The following was written by the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA):

The eagerly anticipated 1921 England and Wales Census release date is almost here. Its secrets have been hidden for over 100 years. But on 6 January 2022 all will be revealed.

AGRA genealogists, like family historians across the country, cannot wait to unlock its treasures: From seeing family members in a census for the first, or last, time, to finding out the impact the Great War had on family and community structures; to discovering the employment, and possibly employers, of their ancestors especially in this period of industrial strife, to where they were - and who they were with - on census night. Then there’s societal changes at the start of the Roaring Twenties, like the increase of divorce, and changes in the work of women from previous censuses. And not forgetting the inevitable disentangling of truth from mistakes and pure fiction in the entries of our ancestors

AGRA Chair, Antony Marr, said: “The release of any major set of historical records is always an exciting time for family history researchers. The 1921 Census is no exception and will allow us to find out so much about the lives of our ancestors, many of whom we may have known as elderly relatives, but will appear listed as young children. An AGRA researcher will be able to help find the correct records, interpret them and use them to connect to other, older records.”

Our membership is now busily drawing up lists of those must-see records, for their own family and local history research, as well as for the research wish-lists of their clients. Many AGRA genealogists will be already preparing for visits to The National Archives at Kew to minimise cost. In fact, because of this, combined with their expertise, it might prove more cost-effective to employ a professional researcher with the experience to view, disentangle, interpret and link these records.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

For further information about AGRA and the 1921 Census please contact Jane Roberts, on tel 0771 4203891 (09:00-17:00hrs) or via press@agra.org.uk.

The Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission (PHMC) has awarded almost $2 million in Cultural and Historical Support Grants to 154 eligible museums and official county historical societies from 56 Pennsylvania counties. In addition, PHMC awarded more than $175,000 in Historical and Archival Records Care (HARC) Grants to 34 organizations in 24 Pennsylvania counties.

The goal of the Cultural and Historical Support Grant program is to strengthen Pennsylvania's museum community by supporting the general operations of eligible museums and official county historical societies that are not supported by other state agency funding programs. An eligible museum must have an annual operating budget exceeding $100,000 (excluding capital and in-kind services) and at least one full-time professional staff person (or approved equivalent).

Award amounts are determined using an equation based on a percentage of the eligible museum's previous year's operating budget. The maximum any museum could receive is $40,000. All official county historical societies receive a $4,000 minimum grant.

Details may be found at: https://www.media.pa.gov/pages/PHMC-details.aspx?newsid=400 including a list of Cultural and Historical Support Grant awards by county.

The following is from the Digital North Carolina Blog, maintained by the maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center:

"In following with our collaboration with newspapers.com, we have another large batch of newspapers this week! These images were originally digitized a number of years ago in a partnership with Newspapers.com. That project focused on scanning microfilmed papers published before 1923 held by the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Special Collections Library. While you can currently search all of those pre-1923 issues on Newspapers.com, over the next year we will also make them available in our newspaper database as well. This will allow you to search that content alongside the 2 million pages already on our site – all completely open access and free to use.

"This week we have over 5,000 issues of The Wilmington Morning Star. The paper was founded in 1867 by former Confederate Major William H. Bernard and played a role in stoking the Wilmington Massacre of 1898. In November of 1898 a biracial government was legitimately elected in Wilmington, which the paper claimed to be fraudulent."

The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center has a huge collection of online historic newspapers. The full list may be found at: https://www.digitalnc.org/collections/newspapers/.

The Cherokee Nation is celebrating the grand opening of their new National Research Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The nation's state-of-the-art facility will provide the public access to cultural collections, genealogy services, archives, as well as artifacts from the 1700s through present day.

Just over a year ago, the items were declared to be in a state of emergency due to aging infrastructure and the need for updated environmental controls necessary for proper preservation.

Thanks to efforts made through the Cherokee Heritage Act of 2020, the public will be able to explore the Cherokee National Research Center and experience firsthand some of the tribe’s most treasured items.

Details may be found in an article by Cassidy Mudd and published in the KTUL web site at: https://bit.ly/3pDCKK9.

The following press release was written by the South Dakota State Historical Society:

More than 3,765 women’s suffrage items from the John A. and Alice Pickler Papers are now available on the South Dakota Digital Archives of the South Dakota State Historical Society.

In 1991, 65 boxes of Pickler family records were donated to the State Historical Society-Archives at the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre, including photographs, political papers, business records, and more than four boxes of suffrage-related correspondence, speech notes, meeting minutes, and booklets.

Recently, to improve access to the collection and to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Women’s Right to Vote, the suffrage portion of the Pickler Papers was selected for digitization and cataloging. These records are now available to the public on the South Dakota Digital Archives at https://sddigitalarchives.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/.

Digitization of this collection was made possible by a generous donation from the F.L. Clarkson Family Foundation.

State Archivist Chelle Somsen said, “We appreciate the F.L. Clarkson Family Foundation’s support that allowed us to make this selection of nationally significant records from the Pickler Papers available online.”

