The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

Search new burial, army and knighthood records this Findmypast Friday

Where will your past take you this week? A London cemetery? Back to World War 2? Or maybe there's a knight in the family you've yet to discover. Read on to find out What's new this Findmypast Friday.

British Army, Royal Engineers Other Ranks: Casualty Cards

These detail-rich records cover casualties during and after World War 2. Consisting of both transcripts and images of original documents, these records will enable you to uncover information on their injuries, next of kin and more.

Harold North's card shows his father's name and address, his army number and when and where he was listed as a casualty. View the full record.

Findmypast is home to a host of useful collections for tracing the stories of Royal Engineers. Delve into tracer cards, journals and more to uncover and commemorate their exploits.

Greater London Burial Index

Is your ancestor buried in London? This vast collection has grown again with thousands of new additions from Southwark and Chiswick.

Following today’s update, the Greater Burial Index now includes new records from:

• • Chiswick, 1856-1866
  • Southwark, St George the Martyr Workhouse, 1835-1874
  • Southwark, St Olave, 1848-1866

This ever-growing resource now contains over 2 million records. See Findmypast’s parish list to see which cemeteries timeframes are covered.

Britain, Knights of the Realm & Commonwealth Index

Findmypast have updated this collection of notable knights and dames with the latest entries from the Queen’s Honours lists.

This index spans several centuries, with entries dating back to pre-1500 and continuing on to present day. Each result will provides transcript that includes birth years, biographies, award types and death years (if applicable) and more.

Newspapers

With 13 new titles and updates to 26 more, Findmypast’s newspaper collection continues to grow. This week’s new arrivals include:

• • British Miner and General Newsman covering 1862-1867
  • Cannock Chase Examiner covering 1874-1877
  • Forest of Dean Examiner covering 1874-1877
  • Glasgow Chronicle covering 1844-1848 and 1850-1857
  • Lancaster Herald and Town and County Advertiser covering 1831-1832
  • Liverpool Journal of Commerce covering 1872, 1874-1877, 1879-1881, 1884-1885, 1910-1915, 1918-1920, 1922-1924, 1926, 1928-1929, 1931, 1935 and 1939-1940
  • Manchester Examiner covering 1846-1848
  • Nuneaton Times covering 1875
  • Preston Pilot covering 1842, 1877 and 1879
  • South Staffordshire Examiner covering 1874
  • Stalybridge Examiner covering 1876
  • Stockton Examiner and South Durham and North Yorkshire Herald covering 1878-1879
  • Stretford and Urmston Examiner covering 1879-1880

While additional pages have been added to:

• • Atherstone, Nuneaton, and Warwickshire Times from 1879
  • Barrow Herald and Furness Advertiser from 1863-1873 and 1876-1879
  • Blackpool Gazette & Herald from 1874-1879
  • Blandford and Wimborne Telegram from 1874-1879
  • Bridport, Beaminster, and Lyme Regis Telegram from 1865 and 1877-1878
  • Central Glamorgan Gazette from 1866-1879
  • Cradley Heath & Stourbridge Observer from 1864-1880
  • Darlington & Richmond Herald from 1867-1879
  • Denton and Haughton Examiner from 1874-1879
  • Dewsbury Chronicle and West Riding Advertiser from 1869-1879
  • Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette from 1858-1879
  • Glasgow Courier from 1844-1848, 1850, 1853-1855, 1857-1864 and 1866
  • Kenilworth Advertiser from 1869-1873, 1877-1879
  • Midland Examiner and Wolverhampton Times from 1874-1878
  • Northern Weekly Gazette from 1860-1862, 1865, 1868-1879, 1911 and 1917
  • Pontypridd District Herald from 1878-1879
  • Poole Telegram from 1879
  • Potteries Examiner from 1871-1874 and 1876-1879
  • Runcorn Examiner from 1870, 1874-1877, 1879 and 1892
  • Shropshire Examiner from 1874 and 1876-1877
  • Stockton Herald, South Durham and Cleveland Advertiser from 1858-1866, 1868-1876 and 1879
  • Swansea and Glamorgan Herald from 1847-1867, 1870-1872, 1874-1879, 1886-1888 and 1890
  • Tamworth Miners’ Examiner and Working Men’s Journal from 1873 and 1875-1876
  • Warrington Examiner from 1869 and 1876-1879
  • Weymouth Telegram from 1860-1871, 1873, 1875, and 1877-1878
  • Widnes Examiner from 1876-1877

The following announcement was written by the organizers of the FHF Really Useful Family History Show 2021:

Friday 12th November : 6pm-10pm and Saturday 13th November : 10am-6pm

The Family History Federation’s Really Useful Family History Show is back and, responding to requests from previous shows, it is changing! 

On Friday evening there is a new session where there will be free access to the stalls of family history societies and other exhibitors. Opportunity to ask local groups for local advice.

