The following was written by the Genea­logi­cal Forum of Oregon:

You are cordially invited to an online “wedding” re­ception – and 
index­ing party!

On Tuesday, Nov. 30, the Genea­logi­cal Forum of Oregon is spon­sor­ing 
an on­line event to index Multnomah County mar­riage records from 1917-1924.

Way back in 1981, the GFO acquired the county’s original mar­riage 
regis­ter books for 1885-1924. Over four decades, dedi­cated 
volun­­­teers have indexed the registers to 1916. But we get many 
requests in the “missing” years, so it’s time to finish the job!

For the first time, GFO is trying out our annual volun­teer work party 
as a one-day, inter­­active event entirely on­line. You can join the fun 
for the whole day or even just an hour. You do not need to be a mem­ber, 
just willing to dedicate a little time to support genealogy. For more 
infor­mation and to RSVP, please visit http://gfo.org/givingtuesday 
<http://gfo.org/givingtuesday>.

The Jennings County Historical Society was recently awarded a Heritage Support Grant of $3,647.91 to update current technology needs at the North American House Museum and offer a new genealogy research station for community members and visitors to utilize. Heritage Support Grants are provided by the Indiana Historical Society and made possible by Lilly Endowment Inc.

Museum curator Chris Asher notes that the current technology is not sufficient for maintaining the museum records and is very grateful for the funding and partnership with the Indiana Historical Society that will allow the organization to be more effective in carrying out its mission.

Details may be fund in an article by Anna Walker published in the North Vernon Plain Dealer and Sun at https://bit.ly/3qSd12T. The The Jennings County Historical Society web site is available at http://jenningscounty.org/.

The following was written by Pierre Clouthier, President of Progeny Genealogy:

We are continuing the conversion of Charting Companion, and have added some enhancements.

* Latest versions: Windows 8.1; Mac 8.1

* Support for Windows 11 and Apple M1 "ARM"

* New accelerated graphics technology, for large charts

* Embroidery

* RootsMagic 8; RootsMagic colors

* Title centering

* Cousin-smart (implexus) with "no hatching" color option

We are privileged to help you tell the story of your family. A story that stretches back in time beyond the dawn of history. The story of humble, unsung people who overcame hardships and built this world for you.

CC 8 offers new "Wizard"-style dialogs that are simpler for first-time users. "Expert" dialogs are available to old hands who want to quickly navigate Charting Companion's rich features.

Charting Companion 8 FGV

If you don't already have Charting Companion 8 for Windows or Mac, order from the link below:

Get Charting Companion: https://progenygenealogy.com/products/family-tree-charts/

Regards,
Pierre Clouthier
President
Progeny Genealogy: http://progenygenealogy.com

The following was written by the  Southern California Genealogical Society (SCGS):

Philanthropists Don and Leslie Budinger have completed a major gift that began in 1999 and has now culminated in the transfer of title to the landmark building at 1100 Orange Avenue, to the Coronado Historical Association (CHA).

By completing the transfer of title of the property, the longtime supporters were able to realize their vision of sustaining CHA and ensuring its role as Coronado's archivist and historian for the community, well into the future.

The Budingers' association with CHA began in 1999 when the couple bought the historic former bank building at 1100 Orange Avenue, restored it, and then entrusted it to the care of the Coronado Historical Association, entering into a 30-year lease-gift agreement.

You can read much more about this gift in an article by Debbie L. Sklar in an article in the Times of San Diego web site at: https://bit.ly/3HsxwZN.

When you think about it, word processors haven't changed much in decades. Each one emulates recording words on paper. The only significant change in recent years is when Google introduced Google Documents, a product that stores its text online in the cloud instead of in your own computer. While significant, that is still a not a major change.

Anyone who can gain access to your computer or to your online account can still read your documents, including accessing private information that you don't want to share. Until now...

Skiff changes all that.

Skiff has launched a new, decentralized architecture - realizing the company's vision to build the application layer for Web3 - private, decentralized, and end-to-end encrypted.

Decentralization and privacy go hand-in-hand. While privacy demands that users know exactly how and when their personal data is shared, decentralization keeps users’ information outside of anti-private, centralized databases. End-to-end encryption and decentralization together truly deliver complete control over personal data to Skiff users. Technically and organizationally, decentralization helps us deliver on core promise to users.

