The following is a message sent by the IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee and republished here with permission:

In 24 hours we have gotten the attention of  the NYC Department of Records & Information Services (DORIS) known to us as the Municipal Archives.  “…heard the positive news that DORIS does not "necessarily" intend to charge license fees for using genealogy records. DORIS recognizes the proposed changes are unclear and has indicated some clarifications will be made before the final rule is published. BUT...there is no guarantee that we will be consulted in advance on the FINAL RULE. Your comments are still NEEDED by October 23 as it still is not clear if personal usage of a vital record certificate is  still at risk beyond the purchase and use by one person.” 

The devil is in the details and we have not seen the changes in the proposed rule. Plus, it is VERY unique for an agency which proposes a rule to change the wording before a hearing, and whether that is considered “legal” or only the wording in the actual proposed rule at this point is  unknown.

The latest is posted by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (NYG&B) and can be read at:

https://www.facebook.com/nyfamilyhistory/posts/3392122924143166

You do not have to be a subscriber to Facebook to access the post. 

This is the wording of the post: 

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Wow! What an impact many of you have made in just 24 hours. BUT WE NEED EVERYONE'S COMMENTS IN THE PUBLIC RECORD by October 23.   

In response to your initial comments, we heard the positive news that DORIS does not "necessarily" intend to charge license fees for using genealogy records. DORIS recognizes the proposed changes are unclear and has indicated some clarifications will be made before the final rule is published. BUT...there is no guarantee that we will be consulted in advance on the FINAL RULE.       

While the application of licensing fees may not apply to vital records, it is not clear if personal usage of a vital record certificate is still at risk beyond the purchase and use of the certificate by one person. 

As written, the rules limit individual use of these records, "Reproductions are provided for the researcher's personal use only. Reproductions may not be reduplicated, published, or transferred to another individual or institution." 

We still need to consider that we do not know what we will find in the final rule before publication. This is also about the wider licensing wording, e.g. "permission to use", and the restrictive language and fees that apply to other "archival sources" which are public records at MUNI.  As written, the rules still require a license for educational, scholarly, non-profit, and media use.

Clarification is needed here: genealogists are educators and scholars! 

We are anxious to see in writing, clarifications DORIS intends to make. 

The hearing date is fixed as October 23…please continue to inform others and ask everyone to act by learning more at https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/access-alert.

 Please be active on this issue---we can’t be silent!

To access the previous  postings on the IAJGS Records Access Alert about the NYC DORIS/Municipal Archives go to the archives of the IAJGS Records Access Alert at:  http://lists.iajgs.org/mailman/private/records-access-alerts/.

You must be registered to access the archives.  To register go to: http://lists.iajgs.org/mailman/listinfo/records-access-alerts  and follow the instructions to enter your email address, full name and which genealogical  organization with whom you are affiliated.   You will receive an email response that you have to reply to or the subscription will not be finalized.

Jan Meisels Allen
Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee

I am pleased to announce that the new website for my newsletter is now online. It is also installed on a new web hosting service in the cloud. The new site at http://eogn.com replaces both the old website at the same address AND the former Plus Edition website at http://eognplus.com.

That's right. There is now one new web site for everyone. You can access it whether you have a Plus Edition subscription, a Standard Edition subscription, or no subscription at all. Visitors (without subscriptions) will be able to read Standard articles, but only subscribers can post comments. As always, Plus Edition subscribers can also read articles written especially for them.

Note: Anyone who visits the new site but is not yet subscribed is now called a “visitor.” You may remain in “visitor” status forever, if you wish. Visitors (without either free or paid subscriptions) will be able to read Standard articles and read messages in the new Discussion Forum, but will not be able to post comments or new messages. Only subscribers can post comments or new Discussion Forum messages. As always, Plus Edition subscribers can also read and comment on articles written especially for them.

The new website features:

1. An all new look-and-feel that should be easier to navigate.

2. No more PayPal. Instead, the new website accepts VISA, MasterCard, and Discover credit cards. The credit card companies all guarantee protection of your payment against fraud. (They also guaranteed PayPal payments in the old web site, but lots of people didn't know that.)

3. If you don’t want to pay online by credit card, you can ask for an invoice (a billing statement) that you can then pay by check or some other means. However, the subscription will not begin until your full payment by credit card, check, cash, waterfront property, or other method has been received at EOGN.COM’s "corporate headquarters" (which is really a corner of a bedroom in my home).

4. You can choose to get either a daily email summary of all articles published since the last email summary. If you don’t want to get any email summaries at all, you can opt out of the mailings at any time. For those who use RSS newsreaders, RSS format files are also available. With this new process, all emails from EOGN.COM will be sent to you more reliably than ever before. You and I can both bid farewell to those third-party (and sometimes erratic) companies that used to do the mailings for me.