On Saturday for ticket holders the range of workshops is being increased; there are over twenty talks and presentations by leading experts; and Ask the Experts will enable show visitors to directly pre-book their session with their chosen expert. These opportunities are all included in the show ticket price. 

The full price tickets are just £10 and can be booked at the show website: www.fhf-reallyuseful.com Plus, there are offers available through some member societies of the Federation for their own members. 

Final details are being announced via the show website:

In early September all Speakers and their Topics

In early October full Range of Workshops 

Essential booking of workshops will open nearer the show—no extra charge

Near to the show date access to Ask the Experts 

New format—you will book a slot with your chosen expert—no extra charge

Visit family history society and other stalls on Friday evening

for opportunity to ask local experts for local advice

Only ticket holders can book workshops or slots for Ask the Experts.

www.fhf-reallyuseful.com 

For further information please see the above website.

Because of an increase in COVID-19 cases in Fulton County, the federal administration in charge of archives has closed the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.

“It is with great disappointment that I am ordering the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum closed until public health conditions improve,” said Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero, who directs the National Archives and Records Administration.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a county with a seven-day total of new cases that is greater than 99 per 100,000 in population, and with more than 9.9 percent positive results in COVID-19 testing, is classified as a “high transmission” county.

Records at the Georgia Department of Public Health show that the positivity rate in Fulton County is 12.7 percent and there were 2,823 new cases in the most recent seven-day count, or 269 per 100,000 population.

You can learn more at: https://bit.ly/3ggVriS.

The following announcement was written by the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute:

 The UCLA Promise Armenian Institute, in collaboration with the UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the 1939 Chair in Holocaust Studies, the UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies, and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will present “Uncommon Genealogies: Violence, Belonging and Memory in the Eastern Frontier” by Dr. Serap Ruken Sengul. The webinar will take place on Friday, September 10th at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time (1:00 p.m. Eastern Time) via the Zoom Webinar platform.

Registration for this webinar is required and free. To register, please visit the website. Once you have registered, you will receive a unique link to the Zoom webinar.

This talk engages a gender analysis of histories and memories of coexistence, conflict and violence in the Eastern borderlands of the Late Ottoman and Turkish Republican states. Tracing rituals of difference and relatedness that inscribed male bodies across periods of intercommunal cohabitation, state-centralization, the Armenian genocide and the Kurdish conflict, Dr. Sengul asks how an analytical focus on (male) gender and methodological orientation in genealogy may render connective formations and experiences of political violence in these borderlands beyond the limits of historicism and methodological nationalism.

Serap Ruken Sengul is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA. She is an anthropologist whose work focuses on gender and sexual formations of sovereignty, nationalism, kinship, violence, memory and displacement in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Dr. Sengul earned her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, and was a Manoogian Simone Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

The following book review was written by Bobbi King:

William Dollarhide holds an honorable and respected position within the community of authors of genealogy resource materials. His Map Guide to the U. S. Federal Censuses, 1790-1920, now more than twenty-five years past first publication, holds its age well; its information is timeless and still essential. This summer I consulted ever-again my handy-dandy Map Guide as I prepared for a research trip to Iowa.

Mr. Dollarhide presents us now with a particularly well-done piece of work. Census Substitutes & State Census Records is five volumes of state and U.S. Territories resources. Each volume represents a section of the United States, and each state has a chapter beginning with a rather lengthy stretch of historical timeline background, and, not surprisingly, a map showing the boundaries of historic counties contrasted against current county boundaries. There still abounds plenty of genealogy resource information that is in print form only, lest we forget, as we casually process the digital information with ease, just how all that fantastic information got online in the first place.

The bibliographies are extensive: lists of compilations, books, databases and where to access them, microfilms and where to find them, urls for all the resources; just a plethora of resource sites and materials for the researcher, beginning and advanced.

So much information, and so nicely organized. I extend my humble compliments to Mr. Dollarhide’s cohort in crime, his friend and publisher, the exuberant and irrepressible Leland Meitzler, for producing books that are so very attractive and readable. Good color choices beckon our eyes to the covers and set apart the sections, the text is sharp against the page, bolded text is strong, and the artful use of white space gives the brain a chance to comprehend. Mr. Meitzler has a real talent for producing books that are tidy and coherent, so orderly in the presentation of content that you don’t feel the burden of studying.

You can read more detail about the series on the website. Mr. Dollarhide and Mr. Meitzler clearly still have a lot to offer, and we are much appreciative.

Census Substitutes & State Census Records, 3rd Edition, by William Dollarhide is available from the publisher, Family Roots Publishing Co., at https://bit.ly/3maVWPj.

The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:

FamilySearch added over 10 million new records this week from Ireland Prison Registers 1798–1928, Ireland Merchant Navy Crew Lists 1857–1922 (Source: National Archives of Ireland), and various Mexico church collections.