Major John A. Pickler and his wife Alice moved to Faulkton, Dakota Territory, in 1882 and became prominent citizens in the area. John was elected to the territorial legislature in 1884 and introduced suffrage legislation in 1885, which was unsuccessful. In 1889, John was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, making him part of South Dakota’s very first congressional delegation. He served in this capacity for eight years and actively advocated for women’s right to vote. Alice was also active in the suffrage movement as a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association.

Please contact the South Dakota Historical Society Foundation at 605-773-6003 or info@sdhsf.org if you are interested in supporting digitization efforts. For information about membership in the State Historical Society call 605-773-6000 or email Jeff.Mammenga@state.sd.us.

About the South Dakota State Historical Society

The South Dakota State Historical Society is a division of the Department of Education. The State Historical Society, an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is headquartered at the South Dakota Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre. The center houses the society’s world-class museum, the archives, and the historic preservation, publishing, and administrative/development offices. Call 605-773-3458 or visit www.history.sd.gov for more information. The society also has an archaeology office in Rapid City; call 605-394-1936 for more information.

About the South Dakota Historical Society Foundation

The South Dakota Historical Society Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation and serves as the fundraising partner of the South Dakota State Historical Society. The Foundation assists in securing funds to collect, preserve, research, exhibit, and interpret history for the lifelong education and enrichment of present and future generations. For more information go to www.sdhsf.org or call 605-773-6003.

To help you prepare for your visit to Sacramento in May 2022, the California Genealogical Society (CGS) is offering a series of six free classes on the top genealogical research destinations and collections in Sacramento.  The speakers are librarians and archivists at the facilities.  The titles and dates of the talks are:

* Jan 11^th  Center for Sacramento History  with Senior Archivist Kim Hayden

* Jan 18^th  Government Publications at California’s State Library  with California State Documents Librarian Emily Blodget

* Jan 25^th  Historical Resources at California’ State Library  with Reference Librarian Elena Smith

* Feb 1^st      Sutro Library –Genealogical Treasures  with Genealogy & Local History Librarian Dvorah Lewis

* Mar 15^th   The California Archives  with Reference Services Manager Chris Garmire

* Mar 22^nd  Special Collections at the Sacramento Public Library  with Librarian David Munger and Archivist James Scott

All talks will be online and are from 4 PM to 5:30 PM Pacific time.  Please note that Sutro library, although part of the Sacramento based California State Library is physically located in San Francisco.

To sign up for these free classes please go to CGS’s NGS 2022 Family History Conference page and scroll down to ‘California Research – Series of Classes’.  There you will find more details on each talk and links to sign up for each of the Zoom sessions.

https://www.californiaancestors.org/ngs-2022-family-history-conference/

A lawsuit has been filed in a Southern Illinois federal court against Ancestry.com for allegedly disclosing genetic information to an unauthorized third party.

According to the Madison-St. Clair Record, a class action complaint was filed on October 29th in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois against Ancestry.com DNA, LLC, alleging violation of the Illinois Genetic Information Privacy Act. It was filed by a minor, identified as A.K., through his guardian, Kelsi Kingsley.

The plaintiffs are attempting to file the case as a class-action lawsuit for all Illinois residents whose genetic information was disclosed or released by Ancestry.com to Blackstone, Inc., a multinational private equity company that bought Ancestry last year in a $4.7 billion deal.

According to Illinois’ Genetic Information Privacy Act (GIPA), genetic testing and information derived from genetic testing are confidential and may only be released to those specifically authorized. The plaintiff claims that when Blackstone acquired Ancestry.com in late 2020, Ancestry.com also disclosed on its website that users’ genetic information would be released and/or disclosed to Blackstone for its use. In the complaint, the plaintiff claims Ancestry.com failed to let them or any of its users know how they could prevent such information from being shared. Additionally, the plaintiff says Ancestry.com did not get their written consent to share such information, which they say violates GIPA.

The suit further alleges that Blackstone acquired all of the accompanying information gathered by Ancestry.com, including personal information that could be used to identify individual plaintiffs, including first and last names, email addresses, and/or home addresses, including age and gender in some instances.

The plaintiffs seek an order declaring the defendant’s actions as violating GIPA, an injunction requiring the defendant to comply with GIPA, statutory damages of $15,000 for each willful or reckless violation of GIPA, statutory damages of $2,500 for each negligent violation of GIPA, or actual damages — whichever is greater — attorney’s fees, court costs, interest and all other relief the court deems just.

Details may be found at: https://bit.ly/31KyEHB.

The Logan County Genealogical and Historical Society will be closed for at least eight weeks while they have work done to clear the smoke smell and have restoration work done to correct the damage from a fire in an adjacent building. The work will start soon.

The closure is due to a fire that was reported in the area of the 100 block of Chicago Street in late October.

According to LCGHS president Bill Donath, “We hope to have the Society open again by the end of February. We will update that information if we can open sooner or need to stay closed longer,” said Donath in a statement.

