Today is the first day of the month. That is still a good time to back up your genealogy files. Then test your backups!

Your backups aren't worth much unless you make a quick test by restoring a small file or two after the backup is completed.

Actually, you can make backups at any time. However, it is easier and safer if you have a specific schedule. The first day of the month is easy to remember, so I would suggest you back up your genealogy files at least on the first day of every month, if not more often. (My computers automatically make off-site backups of all new files every few minutes.)

Given the events of the past few months with genealogy websites laying off employees and cutting back on services, you now need backup copies of everything more than ever. What happens if the company that holds your online data either goes off line or simply deletes the service where your data is held? If you have copies of everything stored either in your own computer, what happens if you have a hard drive crash or other disaster? If you have one or more recent backup copies, such a loss would be inconvenient but not a disaster.

Of course, you might want to back up more than your genealogy files. Family photographs, your checkbook register, all sorts of word processing documents, email messages, and much more need to be backed up regularly. Why not do that on the first day of each month? or even more often?

When Bob Eliot rushed to his parents’ apartment in Co-op City in the Bronx in the autumn of 2011, he was not expecting to discover a secret that would change how he and dozens of other people view their lives, their families, and their pasts. Eliot, a retired IBM engineer and sales executive in his mid-50s who lived on Long Island, was simply fulfilling the obligation of a son. His 86-year-old father had smashed his head, needed to go to the hospital, and had called to ask Eliot to stay with his mother.

Adele Eliot had severe dementia, and Eliot was accustomed to sitting with her as she asked the same question over and over. On this day, she repeatedly said to him, “Bobby, how are your eyes?” He told her that he had the beginning of cataracts. “It makes sense. My grandmother had them,” he added, referring to his paternal grandmother.

His mother stared at him and replied, “He’s not your father. You should be happy. That whole family is crazy.”

Eliot was shocked. Was his mother saying his dad was not truly his father? Maybe this was the dementia talking, he thought. He asked her to explain. But she slipped into a fog and would say no more.

The remainder of the story is lengthy, but fascinating. I suspect you will enjoy reading of the mystery and how it was solved. Yes, genealogy and NNA were involved.

You can read A Bronx Tale: One Sperm Donor, 19 Siblings, and Six Decades of Secrets by David Corn, published in the Mother Jones web site at: https://bit.ly/3hgOZIk.

My thanks to newsletter reader Yvonne Dolbec for telling me about this story.

Census records are amongst the primary tools of genealogists. Even so, those of us who have been reading them for a while can tell you that the records are not as reliable as we would wish. I am still trying to find great-great-granddad in the 1850 census although he appears hale and hearty in the enumerations of 1840, 1860, 1870 and 1880. His absence in 1850 is still unexplained. Still, my quandary is minor compared to some others. For instance, the 1990 census is thought to have missed one native American in eight. Thousands of others – perhaps millions – have been missed in census records taken over the past two centuries.

America’s first census was carried out in 1790, and it was groundbreaking in many ways. It was the first to be mandated in any country’s constitution. It also caused America’s first presidential veto when George Washington, on the advice of Thomas Jefferson, disagreed with legislation defining how this “apportionment” was to be carried out. Washington’s primary objection to the proposed amendment was that “there is no one proportion or divisor which, applied to the respective numbers of the States, will yield the number and allotment of representatives proposed by the Bill.” It is interesting to note that today’s fixed allocation of 435 seats also does not pass the test established by President Washington.

An article from 2007 in The Economist compares the U.S. Census with similar efforts in other countries. It states that In 1634 Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony estimated the local population rather than counting it exactly.

When a Census Bill was debated in Britain in 1753, Matthew Ridley, the member of Parliament (MP) for Newcastle, gave a speech saying that there was among the people “such a violent spirit of opposition to this Bill, that if it be passed into a law, there is a great reason to fear, they will in many places oppose the execution of it in riotous manner.”

The same article also states, “Where government is oppressive, people want to keep out of censuses, lest information they provide is misused. Where government provides, people want to be in censuses, and to boost their numbers, in order to claim a larger share of the goodies.”

The Nazis used population records to round up Jews into concentration camps. As a result, Germans are still reluctant to be counted.

In 1936 Stalin told his officials that the following year’s census would find a total population of 170 million—a figure that did not account for his slaughter of millions in famines and purges. The enumerators (census takers) found only 162 million people and revealed other unwelcome facts, including that nearly half the population of his supposedly atheist country was religious. With this news Stalin denounced the count as a “wrecker’s census” and had the census takers either imprisoned or shot.

