What began in 2022 as a one-paragraph public records request has morphed into a full-blown court fight over who owns digital copies of Pennsylvania’s historical records.

Are they the property of the commonwealth? Or are the documents — which include birth and death certificates, veterans’ burial cards, and slave records — fully controlled by a private company?

That question has pitted a New York City-based professional genealogist against the Pennsylvania agency in charge of a vast array of historical documents and artifacts, as well as Ancestry.com, an online genealogy company used by millions of people to search for family and other records.

The genealogist is Alec Ferretti, a director at Reclaim The Records, a nonprofit that pushes governments to make genealogical information more broadly available.

The state agency is the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC), which in 2008 contracted with Ancestry to digitize a sweeping list of historical documents and make them available on the company’s website. Those records also include naturalization documents, prison records, and Civil War border claims and muster rolls, according to the contract.

Those digitized records, according to PHMC’s website, are free to Pennsylvania residents who create a user profile with Ancestry.

Ferretti, however, isn’t a Pennsylvania resident.

So in September of last year, Ferretti asked PHMC for all records the state agency turned over to Ancestry. He also asked for the metadata on the digitized documents, as well as any indexes Ancestry created for them.

PHMC denied the request, saying it had no responsive records in its possession. Ferretti appealed to Pennsylvania’s Office of Open Records, an independent state agency that’s the first stop in deciding most disputes over access to government information.

According to legal briefs in the case, PHMC said that documents Ancestry eventually digitized encompassed a huge amount of data — approximately 45 terabytes — that would have cost the agency roughly $300,000 annually to maintain. So it chose to have Ancestry house the scanned records for the state.

Copying those records, indexes, and metadata, as Ferretti requested, would be considered a breach of its contract with Ancestry, PHMC argued.

Ferretti countered that Ancestry could at the very least transfer the data using USB hard drives. He noted that because he doesn’t live in Pennsylvania, he would have to pay a subscription fee to the company to access the records. He also argued that though Ancestry houses the documents and their data, the state is their “legal custodian.”

Ownership of the commonwealth’s physical records is not contested. Those are available to Pennsylvania residents and nonresidents alike at the state archives in Harrisburg.

The Office of Open Records sided with Ferretti early this year, but the battle didn’t end. PHMC appealed to Commonwealth Court. Soon after, Ancestry stepped in, arguing that its work digitizing and indexing the records is proprietary. It also argued that though the company agreed under the contract to license copies of the digitized records back to the state, it owns the work product, and said it didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the initial Office of Open Records case.

You can read more about this case in an article by Angela Couloumbis published in The Morning Call web site at: http://tinyurl.com/2p9nphb3.

If you are unfamiliar with Boxing Day, you might want to read the Wikipedia description at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day.

I recently read this word online but did not know it’s meaning. As a genealogist, I am a bit ashamed that I did not know the meaning of the word.

According to Dictionary.com:

grandfamily

[ grand-fam-uh-lee, fam-lee ]SHOW IPA

nounplural grand·fam·i·lies.

a family in which one or more children live with and are raised by their grandparent or grandparents: Grandfamilies exist because of absent parents, and the circumstances behind that can vary greatly from one case to the next.

I have written frequently about the preservation of tombstones. Apparently, one person did not “get the word.” A rather old article in the Los Angeles Times, describes how one well-intentioned person has caused potential long-term damage to many Civil War tombstones. He thought he was helping preserve the tombstones but his efforts had the opposite effect. Not only did he not realize the damage he was causing, he even received commendations from cemetery officials, Representative Loretta Sanchez (D-Santa Ana), the Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society and the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War.

For three years, Gene-o Platt cleaned tombstones, removing fungus and lichen. He then brushed several layers of white-pigmented sealer onto the Georgia marble tombstones. Using drills and grinding tools, he also enhanced worn lettering and then painted them gold. He invested thousands of hours and dollars in the project, hoping his example would be copied nationwide.

What Mr. Platt did not realize is that the sealer will cause the marble to deteriorate from the inside out because moisture in the rock can't escape. In addition, black lithochrome paint should be used for lettering, not gold.

The Veterans Administration, which owns Civil War tombstones, bars sealer from being applied to its monuments, said Mike Nacincik, a spokesman for the VA's National Cemetery Administration.

You can read more about this story in the Los Angeles Times' web site at. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/orange/la-me-tombstone27jul27,1,5766355.story?coll=la-editions-orange&ctrack=1&cset=true.

Here is an article that is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I Found this to be interesting and think that you might also.