Details may be found on the society's web site at https://www.logancoil-genhist.org/.

I have been using a new (to me) program that has me quite enthused. CloudMounter connects to any of several file storage services in the cloud and makes each one look like a local hard drive in your local computer. This is obviously useful if your computer's internal hard drive is becoming full but the program also offers a number of other useful services.

CloudMounter allows the user to connect and upload files to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, BackBlaze B2, and Microsoft OneDrive in Windows Explorer or Macintosh Finder, as if just copying and moving files locally on your computer. Moreover, many users of corporate cloud systems will have a huge advantage without cluttering their drive with a huge amount of network storage.

I am using CloudMounter with Macintosh computers to save files on BackBlaze B2, which advertises itself as being by far the cheapest file storage service of today ($0.005 per gigabyte per month). Using CloudMounter with BackBlaze B2 is actually cheaper than purchasing a new external hard drive.

Unlike Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and a number of other online cloud-based file storage services, CloudMounter does not COPY files to remote services. In other words, you do not have to duplicate files with one copy in your local computer and a second copy in the remote file storage service. That wastes disk space by keeping duplicates in two (or more) different places. Instead, CloudMounter places one copy of a file in the cloud and does not store a duplicate on your computer's local hard drive.

My desktop Mac has a two-terabyte internal hard drive as it is becoming full. There is not a lot of disk space left. With CloudMounter, I now have more-or-less infinite storage space in the cloud and I no longer worry about running out of disk space in the local computer. With CloudMounter, I can connect to 2, 3, or even more cloud-based file storage services simultaneously. With CloudMounter, your Mac or Windows computer has infinite file space!

CloudMounter is of great help to the owners of laptops with low-capacity disk drives. You can outsource your files and documents to the most popular cloud services and mount cloud drive accounts to your PC without having to save cloud files on your computer. Instead, you can copy, move, open, download, and upload files to cloud servers by simply doing so within Windows Explorer or Macintosh Finder. The "learning curve" for using CloudMounter is really simple!

In addition, with CloudMounter your online documents are totally protected. Cloud encryption has never been easier before. Benefit from DropBox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, FTP with encryption as well as other major cloud computing services and remote servers. You can automatically encrypt data before saving it to the cloud to add extra protection for better control of your online files.

In addition, CloudMounter is a pretty handy FTP client Macintosh solution that allows viewing the full structure of the website or a file server. Having seamless Finder integration, the app allows you to handle your online files as local ones: create, view, modify, delete, upload to and download files from a remote server. Have enhanced file management via FTP, SFTP and FTPS protocols with the help of CloudMounter (not yet available in the Windows version, however).

CloudMounter isn't cheap. however. The Macintosh version works with Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive free of charge. The latest Version 3.0 of CloudMounter adds Box, pCloud, BackBlaze B2, and Amazon S3 file storage services for payment of money: a Personal License (1 Mac) costs $9.99 for 3 months while a Lifetime Team License (for up to 5 Macs) costs $129.99. Windows is cheaper: a Personal License for one Windows computer costs $29.99 while a Team License (for up to 5 PCs) costs $99.99.

If you think you might be interested in CloudMounter, take a look at https://mac.eltima.com/mount-cloud-drive.html or look in the Apple App Store.

Just in time for end-of-the-year health savings account spending, 23andMe is offering a new standalone “Health Service” option for people looking to apply their HSA & FSA funds toward purchasing an at-home DNA test.

This offers another option to customers who only want to delve into reports about their health predispositions,* carrier status,* or wellness. The new standalone service also makes it easier for U.S. residents to use money set aside in their Flexible Spending Account (FSA) or Health Savings Account (HSA) for their 23andMe Health Service purchase.

An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 2019 first allowed customers to use FSA & HSA funds for a portion of the cost for their Health + Ancestry Service. The new Health Service makes that much simpler because the full cost may be eligible.

In the United States, FSAs and HSAs both allow you to set aside a certain amount of your pre-tax income each year for qualified medical care expenses. Qualified medical care expenses may include such things as co-pays for doctor’s visits, prescription medications, glasses, and sunscreen.

The rule also means the full cost of the 23andMe Health Service should be an eligible medical expense. You can check with your FSA/HSA administrator for eligibility.

The standalone 23andMe Health Service includes more than 10 health predisposition reports for conditions* such as Type 2 Diabetes (powered by 23andMe research), Celiac Disease, Age-Related Macular Degeneration, and Parkinson’s Disease; as well as more than 40 carrier status reports* for conditions like Cystic Fibrosis and Sickle Cell Anemia. Customers also receive wellness reports on sleep movement, muscle composition, and genetic weight.

In addition, the Health Service includes health action recommendations, as well as a lifestyle dashboard that compares your diet and activity to other 23andMe users. The service also includes a place to track lab results and an area where you can see insights from 23andMe research. You can also connect, message, and share with friends and family if you wish.

You can learn about 23andMe’s other product offerings here.