Great news! The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History Library reopened last Tuesday.

The genealogical research facility had been closed since March of 2020 due to the pandemic. The library was also updated during the closure.

Now, as guests walk inside, they’ll notice newly-organized research materials, upgraded technology, desktop book scanners, more room for interactive experiences, and more than 300 staff and volunteers ready to help.

 It now has fewer computers than it did before, but more than half are Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant.

Genealogists generally spend their spare time researching and thinking about live in the past. However, an article by Victoria Song and published in the Gizmodo web site got me thinking about the opposite: life in the future.

The article states (in part):

Owning things used to be simple. You went to the store. You paid money for something, whether it be a TV, clothes, books, toys, or electronics. You took your item home, and once you paid it off, that thing belonged to you. It was yours. You could do whatever you wanted with it. That’s not how it is today, and by 2030, technology will have advanced to the point that even the idea of owning objects might be obsolete.

Many a think piece has been written about how Millennials aren’t as interested in owning things as their predecessors. After decades of Boomers keeping up with the Joneses, Millennials were supposedly “more about the experience” than physical goods. There’s a kernel of truth in that, but the shift to services was telegraphed a long time ago.

Back in 2016, the World Economic Forum released a Facebook video with eight predictions it had for the world in 2030. “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy,” it says. “Whatever you want, you’ll rent. And it’ll be delivered by drone.”

“Everything you considered a product, has now become a service,” reads another WEF essay published on Forbes. “We have access to transportation, accommodation, food, and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.”

The WEF’s framing is overly optimistic, but this is the future we’re rapidly hurtling toward. I rent my apartment, and therefore, all the home appliances in it. If I wanted, I could rent all my furniture and clothes. Sure, I have my own computer and phone, but there are plenty of people who use company-issued gadgets. And if I didn’t want company-issued items, I could always rely on electronics rentals. I like cooking and grocery shopping, but I could just sign up for a meal kit service and call it a day. I wouldn’t even need appliances like toasters, rice cookers, blenders, air fryers, or anything beyond a microwave. To get around, there are Citi Bikes, Uber, and Zipcar.

You might be wondering—what’s the problem here? Consumerism is exhausting, and as far as housing goes, ownership isn’t the golden ideal it’s cracked up to be. In some ways, not owning things is easier. You have fewer commitments, less responsibility, and the freedom to bail whenever you want. There are upsides to owning less. There’s also a big problem.

You can read the entire thought-provoking article at https://gizmodo.com/in-2030-you-wont-own-any-gadgets-1847176540.

New Zealand's National Library will donate 600,000 books that it was planning to cull from its overseas collection to a United States-based internet archive that will make digital copies of the works freely available online.

National Librarian Rachel Esson announced the “historic” agreement on Monday, saying books left at the end of the library’s review process would be donated to the Internet Archive, a digital library with the self-stated mission of universal access to all knowledge.

“This is a great outcome for us,” Esson said.

The agreement comes after months of controversy and uncertainty regarding the cull of the books, mostly written by non-Kiwi authors.

You can read all the details in an article by Andre Chumko published in the Stuff.co.nz web site at: https://bit.ly/3ebHtgZ.

The following announcement was written by the Association of Professional Genealogists:

Are you ready to level-up your genealogy business? 

Or maybe you're taking the first steps to become a professional? 

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or new to the business of genealogy, the APG Virtual Professional Management Conference is a must!

The PMC teaches genealogy professionals how to more effectively run their businesses by covering a wide range of business topics taught by well-respected industry professionals.

This year’s conference features sixteen virtual presentations and opportunities to network with other peers and colleagues. Presentations will be offered during 3 sessions: August 24-25, September 21-22, and October 19-20. Each session will be followed by on-demand access to presentation recordings for 10 days.

Registration is open to all interested individuals and early-bird discounts are available until July 15. If you decide to join APG and sign up for the whole conference, you will have access to a $120 discount. 

We are looking for individuals and companies interested in donating door prizes and volunteers to help the event run smoothly. If you are interested in either, please contact admin@apgen.org. 

We hope you will join us for this exciting event where you will gain tools for building a better genealogy business. To learn more about the conference and register, visit https://www.apgen.org/events/2021-professional-management-conference. 

If you’re looking to join APG to access conference discounts in addition to a subscription to the APG Quarterly, a listing in our member directory, and more, visit https://www.apgen.org/join. 

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

How many times has this happened to you? You enter a courthouse, library, or other repository of genealogy information with the intent of finding information about your ancestors. You don't really know what is available in that library or archive. After all, that is the purpose of your trip, right? You want to find out. Next thing you know, your head is spinning amidst a profusion of information and a confusion of objectives.