Holding online meetings and seminars can be a great time saver and money saver. If you wish to conduct a class or seminar, hold a society meeting of a few people, or even control someone else's computer for troubleshooting purposes or most any other purpose of displaying information on a remote computer, you can choose from dozens of screen-sharing products available today. However, some of the available online meeting products can be quite expensive. I have recently been experimenting with a low-cost and even no-cost product with the easy-to-remember name of "join.me."

With join.me, you can hold an online seminar or meeting with up to 250 participants at no charge; extra features are available for a reasonable fee. Join.me provides a meeting space that happens wherever and whenever you need it. Join.me is an instant screen-sharing application that allows others to see the material you wish to present. It can be available on a moment's notice at no charge and with no registration required. 

The free version of join.me allows all participants to see what you are seeing on your screen. You can also use an online chat feature to send and receive text messages (normally entered on the keyboard) to a single participant or to all participants at once. You can also send files to any one participant, but not to all participants at once. You can even transfer control of your computer to anyone participant in the session.

With join.me, the required software downloads automatically at the time you join the meeting. There is no requirement to download or install software in advance. 

Join.me doesn't provide the audio directly, but it does provide an easy method of conversing via telephone calls by dialing join.me telephone numbers in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Hungary, or the Netherlands. Once connected to the conference call by telephone, each participant enters the number of the online session and then is connected to everyone else in the session. Participants can talk and listen by telephone while watching the on-screen session on their own Windows or Macintosh computers. Each caller does pay any applicable toll charges to connect to the nearest teleconference phone number. Sounds played on the presenter's computer are not shared with meeting participants.

Of course, there is no requirement to use a telephone conference call. Instead, participants can simultaneously use the join.me service while also talking via a Skype conference call or other free VoIP conference call service. However, Skype cannot provide audio to hundreds of simultaneous users. Anyone conversing on Skype also will not hear those conversing on normal telephones. All participants need to be on Skype or on normal telephones, there is no mixing and matching of them together.

Upgrading to the paid pro version of join.me adds the following features: A permanent personal link that becomes your own "meeting room." You can tell others, "This is where you will find me."

Meetings can be scheduled in advance and email invitations sent that will add the session to the recipients' iCal or Outlook calendars.

The ability to have multiple presenters, although only one person can be presenting at any given moment.

A lock on the door. Anyone who wishes to join a pro session must request access. The moderator then can grant access or not, as he or she wishes. (With the free version, anyone can join if they know the URL.) Join.me uses 256-bit SSL encryption. That's the same technology used by online banks and shopping sites – in fact, by anyone who cares about online security. As a result, unwanted participants cannot "listen in" to pro version meetings. (Free version meetings are also encrypted, but an unwelcome visitor can join in if he or she can discover the URL or meeting number.)

Join.me's free service is also a great method of troubleshooting a problem on someone else's computer. Do you have a technologically-challenged relative in a distant city who needs computer assistance? Have that person start a free join.me meeting by sending him or her an email message containing the join.me URL. The remote relative clicks on the URL to start an online meeting, then gives you control of their computer. Even though you are many miles away, you can move the mouse, click on icons, and type on the keyboard as you both watch the action on your respective computer screens. You probably will also want to be talking with the other person via a telephone call or via Skype, although that isn't absolutely necessary. 

Starting a meeting is simple: go to http://www.join.me. If you are creating the meeting, a meeting number will be assigned to you. If you wish to join a meeting already in progress, enter the appropriate meeting number.

The free join.me service is very easy to use and doesn't require a credit card or even an email address. The pro version, however, will require both a credit card and an email address in order to create an account

For more information, or to hold an online meeting of up to 250 participants, go to https://join.me/

What Is the Public Domain?

Creative works that are not protected by copyright are said to be in the “public domain”, a vast commons of material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction. While works can be dedicated to the public domain (by the creator forgoing their copyright), most are in the public domain because they are old enough for their copyrights to have expired. However, different countries and jurisdictions have varying laws about how and when copyright expires, meaning there exist, in effect, many public domains, despite the tendency to talk of “the public domain” as a singular entity.

How do I know if a work is in the Public Domain?

For works made prior to 1870 or thereabouts, it is generally safe to assume they are in the public domain the world over. But as we move toward the present, the status will start to vary according to the idiosyncrasies of copyright law in different jurisdictions, meaning a work might be in the public domain in one country but not in another. While copyright law can be frustratingly complex, most countries are covered by one of three main types of copyright term for historical literary and artistic works:

a term which lasts for 70 years after the creator’s death (relevant in UK, Canada, most of the EU, and South America);a term which lasts for 50 years after the creator’s death (relevant to most of Africa and Asia);

a term which lasts for 95 years after the publication of a film or book, including any artworks featured within (relevant solely to the United States).