According to the programmers who created Skiff:

Decentralization

Your identity is your keypair: Skiff’s products keep your personal information private to you. Our whitepaper details this approach to provisioning users with keypairs (for encryption and attestation). Like a password manager or a crypto wallet, this technical design represents the foundation of decentralized collaboration.

Decentralized real-time collaboration via CRDTs: As detailed in our pre-launch blog post on decentralized collaboration from March 2021, decentralization allows us to realize numerous technical and user-friendly advantages. In particular, CRDTs enable us to, in real time, synchronize data structures across multiple Skiff users around the world. Users communicate end-to-end encrypted document changes to each other and arrive at fully synchronized, independent copies of working documents.

Decentralized storage via IPFS: We are incredibly excited to announce our collaboration with Protocol Labs and IPFS to build fully decentralized storage into Skiff. In IPFS, Filecoin, and libp2p (for direct peer-to-peer communication), Protocol Labs is building foundational infrastructure to enable decentralized, privacy-first applications like Skiff.

Now, Skiff users can store files, static content, and more via the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS). Inside the settings page, users can enable or disable IPFS storage:

In short:

1. Skiff breaks every document into dozes or hundreds of smaller pieces and each piece is stored in a different web server in the cloud. Even if someone who access a small piece, there will be so little information displayed that it becomes useless to the hacker.
2. Even before being broken into hundreds of small "snippets" of information, each piece is encrypted in its own unique encryption code. Even different snippets within one document are encrypted in different methods.

When the document's creator wishes to retrieve the document, everything happens in a manner that emulates an old-fashioned word processor: each snippet is located, retrieved, and combined tito a single document within seconds in a manner that is invisible to the document's creator.

You can learn a lot more about Skiff at: https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-decentralized.

The following announcement was written by Sharon Cook MacInnes, Ph.D, CG with the following explanation:

"Over the years, I've spent hundreds of hours at the Library of Congress taking photos of landowner maps for most of the counties of Pennsylvania and I posted them on my old website for researchers to use.  I've recently created a new website and added many more free tools--links to published county histories, tutorials, etc.  The tools on my website can be correlated with census, court, military, tax, and vital records to provide a much fuller picture of the men and women who came before us. "

Our new website is a one-stop portal for pinpointing Pennsylvania residents in the 1700s and 1800s. Would you like free images of 19th-century landowner maps and atlases to correlate with censuses? Check. How about links to published county histories that correlate with the maps? Check. And what about “how to” tutorials that put it all together and bring you:

• Free images of Warrant Indexes granting land to the first individuals applying for land from the colony or state
• Free images of Survey Books containing surveys for each tract transferred from the colony or state to an individual
• Free images of Patent Indexes conveying final title to each buyer of a tract transferred from the colony or state to an individual
• Free images of land transactions transferring tracts to applicants buying their land as a result of Indian treaties 
• Free images of military donation and depreciation land ledgers
• An understanding of boundary disputes and the records for countless people whose land was caught up in them
• Links and timeline for African American research

Check, check, and check. Use our images, links to books, and tutorials in conjunction with census and tax records to give context to your ancestors.

New editions of “Early Landowners of Pennsylvania” atlases! Just prior to launching the website, we finished editing new editions of our eight “Early Landowners of Pennsylvania” county atlases. These atlases, containing maps of the metes-and-bounds tracts of the first landowners, are now available at http://ancestortracks.com as downloadable pdf files. We’re also offering, for the first time, each individual township chapter as downloadable (pdf files; $1.99-$4.99). Consult the free indexes for each county atlas, indexed by surname or by township, and don’t forget to look for allied families.

The following sentence may sound like the logline for an as-yet unmade National Treasure 3, but it's very much real: A large group of crypto maximalists is banding together in an effort to obtain the actual U.S. Constitution.

From a report: Unlike the antagonists in the previous Nicolas Cage movies, this crew might actually succeed. Or kind of, anyway. On Thursday, November 18, Sotheby's is auctioning off "an exceptionally rare and extraordinarily historic" first printing of the U.S. Constitution. Only thirteen copies remain, besides the one located in Washington D.C.'s National Archives museum, from the original printing of 500 that the founders issued for submission to the Continental Congress. It's the first time in 30 years that this one has become available for purchase, following the 1997 death of its last winner, New York real estate developer S. Howard Goldman.

It's expected to fetch between $15 million and $20 million in the auction -- unless, of course, it instead fetches the equivalent in Ethereum.