You may be wondering how this happens. While at the library/archive/repository, you start to look at the available information, but you also notice a book, microfilm, or other set of documents about some related topic. You spend some time looking at that book, even though it was not a part of your original plan. You find some interesting material about things that are not directly related to your ancestors. The end of the day arrives all too soon, and you find yourself leaving the facility, feeling a bit frustrated that you didn't accomplish what you had planned to do that day.

I know this has happened to me all too many times. Time and again I have traveled across town or across the country, only to not find the information that I wanted to discover. Over the years I have developed some techniques that help me become more organized and more effective once I am “on site.” I thought I would share some of those techniques this week.

Basically, there are three steps to a successful genealogy research trip:

1. Plan

2. Plan

3. Plan

I might even suggest that there is a fourth step: stick to the original plan! However, that seems to simply be a variation of the first three steps.

Before you leave home, have a game plan prepared. Establish goals and priorities prior to making your trip. Make a list of your problems and list the sources that might give you answers. Know which documents you wish to examine. In fact, with the major repositories, that is easy to do. The library catalogs of many major libraries are available online, including:

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/10740592.

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.

Do you know how many ancestors you have? Of course not. Let’s simplify the question: How many ancestors do you have in the past one thousand years? Many people do not know the answer to that question. Care to guess? (The answer is given below but please don’t peek just yet.)

The number of ancestors is simple to calculate as it is a simple mathematical progression: every person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents and so on. The number doubles with each generation. As you go back in years, the numbers soon become very large.

For this example, I have assumed that a new generation appears on an average of every twenty-five years:

Number of Ancestors

Generation Number	# of Years Before Your Birth	Number of ancestors in that generation	Total ancestors (this generation plus all later generations)
1	-25	2	2
2	-50	4	6
3	-75	8	14
4	-100	16	30
5	-125	32	62
6	-150	64	126
7	-175	128	254
8	-200	256	510
9	-225	512	1,022
10	-250	1,024	2,046
11	-275	2,048	4,094
12	-300	4,096	8,190
13	-325	8,192	16,382
14	-350	16,384	32,766
15	-375	32,768	65,534
16	-400	65,536	131,070
17	-425	131,072	262,142
18	-450	262,144	524,286
19	-475	524,288	1,048,574
20	-500	1,048,576	2,097,150
21	-525	2,097,152	4,194,302
22	-550	4,194,304	8,388,606
23	-575	8,388,608	16,777,214
24	-600	16,777,216	33,554,430
25	-625	33,554,432	67,108,862
26	-650	67,108,864	134,217,726
27	-675	134,217,728	268,435,454
28	-700	268,435,456	536,870,910
29	-725	536,870,912	1,073,741,822
30	-750	1,073,741,824	2,147,483,646
31	-775	2,147,483,648	4,294,967,294
32	-800	4,294,967,296	8,589,934,590
33	-825	8,589,934,592	17,179,869,182
34	-850	17,179,869,184	34,359,738,366
35	-875	34,359,738,368	68,719,476,734
36	-900	68,719,476,736	137,438,953,470
37	-925	137,438,953,472	274,877,906,942
38	-950	274,877,906,944	549,755,813,886
39	-975	549,755,813,888	1,099,511,627,774
40	-1000	1,099,511,627,776	2,199,023,255,550

Answer to the earlier question: If we assume that there is a new generation every twenty-five years, an ancestor born 1,000 years before you would be 40 generations removed from you. You would have 2,199,023,255,550 (that’s 2 trillion, 199 billion, 23 million, 255 thousand, 550) unique ancestors born in the previous 40 generations, assuming no overlap (that is, none of your ancestors were cousins to other ancestors).

1,000 years doesn’t even take you back to the years in which Charlemagne lived! (April 2, 742 AD to January 28, 814 AD)

Now, how many ancestors have you had in the past 10,000 years? 100,000 years? I’ll leave it to you to figure out the mathematics involved. However, the answers obviously are huge numbers!

There is but one problem: all of these numbers are far more than the total number of people who ever lived on the face of the earth.

The reality is that all families can find lots of cousins somewhere in the limbs of the family tree, resulting in the same ancestor(s) showing up in multiple places in the pedigree charts. Ask anyone who has done French-Canadian genealogy or has researched any families that lived for generations in one small village almost anyplace on earth.

Obviously, you and everyone else have cousin marriages in your ancestry, resulting in individual ancestors showing up in multiple places in your family tree.