You will also be able to change the email address on your account all by yourself, and it will take effect immediately.

NOTE: This email message was sent to you by the new email sending capability built into EOGN.COM.

4. A new Discussion Forum is built into the new website. This is a place for you to post questions or comments about any genealogy-related topic, ask for assistance, compare notes with other genealogists, and more. I suspect this will become a very popular service.

5. Cloud-based! The entire EOGN.COM website now runs in the cloud. No, it won't be running on a PC in my living room, in a single sever in a data center on the other side of the world, or anything similar. EOGN.COM now uses cloud services just like Netflix, Gmail, Microsoft Office 365, Amazon, eBay, and many other popular web sites. By running in the cloud, all these web sites achieve 99.99% or better uptime.

At any moment, you will be accessing the newsletter's multiple servers in California, New Jersey, Dublin, Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, or elsewhere; you won't know—and most likely you won't care! All you will know is, "It just works!"

6. No viruses! The cloud servers are monitored 24 hours a day by system professionals using all the latest anti-virus and anti-malware techniques.

Note: Actually, the old newsletter web site never had a virus either; but it depended upon me to monitor everything. I feel a lot better with cloud services gurus monitoring and protecting everything 24 hours a day. I can sleep better now.

6. Hardware agnostic and mobile friendly! You will be able to access all functions on the new EOGN.COM whether you are using Windows, Macintosh, Chromebook, Linux, iPad, or Android devices. You even can use your "smartphone." The new website automatically adjusts its appearance to display on your device's screen (although using a very small screen size may not be an optimum user experience).

7. A new smartphone app will soon be available. You will be able to access everything in the newsletter’s web site with customized apps designed for that purpose. These iPhone, iPad, and Android apps are already available to me, but I need to customize them for use with EOGN.COM. I have been rather busy building the website in the cloud. With that new website up and running properly, configuring the new smartphone and tablet client is next on my to-do list.

8. Lots of disk space is available now, and I can always pay for more space, if needed. The maximum available size in the cloud is "infinite" although I am not prepared to pay for quite that much space. As one insurance company advertises, "Only pay for what you use."

Downsides

1. If you expect the all-new web site to be perfect in every way the instant it becomes available, you may be disappointed. This first release will be version 0.9. Like most software, you can expect later versions to squash bugs, correct typo errors, and provide new functions based on user suggestions. In short, I expect this to be a "work in progress" for a while.

2. You will have to create a new password. Modern security techniques require that user passwords never be visible to anyone other than the user, not even to me as your system administrator. As a result, when I moved your existing customer record to the new EOGN.COM website, complete with email address and subscription level, your old password did not move to the new website. Instead, I created a temporary password for you. Now, the first time you log on, you will be asked to change this temporary password to one of your own choosing. You can re-enter your old password, if you wish, or create a brand-new password. Your choice.

I could go on and on... But probably the best advice I can offer is, "Check out the new EOGN newsletter for yourself at https://eogn.com.

I'll "see" you online!

- Dick Eastman

The following is an excerpt from an announcement by the organizers of the FHF REALLY USEFUL Family History Show, an online virtual event sponsored by the Family History Federation:

The Family History Federation and Parish Chest report an excellent uptake of tickets on the “early-bird” bookings for the FHF REALLY USEFUL Family History Show. Bookings are increasing daily – the 1,000th booking will be suitably rewarded!

There will be twenty-four presentations and talks by specialists providing helpful and interesting information for everyone from beginners to seasoned researchers.

All presentations will be available online for ticket holders for 48 hours after the show.

Regular announcements providing further details of the presentations and talks at the show will be on the show website and associated media. https://www.fhf-reallyuseful.com.

Great news for anyone researching Irish ancestry! An article in the IrishCentral website states:

"Irish birth and marriage certificates from as far back as 1864 are now available for free online, while death certificates between 1878 and 1968 are also accessible.

"A plethora of Irish genealogy records were made available online thanks to a joint initiative from the Department of Culture, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht and the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, in 2019.

"A wealth of historical registers of marriages, births, and deaths are available to view for free on the website Irish Genealogy and covers births from 1864 to 1918, deaths from 1878 to 1968, and marriages from 1864 to 1943.

"The new additions include deaths in 1967 and 1968, births in 1917 and 1918, and marriages from 1864 to 1869 and 1942 to 1943..."

You can read all the details in the IrishCentral website at: https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/genealogy/irish-genealogy-resource-free.

An online video about DNA, produced by Momondo, is very impressive. I would suggest every genealogist should watch it. Perhaps every human on the face of the earth should view it. I decided to encourage YOU to click on https://youtu.be/tyaEQEmt5ls  to see what a DNA test could do for you.

