Mary Sutton may email Ray at hisstree@outlook.com.

23andMe co-founder and chief executive Anne Wojcicki made a non-binding proposal to the board to acquire all of the company's outstanding shares not already owned by her or her affiliates for $0.40 per share, a filing showed on Wednesday.

In April, Wojcicki notified the members of the board's special committee of her intention to make an offer for the genetic testing firm and take it private.

Wojcicki also had indicated that she was working with advisers and intended to begin speaking to potential partners and financing sources.

The proposal, which Wojcicki made on July 29, indicated that she continued to have discussions with potential equity financing sources, the filing showed.

The offer is conditioned upon approval of the company's special committee and there can be no assurance that the proposal will result in any definitive agreement, transaction or any other strategic alternative, the filing said.

In the proposal, Wojcicki again stated that she would not expect to support any alternative transaction. 

Berkeley Law’s Paper Prisons Initiative led by Professor Colleen V. Chien, recently unveiled an innovative database aimed at helping defendants and people convicted of crimes challenge a charge, conviction, or sentence under the California Racial Justice Act (RJA). 

The initiative’s Racial Justice Act Tool(opens in a new tab), which is currently in beta mode, reports on data provided  by the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) database of arrests, court actions, convictions, and sentences in California. Users can sort by a variety of variables, including the race of a defendant, what they were charged with, the county where it happened, and the year. 

Chien outlines the tool’s value in a paper(opens in a new tab) published in the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law(opens in a new tab)(BJCL) earlier this year with Santa Clara Law Professor William A. Sundstrom, web developer Yabo Du, Santa Clara University computer science graduate student Akhil Raj, and Berkeley Law students Bennett Cyphers ’25 and Rayna Saron ’24. All are members of the initiative, a grant-funded research project Chien founded and leads which combines data science and law to address and advance economic and racial justice through research on the second chance gap.

The journal volume collects scholarly work from BJCL’s spring Racial Justice Act Symposium, which gathered expert lawyers, computer scientists, scholars, government officials, criminal justice nonprofit leaders and students to examine the law’s early implementation and implications.

Enacted in 2020, the RJA prohibits bias based on race, ethnicity, or national origin in charges, convictions, and sentences issued in court. It permits a challenge to a criminal conviction if a judge, attorney, law enforcement officer, expert witness, or juror exhibited bias or animus towards the defendant because of their race, ethnicity, or national origin — or used racially discriminatory language during the trial. 

To make a case for relief on the basis of a pattern of racial disparity, however, the law requires evidence of this disparity, which is often hard to come by for individual defendants. The tool makes it possible to access data supporting a prima facie case, leveling the playing field and enabling more people to assess and bring their potential claims.

 The data can also reveal insights about the law and its potential limitations. For example, it required that the comparisons be for cases where defendants are “similarly situated” and in the “same county” — a bar that can be too high in smaller jurisdictions, Chien and her co-authors write, to tease out valuable information about bias. 

For example, they find that for 16 counties with small Black populations, not a single offense has a large enough number of arrest incidents in 2019 for the data to be reportable. Later in the criminal cycle, no comparison of Black defendants involving felony convictions is possible in more than three-quarters of the state’s counties.

The online tool breaks down differences among races for different offenses and various stages of the criminal process and differentiates between California’s 58 counties. Using statewide data can help solve the problem of tiny sample sizes and help the law meet its ultimate aims, they write. 

“The California Racial Justice Act holds considerable promise as a tool for identifying and remedying racial disparities in the criminal justice system, but its potential has been constrained by the lack of data needed to detect the presence or absence of an actionable disparity,” they write. “If the RJA is to have its intended impact of ‘eliminating racial bias’ from the criminal justice system, its evidentiary standards cannot be so strict as to make it nearly impossible to demonstrate a disparity except for the most common offenses in the most populous counties and racial groups.”

The project also just introduced two other RJA-related elements: a blog(opens in a new tab) with first-person stories from incarcerated people and their families and friends that’s a partnership with Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law and Justice Center and a diary feature as another avenue for amplifying the voices of those who are using the tool. 

Anyone can volunteer for the Revolutionary War Pension Project.

In 1777, drunken British soldiers stormed into Sarah Martin’s home in Woodbridge, New Jersey and demanded that she cook them ham and eggs. Hostile and impatient, the soldiers threatened to kill her youngest child, who cried as she prepared the meal. One of the officers even wielded his sword, striking the child and giving Martin a severe cut across the arm.

This appalling scene was not a unique event in Martin’s life. The family’s roadside residence, then in British-occupied territory, was ransacked as many as 30 times during the Revolutionary War. British soldiers plundered the home, drove away cattle, and eventually burned down the property while her husband, Gershom Martin, was away for months at a time on militia duty.

Martin recalled these traumatic events 60 years later in a court of record. The 83-year-old widow had to provide oral testimony about her husband’s military service to demonstrate her eligibility for a pension. Today, her story is one of more than 80,000 that would remain untold if not for the Revolutionary War Pension Project.

The Revolutionary War Pension Project is a collaborative effort between the National Park Service and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to transcribe more than 2.3 million pages of pension files from the nation’s first veterans and their widows. Launched in June 2023, the citizen archivist mission provides volunteers with the opportunity to make a permanent contribution to the historical record as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches.

A Treasure Trove of Stories

Many of the soldiers who survived the American Revolution were left in poor health. In the decades that followed, they often struggled to work and support their families. The young United States addressed this burgeoning crisis of poverty among Revolutionary War veterans by passing the first of four pension acts in 1818. The youngest veterans were in their late 50s and 60s at that point, burdened by 35 years of economic hardship after the war ended in 1783. Several of them owned little but the clothing on their backs and were in desperate need of financial assistance.