Within these basic frameworks there are, however, subtleties and exceptions. Determining if an artwork is out of copyright in the US can be particularly tricky, depending as it does on when (if at all) the artwork was first “published” (a term which itself is not clearly defined). To find out more about the ins and outs of US copyright law, we recommend this excellent chart from Cornell University and this tool from the Copyright Advisory Network. For the UK and the EU, you can try this handy set of flowcharts from Law Flow (from 2011, but this shouldn't affect the status of historical works). For info on all countries, see this useful set of pages on Wikiedia Commons.

Digital copies of public domain works

When we encounter a historical public domain work online it is in the form of a digital copy. While the underlying work itself is free from copyright, the digital copy can sometimes be subject to additional claims of copyright (or restrictions applied to its use). Rights and licences applying to historical works found online can therefore be broadly divided into two categories:

The rights status of the underlying work, by which is meant the original work itself (the words of a book, the actual physical painting or drawing, a musical score, etc.).

The rights status of the digital copy, by which is meant the digital reproduction of the original work (usually a scan or photograph).

Whether there should be such a distinction between the originals and their digital copies is hotly debated, and many doubt if it is legally valid to apply copyright to a basic reproduction of an out-of-copyright work. In 1999, in the US, a landmark case (Bridgeman v. Corel) ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright in the US because the copies lack originality.

You can read more about this topic at: https://publicdomainreview.org/what-is-the-public-domain/ .

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

I am writing this article while seated at a desk in my home. I am staring at a large monitor on the desk and typing these words on a keyboard that sits on that desk. The keyboard is connected to a boxy-looking computer on my desk. This is how I use a computer most of the time. It is the same method that I used 39 years ago, in 1984. 

This is modern technology?

Of course, I do also use a laptop computer, and that has changed things somewhat. Nonetheless, the laptop is merely a miniaturized copy of a desktop computer, and I use it in more or less the same manner as the desktop, except that I am not chained to the desk at home. I can use it in different locations, but the way I use it remains the same as what I was doing in 1984.

Admittedly, I also have a small tablet computer. In my case, it is an Android device but it also could be an Apple iOS tablet. My cell phone is a “smartphone,” meaning it is really a handheld computer that happens to make phone calls and it takes photographs. I even have a digital wristwatch that connects to the Internet via wireless technology and retrieves information, records my exercise, and performs other (limited) computing tasks. However, I don’t use any of these smaller devices for my writing and also do less of my genealogy work on these portable devices simply because of the constraints of the smaller screen sizes and the on-screen “keyboards.” Instead, I use desktop and laptop systems for my “serious computing.”

The hardware has changed dramatically in the past 37 years, but the method by which I use a computer remains the same: I sit in a chair and type on the keyboard and stare at a monitor.

All this is been changing for some years and now desktop computers are dropping in popularity. Sales of laptops has outnumbered the sales of desktops for the past several years. New devices, such as the Apple iPad and other tablet computers, Kindles, the various smartphones, and other portable computing devices threaten to change the way we use computers. 

The desktop is dying. 

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/13293932.

"The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitizing and then throwing away about 100 million paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save 4.5 million pounds a year," reports Robert Booth via The Guardian. Leading historians are calling these plans "sheer vandalism" and "insane." From the report: 

Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as "bananas" and "a seriously bad idea." The government is proposing to keep the originals of some wills of "famous people" -- likely including those of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales -- but others would be destroyed after 25 years and only a digital copy would be kept. It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost.

Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitized documents unavailable to users since late October. 

"We are advocates of digitization but not at the cost of destroying originals," says Natalie Pithers, interim co-chief executive of the Society of Genealogists. "In any digitization projects mistakes get made. We don't know what further information could be gained in the future from the original documents. There could be somebody in there who did something extraordinary."

The following is an announcement from Findmypast:

In our last record update of 2023, we've added over 18,500 English records. These fascinating additions include monumental inscriptions from Yorkshire, Lincolnshire workhouse guardians' minutes, and 18th-century school records from the UK's first free school for deaf children. 

We've also added two new titles to our newspaper collection, taking us past yet another exciting landmark. 

Read on for a full rundown of all that's been added this festive Findmypast Friday.

Yorkshire Monumental Inscriptions

We've added 8,273 transcriptions to our existing collection of monumental inscriptions from Yorkshire. Spanning from 1807 right up to 2022, these latest additions are from parishes across the county. To see the parishes included, check our updated list. 