I was not familiar with Momondo so I looked it up on Wikipedia.org:

“Momondo (stylised momondo) is a travel fare aggregator and travel fare metasearch engine. Momondo also operates a travel information blog, Inspiration. The website is a white-label of the Kayak.com subsidiary of Booking Holdings.”

So why would a “travel fare aggregator and travel fare metasearch engine” produce videos about DNA? It seems that the company asked 67 people from all over the world to take a DNA test.

I am not going to give you the results. The video will do that.

Check it out for yourself. Watch the DNA Journey at https://youtu.be/tyaEQEmt5ls.

My thanks to Terry Mulcahy for telling me about the video.

I had hoped to announce this weekend that the new replacement for this newsletter’s web sites had been launched. But of course things never go exactly as planned.

See https://blog.eogn.com/2020/08/31/eognplus-com-website-is-offline-and-here-is-the-plan/ and https://blog.eogn.com/2020/09/21/update-eognplus-com-website-is-offline-and-here-is-the-plan/ for the history of how the web sites got into their present condition.

The new web site is waiting for “one more thing.” Unfortunately, it is a background check of me supplied by an outside company and I have no control over when it will be received. I also suspect that during the pandemic, all of that company’s employees are working from home which possibly will slow things down a bit.

All I can say is, “Any day now.”

I do expect to send an email notice to all subscribers on the day the new website goes online, replacing the old websites. Stay tuned…

The following book review was written by Bobbi King:

Diverse Gashes
Governor William Bradford, Alice Bishop, and the Murder of Martha Clarke, Plymouth Colony 1648
By Donna A. Watkins. Published by American History Press. 2020. 353 pages.

The book opens on a bold note: the recitation of the rituals in early Plymouth Colony of the hangings of men and women convicted of such crimes that would cause the imposition of such ghastly punishment.

The descriptions of these particularly unfortunate and grim events, commonly held at fairs and as public displays of community justice, are presented in an unexpectedly straightforward and detailed manner, and set the tone of the book—the telling of the tale of the harsh environment and living conditions, and the strict governance, both legal and social, of the Pilgrim society that struggled to grow the Plymouth Colony amidst the fear of Indians, the burden of satisfying investors’ demands of a lucrative venture, and compliance with the Pilgrim code as interpreted and imposed by their governor and judge, William Bradford.

The “Diverse Gashes” were the cause of death of four-year old Martha Clarke, the daughter of Alice Bishop, a re-married mother of three young children and wife of a successful Plymouth farmer. Without apparent reason, Alice brutally took the life of her daughter, on an ordinary day, with no witnesses present, and with no pleas of innocence. Alice meekly submitted to the investigation led by William Bradford, offered no reasons for her impulsive act, and was subsequently convicted. She became the first and only woman in Plymouth Colony to be hanged.

Alice is the author’s ninth-great-grandmother.

The book especially considers the circumstances of women whose submission and compliance to the men, their lifelong heads of household, their fathers and husbands, was particularly onerous and stifling. It seems there was simply no room, in the Pilgrim sphere, for female opinion, wishes, words of wisdom, wants, or needs. Even from the age of a young girl, the Pilgrims mandated absolute female compliance to the male authority.

The murder of a child by her mother is the event from which the author tells the peripheral stories of Separatism, Puritanism, the settlement and divisiveness of Plymouth Colony, with a fresh look and attention to the many tasks, duties, and few pleasures of the colonists’ daily lives that draws in the reader with easy reading that is deceptively interesting, recounting the never-ending pursuits of daily cooking, family-raising, crop-producing, church-going, peace-keeping, and child-rearing.

Ms. Watkins introduces the Pilgrim practice of “watchfulness,” the Neighborhood Watch of its day. “Watchfulness” was the assumption of responsibility by the entire community for the welfare of the entire community. But the “watchfulness” principle may have felt like a habit of “spyfulness” to some inhabitants. Might this have contributed to the tragedy of Alice Bishop and her daughter Martha? The author discusses the question.

The final third of the book is devoted to Ms. Watkins’s analysis of the extant records and circumstances on the whole matter of Alice Bishop and her time. William Bradford, staunch protector of the Pilgrim code and belief system, and his male counterparts, governed the investigation and likely influenced the lack of historical mention in the Colony records of Alice’s case, not typical for a man who sought to document and preserve, in his many writings, the complete history of his Plymouth Colony.

An extensive bibliography offers numerous rich resources for additional research, and the source notes indicate the approach of a careful and thoughtful researcher.

Alice Bishop could never have imagined being remembered some eight generations and three hundred fifty years later, but she has been.

Ms. Watkins memorialized her ancestor in a compassionate and sympathetic fashion. And she set the scenes of colonial life with an unidealized eye that seems more believable than the Pilgrim story we re-enacted in second grade.