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

Immerse yourself in family history research this weekend with thousands of new records to explore. Here's a rundown of what's new on Findmypast.

British Army Embarkation Lists, 1871-1889

This detailed collection documents British Army soldiers who were drafted to India in the late 19th century.

There are over 100,000 transcripts in this collection taken from original embarkation returns held in the British Library’s India Office Collection. They can reveal your army ancestors' names, ages, service numbers, ranks, regiments, the date they left for India and the ship they travelled on.

St Kitts & Nevis Baptisms 1716-1881

Delve into thousands of new baptism records from the Caribbean islands of St Kitts & Nevis.

An old map of St Kitts (St Christopher) & Nevis, circa. 1775.

Spanning from 1716-1881, the records reveal essential family tree information including names, parents’ names and addresses.

Newspapers

It’s a bumper week of releases with 13 new papers and updates to six others. Brand new additions include:

• • Aberystwyth Observer covering 1869, 1874-1884, 1887-1895 and 1899-1910
  • Censor or Satirical Times covering 1846
  • Dissenter covering 1812
  • Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper covering 1846-1851
  • Emigrant and the Colonial Advocate covering 1848-1849
  • English Mail covering 1860
  • Evening Star (London) covering 1843
  • Fleetwood Express covering 1889, 1896-1917 and 1919-1920
  • Jewish Record covering 1868-1871
  • London Free Press covering 1827
  • London Mercury 1836 covering 1836-1837
  • Monthly Times covering 1842 and 1844-1849
  • National Standard covering 1858 and 1860

Findmypast have also published pages from additional years in the following newspapers:

• • Haslingden Gazette from 1915
  • Morning Herald (London) from 1855-1860
  • Northern Guardian (Hartlepool) from 1901-1902
  • Swansea Journal and South Wales Liberal from 1899-1900
  • The News (London) from 1808
  • Weekly Chronicle (London) from 1836-1840 and 1851

Sure, it is easy to create digital photographs with today’s smartphones and digital cameras. But how do you keep them forever so that future generations may view them?

Actually, the process is simple and is well described in an article by Jack Schofield in The Guardian web site at http://bit.ly/2EGtWJL.

Schofield writes:

“People lose their most important photos every day when hard drives fail, when smartphones and laptops are stolen, when online services shut down, and when natural disasters strike. Fires, floods and earthquakes can also destroy digital records.

“To be really safe, you should have more than one copy of each photo, stored in more than one way in more than one place.”

You can read the full article at: http://bit.ly/2EGtWJL.

How is this for a well-documented family tree?

The newly documented genealogy could help scientists identify Leonardo's long-lost DNA.

Although Leonardo da Vinci never married or fathered any children of his own, he had at least 22 half-brothers that proliferated the family’s genes centuries after the famed renaissance artist and inventor passed away. According to the results of a decade-long investigation by researchers in Italy, the da Vinci family tree includes at least 21 generations spanning across 690 years. At least 14 da Vinci male descendants are still alive today, according to the researchers, which could greatly aid the search for Leonardo’s DNA.

Leonardo’s family roots

The Renaissance polymath, known for paintings like “The Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa,” was born in the Tuscan town of Anchiano in 1452, about 18 miles west of Florence.

Born out of wedlock to respected Florentine notary Ser Piero and a young peasant woman named Caterina, da Vinci was raised by his father and his stepmother. At the age of five, he moved to his father’s estate in nearby Vinci (the town from which his surname derives), where he lived with his uncle and grandparents.

For over a decade, Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato, both art historians and experts in Leonardo’s life, have been piecing together the puzzle pieces that form the da Vinci family tree. Using historical documents, the two Italian researchers performed genealogical detective work that documented Leonardo’s family across many generations.

You can read the details in an article by Tibi Puiu in the ZME Science web site at: https://www.zmescience.com/science/da-vinci-family-06072021/.

This year, respondents will be given multiple days to complete the census, which collects key demographic, social and economic data from everyone in the country. There are just two optional questions included in the census: the respondent’s religion, and their willingness to participate in the Census Time Capsule.

A capsule containing respondents’ complete census data from each event is stored at the National Archives for 99 years, after which it is released publicly.

Demographer Mark McCrindle says storing the information will benefit our descendants a century down the track.

“How grateful we are when we may be on an ‘ancestry.com’-type situation [and] someone’s got the marriage certificate or some birth data details.

“We’re glad that forebears have it and I’m sure that future [descendants] will be glad to dig into a bit of detail about who those ancient ancestors of theirs were.”

You can read more at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Australian_census.