The Kansas City Jewish Community Digital Archive, jewishkcarchives.org/, is launching with digital issues of The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle’s entire back catalog, plus local history video interviews — and it’s looking to the community to help it grow more. 

Powered by work from Andrew Kaplan, Alan Edelman and Norman Kahn, its first phase was building the web interface so people could access materials, as well as making old microfilm copies of The Chronicle digital and searchable by keyword and issue. That required a partnership with BMI Imaging Systems in Sacramento to get the technical side of the optical character recognition done.

“If you were doing research and you wanted to know what was going on as it relates to Chaim Weitzman, you can get to that very quickly and look at specific information as to what was going on right then at the time [in Kansas City],” Kaplan said. 

With the keyword search, it’s easy to find anyone by name in old copies of The Chronicle. Anything that was already stored in digital, searchable form was much easier to include.

The Chronicle “was the best, most accurate, most available source of information that covered the community,” Kaplan said.

Added to that package is video interviews of locals conducted by Sybil Kahn over a number of years. Hosted on YouTube, they are also currently linked in the archive.

You can read more in an article by Beth Lipoff published in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle web site at: https://bit.ly/3tV0XxN.

The Irish Government has extended the online availability of birth, death, and marriage records by a further 12 months.

Available at www.irishgenealogy.ie., the Birth Register now includes the years 1864 to 1921, while the Marriage Register has been updated to include records from the years 1845-1946.

The Death Register, meanwhile, now includes the years 1864 until 1971.

The website is free and users do not require any subscription to access the records.

A total of 6,943,532 Civil Death register entries, 6,784,749 Civil Birth Register entries, and 1,939,623 Civil Marriage Register entries are now available to view online.

On Friday, March 4, FamilySearch announced the Get Involved volunteer experience, which can be accessed in a new mobile app and on FamilySearch.org. A tab at the top of the website titled Get Involved now appears where the Indexing tab used to be.

“But indexing is not going away,” said Ty Davies, a FamilySearch portfolio director who oversees the development of records. “It’s becoming part of this Get Involved piece.”

Get Involved had a limited release in Latin America in December — the experience is called Participa in Spanish. More languages are expected in coming months.

As more and more people worldwide want to connect and find their ancestors, FamilySearch is introducing Get Involved to help people have more personal discoveries in their family history. Reviewing a name on a record that was indexed by handwriting recognition artificial intelligence is one task that can be done with Get Involved.

You can learn more in a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfIxO3RQGFU.

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

NOTE: This article is off-topic. That is, it does not concern anything to do with genealogy, DNA, or related topics normally found in this newsletter. However, I suspect that many newsletter readers will be interested in this article for many different purposes:

A new buzzword is becoming popular in high tech. Well, it isn't really a new buzzWORD as much as it is a buzzABBREVIATION (if there is such a thing).

According to Wikipedia's definition of IPFS:

"The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting all computing devices."

While that explanation is technically correct, I think it deserves a bit more explanation. I prefer the explanation offered on IPFS.com:

"A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to preserve and grow humanity's knowledge by making the web upgradeable, resilient, and more open.""

Even that is a bit cryptic. I would prefer:

"IPFS is the next iteration of cloud computing.'

Another simplistic explanation might be: "The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system."

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/12640127. 

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. 

At RootsTech, MyHeritage announced the new Live Story, a new means of adding stories to your family tree in a manner that looks like (and sounds like) your ancestor is speaking... LIVE! I wrote about this in yesterday's newsletter at https://eogn.com/page-18080/12638302.

Trying to properly describe a new video product in a text-based description is challenging, to say the least. Luckily, MyHeritage has now released a video that shows Live Story in action.

The incredible Live Story feature from MyHeritage takes the facts and photos in your tree and transforms them into an animated video of an ancestor telling his or her own life story. In the video, Tal Erlichman, Director of Product Management at MyHeritage, introduces this futuristic feature and shows you how to use it to give voice to your ancestors' stories.

You can watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBwr-DO63vI&t=46s.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

For the first time, researchers will now be able to see more accurately where their ancestor’s house was situated on maps down to house, street or parish level, giving more detail than ever before.

J R R Tolkien recorded in 1939 Oxford displayed on Bing Satellite map

TheGenealogist.co.uk has also added over 258,000 new records that have now been officially opened. Now you can use TheGenealogist’s SmartSearch on even more records in the 1939 Register to discover where your ancestors were living.

Film star Leslie Howard’s house in Surrey shown on a historical map

With the addition of the more precise mapping feature there are some very compelling reasons to search the 1939 Register on TheGenealogist. Firstly it benefits from their unique and powerful search tools and SmartSearch technology. This offers a hugely flexible way to look for your ancestors as the authorities scrambled in 1939 to issue identity cards and ration books for the population.

Secondly, searching the 1939 Register on TheGenealogist allows researchers to take advantage of some powerful search tools to break down brick walls. For example there is the ability to find ancestors in 1939 by using keywords, such as the individual’s occupation or their date of birth. Researchers on TheGenealogist may also search for an address and then jump straight to the household or, if you are struggling to find a family, you can even search using as many of their forenames as you know.

With a record found in the 1939 Register, TheGenealogist then gives you the ability to click on the street name to view all the residents in the road. This feature can be used to potentially discover relatives living in the area and can therefore boost your research with just a click.

The 1939 Register on TheGenealogist also benefits from innovative SmartSearch technology that enables you to discover even more about a person by linking to their Birth, Marriage and Death records.

The 1939 Register, when linked to a more detailed mapping tool than ever before, is a fantastic resource for family historians searching for where forebears lived in September 1939.

See TheGenealogist’s article:Powerful mapping linked to 1939 Register pinpoints ancestor’s households https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/powerful-mapping-linked-to-1939-register-pinpoints-ancestors-households-1520/

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!

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

If you were unable to attend RootsTech 2022's opening sessions yesterday, you can watch a video of a keynote session featuring Palestinian-American comedian, Maysoon Zayid, and Stranger Things actor, Matthew Modine, as they shared their stories as keynotes on the Main Stage. Listen to Maysoon speak to the importance of equality and the power of comedy. Also hear Matthew Modine share the importance of story-telling. All this is available as a video at https://bit.ly/36QhkUb.

If you were unable to attend RootsTech 2022's opening sessions yesterday, you can watch a video of Ancestry.com's presentation featuring Crista Cowan (also known as The Barefoot Genealogist) at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT-6h2jQIdE

If you were unable to attend RootsTech 2022's opening sessions earlier today, you can watch a video of MyHeritage's (one of the Keynote sessions) presentation at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sz3mlg31sw