Diverse Gashes: Governor William Bradford, Alice Bishop, and the Murder of Martha Clarke, Plymouth Colony 1648 by Donna A. Watkins is available from the publisher, American History Press, at https://bit.ly/3jtmjvA as well as from Amazon at https://amzn.to/3cS1Fmo.

If you have one of the surnames listed at https://bit.ly/3jyBweI, you might inherit money, land, and who-knows-what-else. There are hundreds of unclaimed estates in the West Midlands of England worth huge sums of money. Dozens of people across Worcestershire could potentially be entitled to huge sums of money after residents died and no rightful heir could be found.

You can find the article and the (lengthy) list of surnames in the BirminghamLive web site at https://bit.ly/3jyBweI.

I will mention that I already checked the list for my surname. That isn't one of names listed. (sigh)

Mount Auburn Cemetery was the first garden cemetery in the United States, located on the city line between Cambridge and Watertown in Massachusetts, 4 miles west of Boston. The cemetery is credited as the beginning of the American public parks and gardens movement.

Prior to the establishment of Mount Auburn Cemetery, the early American cemeteries were established as places under churches for burial of deceased church members. As the available space under a church was filled, cemeteries often were built on available land in front of, beside, or in back of the church. These graveyards sometimes created serious health problems as graves were not always dug 6 feet deep. As a result, diseases often were spread amongst a population that had little or no knowledge of germs or the causes of the spread of diseases.

As these spaces became filled with bodies and as the population became more aware of health issues, “burying grounds” were established in most any space that was suitable for the purpose. As early as 1711, the architect Sir Christopher Wren advocated for the creation of burial grounds on the outskirts of town, “inclosed with a strong Brick Wall, and having a walk round, and two cross walks, decently planted with Yew-trees”.

In fact, the word “cemetery” was not common in Colonial days. The term “cemetery,” derived from the Greek for “a sleeping place,” became popular in the 1800s as a replacement for “graveyard.” Many were placed in rural areas, some distance from human habitation.

Mount Auburn Cemetery was one of the first to be planned as a pleasant place to visit with gardens, waterfalls, and even walkways that were pleasing to the eye. Quoting Wikipedia:

“The first rural cemetery in the United States was Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded by Dr. Jacob Bigelow and Henry Dearborn of The Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1831. The City of Boston became concerned about the health hazards caused by decomposing corpses in cemeteries in the middle of the city. A citizens’ group led by Bigelow pulled together residents to discuss the design and location of a cemetery outside city limits. The search for a site took six years and land was eventually purchased on a farm known as Sweet Auburn along the Charles River about four miles from Boston.

(NOTE by Dick Eastman: This selected location was open farm land in 1831 but the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts expanded greatly over the years. Now Mount Auburn Cemetery is a pleasant public garden or even a city park totally surrounded by the city.)

“Coinciding with the growing popularity of horticulture and the Romantic aesthetic taste for pastoral beauty, Mount Auburn was developed as a “domesticated landscape” popularized by 19th century English landscape design. Its plan included retention of natural features like ponds and mature forests with added roads and paths that followed the natural contours of the land, as well as the planting of hundreds of native and exotic trees and plants. United States Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story delivered the dedication address on September 24, 1831.

“Mount Auburn also began the practice of allowing the purchase of family plots large enough to allow the burial of several generations of a single family.”

The cemetery soon became a tourist attraction, attracting locals as well as tourists from across the country and Europe. Mount Auburn Cemetery also became the location of many of Boston’s leading citizens, including ministers, politicians, army generals, Civil War heroes, authors, industrial leaders, and many more.

A few years ago, I became one of those tourists and spent most of a day in the Mount Auburn Cemetery. I had planned to go for only an hour or two early in the morning. The place was so interesting, however, that I remained there most of the day.

A short time later I moved into a home in the Boston suburbs, only a few miles from the Mount Auburn Cemetery. I returned to the cemetery and took a video camera with me. I took many videos of the tombstones, the gardens, the scenic ponds, and the winding roads and pathways. I have since selected the better videos and combined them into a “digital tour” of the garden cemetery. You can watch the video on YouTube at https://youtu.be/Zs63WUAyA5M or in the video player below:

There are thousands of tombstones and memorials in the cemetery. A video of all of them would be several hours long! Instead, I am only showing a small sample of them.

This 8-minute video is a sampling of two things: (1.) the beauty and artistry of the Mount Auburn Cemetery and (2.) a number of hints about taking pictures or videos of tombstones.

Statues and memorials often include depictions of angels and cherubs as well as botanical motifs such as ivy representing memory, oak leaves for immortality, poppies for sleep, willow trees for sorrow and grieving of the families in mourning, and acorns for life.

You can learn more about the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Auburn_Cemetery and in the cemetery’s own web site at: https://mountauburn.org.