At first, pensions were only available for Continental Army soldiers who served under George Washington. Later acts opened pensions to those who served in militias and to widows, like Sarah Martin, married before the war’s end. Since there was little documentation to support the eligibility of widows and militiamen, these applicants had to describe their wartime experiences in a court of record and verify the details with credible witnesses. For a lot of them, especially for those who couldn’t write, it may have felt like the only chance to document their stories. The testimonies of women and people of color fill important gaps in the historical record and reveal the diversity of people who contributed to the war effort.

In the 1970s, NARA created thousands of microfilm reels with photographs of Revolutionary War pension documents held in the National Archives building in Washington, DC. The content of these reels was later digitized for NARA’s online catalog. The collection contains both handwritten pages and later-typed correspondence about the pensions with quality ranging from intact and easy to read to torn, covered in inkblots, and illegible.

National Archives and Records Administration

The pension applications hold detailed and diverse first-hand accounts of the Revolutionary War, from boasts of celebrity encounters with the likes of Washington and the French commander Lafayette to somber accounts of burying the dead after a battle. They chronicle Revolutionary War turning points, many of which are commemorated at present-day NPS sites, such as the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill and the 1777 Battles of Saratoga. The files also contain valuable social history details about veterans and their families, such as rank, dates of birth, family composition, and property ownership. Each document yet to be transcribed remains an untold story of the revolution.

To date, more than 4,000 Revolutionary War Pension Project volunteers have typed up the content of over 80,000 pages of pension files, with upwards of 2,300 records completely transcribed. Almost 600 contributors are from the NPS.

You can read more in an article by Nina Foster, a 2024 Scientists in Parks intern at Acadia National Park, at: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/revolutionary-war-pensions.htm.

The president of the Africville Genealogy Society is calling for a safety audit after five people were shot during the community's 41st annual reunion in Halifax, Nova Scotia over the weekend.

Irvine Carvery said the society's board of directors will hold an emergency meeting Tuesday night to review the shooting and discuss what can be done to improve safety at future gatherings.

"The reunion will be on next year. We are Africville Strong. We are not leaving. We are not going to allow that incident to define who we are as a people," Carvery told reporters on Monday.

"The perpetrators that came in and did that are not from Africville."

The Africville Family Reunion aims to bring together former residents and their descendants. The community was uprooted in the 1960s when the City of Halifax demolished homes to make way for the A. Murray MacKay Bridge.

During celebrations Saturday, two men exchanged gunfire and the bullets went into the crowd, injuring five people. 

"There was one young lady who unfortunately got hit in the neck, and what I understand is the bullet lodged near her spine and they couldn't operate to remove it," Carvery said.

"So I don't know what her prognosis is, but she's alive. She is going to live. That's the main thing. We gotta give God thanks for that, that she is going to live."

Halifax Regional Police said both men involved in the shooting had left the area by the time officers arrived. The investigation is ongoing.

You can read more in an article by Anjuli Patil published in the cbc.ca web site at: https://bit.ly/4fnd8tY

Research has uncovered an intriguing discovery regarding an unusually high prevalence of a specific set of genes in China. This research suggests that approximately 1.5 million Chinese men are direct descendants of Giocangga, the grandfather of the founder of the Qing dynasty.

Giocangga's remarkable number of descendants, primarily located in north-east China and Mongolia, is believed to be a result of the numerous wives and concubines his offspring had. Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, made this finding based on a study of genes on the male Y chromosome.

In an interview with the BBC World Service's Science In Action program, Dr. Tyler-Smith explained that these genes provide a genetic surname for each man's family. By analyzing around 1,000 men from the region, researchers identified two types of Y chromosomes that were unusually common, with one type making up approximately 3% of the sample.

Further investigation revealed that this genetic code originated in north-east China around 500 years ago, just before the rise of the Qing dynasty in 1616. Dr. Tyler-Smith noted that the Qing imperial nobility, who ruled China for several hundred years, had multiple wives and concubines, leading to a high number of offspring with a good chance of survival.

This research sheds light on a significant historical event during the establishment of the Qing dynasty and provides insight into the genetic legacy of Giocangga and his descendants in China.

For nearly 26 years, no one knew the identity of a woman whose body was found floating in the Cumberland River. 

It was a troubling mystery that Metro Nashville police and genetic genealogists spent years trying to piece together, until finally, they were able to make a breakthrough. Last week, the police department announced that the woman who had only been known as the “Leo Jane Doe” for multiple decades now had a name.

Diane Minor was a country singer, beauty queen and weather personality for WSIX-TV before the station changed ownership and became WKRN. She moved to Nashville as a teenager seeking her first big break in the music business but was originally from Alabama.

Eric Schubert, a 23-year-old genealogist from New Jersey, knew that she was from Alabama four years ago, but that was just the first clue to the massive genetic puzzle.

Schubert, who was been nationally recognized for his volunteer work on other cold cases since he was just a teenager, began trying to help detectives put together a picture of who the “Leo Jane Doe” was back in 2020.

At the time, he was working on a handful of other cold cases, including the death of 9-year-old Marise Chiverella, which was then one of the most notorious unsolved murders in Pennsylvania. 

The college freshman had been doing genealogical work to help families find their ancestors as a hobby since he was 10 years old, with some articles referring to him as a “genealogy wiz.” He became interested in criminal cases at the age of 16, but thought that, realistically, no law enforcement agency would ever enlist his help.

“I was like 16, 17, 18 and thought no police department is going to email me and say, ‘Hey, Eric, you know, we heard about you. We would love to get your help on this case’,” Schubert said. “But the week I graduated high school, that’s exactly what happened.”

You can read more about this story in an article by Sierra Rains published in the wkrn.com web site at: https://bit.ly/4fqDwTY.