There are now over 318,000 records in this set. Each is a transcription of the details on a gravestone in Yorkshire. In the records, you can expect to learn names, ages, birth years, death years, inscription details, and descriptions of each grave site, as well as the memorials' locations. 

If you've got roots in Yorkshire, you may be able to uncover a moving tribute to your ancestor. You'll find deeply emotional and personal inscriptions - take the record of Harry Aaron, for example. Harry died in 1938, aged 67. He is buried at Illingworth Moor Methodist Chapel in Halifax. 

View this record.

His gravestone reads 'Treasured memories of him we loved best'. From his record, we learn that he is buried with Sarah Ann Williamson (perhaps his wife), who died on 22 April 1940, aged 58. Their joint inscription reads 'Peace, perfect peace'.

Lincolnshire, Workhouse Guardians' Minutes

This week's second update brings a brand-new record set, comprising 9,354 workhouse guardian records from Lincolnshire. These additions span 1837 to 1901 and document poor law relief applications as recorded by the guardians who administered each case. 

Lincolnshire's Sleaford Union Workhouse in the 19th century.

Though the information included varies slightly, each record typically contains a full name, residence, date of birth, status, and event date. There are transcriptions and images available, so consult the original record to glean all the details. Within the documents attached to each record, you may be able to see the rates that were paid, as well as more biographical details and notes about the case.

London, Asylum for the Deaf & Dumb Pupils 1792-1859

Last but not least, we've got yet another brand-new set. Containing 899 records, this collection is from the London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb - the first free public institution in England to offer education to deaf children from poor families.

These transcriptions span almost 70 years, from 1792 to 1859. They offer a valuable insight into the lives of the school's pupils and will be of particular interest to those of us who may have deaf ancestors. 

A map of the school (formerly called Deaf and Dumb Asylum) on Old Kent Road, c.1875.

The information recorded changed significantly over time. For some pupils, only very brief detail is included. Nevertheless, you may be able to discover a name, year of attendance, parental details, and residence, as well as other family facts (including whether other relatives were also deaf).

Peruse Pictures and more...

This week, we added 127,786 new pages to our newspaper collection, taking our total page count past the impressive 73 million landmark. With two new titles - the Blyth News Post Leader and Pictures - there are more stories to explore than ever.

A precursor to the movie fan magazine Picturegoer, Pictures was first published in October 1911. It described itself as 'an illustrated weekly magazine of fiction for lovers of moving pictures'. It ran stories about upcoming features, articles about the most popular stars of the day, and images of cinema stills. 

Pictures. View this title in full.

Here's a full rundown of all that's been added this week.

New titles:

• Blyth News Post Leader, 1987-1988, 1991-1992
• Pictures, 1911

Updated titles: 

• Atherstone News and Herald, 1991 
• Ballymena Weekly Telegraph, 1895, 1903, 1905, 1917-1920, 1930, 1960-1970, 1985-1989, 1991-1992 
• Deal, Walmer & Sandwich Mercury, 1986 
• Gloucestershire Echo, 1995-1996, 1998-1999 
• Kent Messenger, 1941 
• Kentish Express, 1976 
• Maidstone Journal and Kentish Advertiser, 1873-1875, 1878-1886, 1909 
• Maidstone Telegraph, 1939, 1941-1945 
• Pateley Bridge & Nidderdale Herald, 1987-1989 
• South Eastern Gazette, 1977

Last week, we added new parish records for Kent and over 187,000 1939 register entries. Discover the full release here.

Have you made a surprising family history discovery? Whatever you've uncovered about your past, we'd love to hear about it. You can now get in touch and tell us using this handy form.

People can now easily dive into the rich 225-year history of Newtown School Waterford, as a digital outreach project between the independent school and South East Technological University (SETU) hosts the freely available artifacts.

The digital archive contains a wealth of information on the school, which has seen the likes of Erskine Barton Childers, Ralph Fiennes, Sinéad O’Connor, and Leslie Dowdall pass through its storied halls.

The project, led by Kieran Cronin, special collections, heritage and outreach librarian at SETU’s campus in Waterford, enables easy access to the school’s history and it’s hoped the archive will act as an important tool for students, researchers and those in the local community who wish to gain a deeper understanding of Newtown School and its influence on the cultural fabric of Waterford city.

The school also hopes the democratisation of this history will foster a sense of shared heritage and community pride.

You can read more (including a link to the Archive) in an article by Jessica Martin published in theWaterford News & Star web site at: http://tinyurl.com/2p984td8.