Search expanded Catholic Church records for Mexico (Chiapas 1557–1978, Distrito Federal 1514–1970, Guerrero 1576–1979, Jalisco 1590–1979, Michoacán 1555–1996, Nuevo León 1667–1981, Puebla 1545-1977, Sinaloa 1671–1968, Tlaxcala 1576–1994, and Zacatecas 1605–1980, among others) and peruse new records for Chile, England, Puerto Rico, and El Salvador, and the USA (Massachusetts, Town Clerk, Vital and Town Records 1626–2001).

Search these new records and images and more by clicking on the collection links below, or go to FamilySearch to search over 11 billion free names and record images.

NOTE: The full list is very long, too long to fit here. You can find the complete list at: https://media.familysearch.org/new-free-historical-records-on-familysearch-week-of-16-august-2021/

If you have Oriental ancestry, you will want to read an article written by Twila Van Leer and published in the FamilySearch.org web site. It describes the efforts of Derek Dobson, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who served his missionary years  in Hong Kong and became interested in Oriental genealogy. Dobson currently serves as a customer experience manager at FamilySearch with an emphasis in Asian ancestry. The article describes Dobson's work.

You can find the article at: https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/derek-dobson-asian-ancestry/.

You also might want to read Christine Chiang Discovers Living Chinese Relatives and Treasured Ancestral Jiapua at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/christine-chiang-chinese-ancestors/.

You can find an interesting article about a current effort to preserve some interesting records from Bexar County (Texas) at https://bit.ly/37JXyqG.

The article by Brian Kirkpatrick and originally published by Texas Public Radio: 

"An $18 million project on Bexar County's historical archives is underway and should be completed in two years. The project backed by County Commissioners includes the preservation, protection and online digitization of county records that date back to the Spanish Colonial era.

"The oldest local document is a Spanish land grant that dates back to 1736. The royal seal of Spain's King Ferdinand VII, who ruled in the early 1800s, can also be seen in the Spanish archives. County Clerk Lucy Adame-Clark led the project to preserve and protect the records and make them available online.

"So why would researchers beyond Bexar County be so interested in the old archives found here?

"Adame-Clark said after Spanish and Mexican rule over Texas ended in 1836, the newly created Bexar County of the Republic of Texas was huge.

"People don't understand that the records in Bexar County used to include also five different states, you know. We have Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado and a little north of Wyoming. And we gave birth to 128 counties," she said.

Included among the papers is Jim Bowie's wedding contract to Ursula Veramendi from 1831."

Again, you can find the article at: https://bit.ly/37JXyqG.

The following is a press release written by TheGenealogist:

TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer^TM, the powerful mapping tool for family historians, has been boosted this week by the addition of four new English counties of georeferenced Tithe Maps into the record set layer.

Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist can now view the Victorian Tithe Maps linked to apportionment records for Cornwall, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire and Worcestershire which are overlaid the modern and historical maps of the base and middle layers. This enables the user to see the land as it appeared through time. Tithe records allow researchers to find land that was both owned or occupied by ancestors in the period 1837 to 1850s with some additional altered apportionments in later years when property was sold or divided. Meaning that it was not just the wealthy landowners who are recorded in the tithe records but also those tenants who may have farmed a small plot or lived in a cottage.

First & Last House, Land’s End from TheGenealogist’s Image Archive

Map Explorer™ includes various years of georeferenced Ordnance Survey maps, current road and satellite view maps and with the additional Tithe record layer researchers can see how their ancestors’ environment had changed over the decades. When used in conjunction with other records, such as the census, the family history researcher can gain a fascinating insight into their forebears’ story.

• • This release adds 784 maps across 4 counties

  • Total new Tithe plot pins on Map Explorer: 547,976

  • Total number of Tithe maps in Map Explorer™ including this release now: 10,494

  • 4,504,575 viewable records are now indicated by Map Pins on Map Explorer™

In TheGenealogist’s featured article, to go with this release, we can look at how some furze-covered tracts of countryside at Land’s End were transformed by a family into a tourist spot. Finding the plots of neighbours on the tithe maps and by also using TheGenealogist’s census collection and its standout feature allowing a researcher to view all the households on a street, we are able to investigate how the different names in the records were related to each other with various “cousins'' living next door or owning adjacent plots of land.

Read the feature article ‘Keeping it in the Family – The Tale of Land’s End’

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2021/keeping-it-in-the-family----the-tale-of-lands-end-1438/

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!

Elvis’ maternal great-great-grandmother was a Jewish woman named Nancy Burdine.

Little is known about Burdine, but it’s believed her family immigrated to America from what is now Lithuania around the time of the American Revolution.

According to Ancestry.com, Burdine was born in Mississippi in 1826 and died in 1887. Burdine’s great-granddaughter was Gladys Love Smith, who married Vernon Presley in 1933.

Two years later, Gladys gave birth to Elvis in Tupelo, Mississippi. The family moved to Memphis when Elvis was 13.

You can learn more in an article by Dan Fellner published in the Times of Israel web site at: https://bit.ly/3m1o2wk.