A new count in 1939, apparently conducted by a new team of enumerators, gave Stalin his figure of 170 million.

You can read more about census records in the article in The Economist at http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10311346.

Census enumerators (census takers) have a difficult job at best. Can you imagine The Three Stooges interviewing local residents?

In a 1940 Three Stooges movie, Larry, Curly, and Moe obtained jobs as census enumerators and were to be paid four cents per name recorded. I watched the movie today, and now I understand some of census records I have looked at in the past! I think this is the same group that visited my great-great-grandfather's house.

You can watch The Three Stooges at their best, or worst, in "No Census, No Feeling" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAcSFskC0aI.

Here is a bit of trivia:

The football sequences in “No Census, No Feeling” were filmed at USC in the autumn of 1940. Some of the crowd scenes apparently were filmed during a real game.

Curly's Thanksgiving remark alludes to the 1939 law establishing Thanksgiving as a legal holiday to be celebrated on a Thursday, something that was still controversial when the movie was made a year later.

At one point, Moe says, "Wait a minute, flathead! We just got a job. We're working for the census."

Curly replied, "You mean Will Hays?" Will Hays was a reference to William Harrison Hays Sr. a United States politician, chairman of the Republican National Committee (1918–21), U.S. Postmaster General (1921–22), and, from 1922–1945, the first chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). He became the namesake of the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, informally referred to as the Hays Code, which spelled out a set of industry moral guidelines for the self-censorship of content in Hollywood cinema.

The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:

The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:

In recent weeks I have received a number of e-mail messages concerning copyrights. Many of the messages are along the lines of, "I gave my genealogy information to another person and now he has published it online. Can he legally do that without my permission?"

I am no lawyer and certainly am not a position to offer legal advice. However, I did find a great Web site that gives detailed information about copyrights, especially as to how copyright laws work in an online world. The information presented refers primarily to United States laws. The site is not genealogy-specific, but the information there does apply to genealogy data as well as all sorts of other information.

To learn more about copyright laws in the digital age, read Brad Templeton’s "10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained" at: http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

The following announcement was written by the Society of Genealogists and the Halsted Trust:

A convivial and virtual genealogy weekend hosted by the Society of Genealogists and the Halsted Trust.

Known for fun, fascinating and innovative genealogy conferences in the past, notably the 2018 Secret Lives Conference, the Halsted Trust and Society of Genealogists bring family historians together in an online environment in September 2021

The weekend will include talks by established genealogists and speakers new to the British genealogical community. In addition to breakout rooms for discussions and chat the event will conclude each day with a social zoom hangout where we can share a glass or two of wine or any beverage of choice (sadly BYO in this case).

Our speakers this year will focus on tracing women ancestors and wanderers – so often a challenge in our pedigrees and stories. Concentrating on sources and guidance for research we also have examples of studies that researched the lives of formidable women. We will look at how DNA cracked a seemingly impenetrable and confusing case. We will follow a search for itinerant ancestors across the US, China, India and Europe and the sources used to uncover their tangled lives. On the other side of the Pond we can discover the steps of a 17th century migrant from England as part of a transatlantic genealogical collaboration. Finally, we will establish how religious changes in the 16th century cause genealogical challenges for researchers lucky enough to take their family history that far.

You can read all the details, including a detailed list of all the sessions planned in this virtual genealogy conference on 4-5 September 2021, at: https://bit.ly/2SCvGRy.

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

I have written often about the advantages of storing some of your backups off-site in "the cloud." Computer experts will tell you that everyone needs to make backups, and at least one copy of each backup needs to be stored "off site" where it is safe from local disasters such as house fires, burst water pipes, and similar in-home disasters. Storing some of your backups on BackBlaze, Carbonite, Dropbox, Amazon S3, SugarSync, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or other backup services is a great idea. However, most of these services provide only a limited amount of free storage space in their cloud (typically 2 to 5 gigabytes) and then charge you if you need more space. If you have a lot of data to back up, the charges can add up quickly. There is a cheaper method of accomplishing the same thing: you create your own off-site backup servers. Luckily, this is easy to do and, with a few pointers, is rather inexpensive. This article will supply those pointers.

Another advantage of this type of backup is that it lets you access your backed up files from anywhere you have an Internet connection. If you need a file from home, you can connect to the Internet from the office, from a hotel room, or from most any public library and retrieve whatever you need from your own server. You can even retrieve files by using an iPhone or an Android smartphone. Likewise, you can also save newly-created files from your laptop to your server in the cloud so that those files are available in the future from anyplace you can access the Internet. If you own multiple computers, you can back up all of them.

Actually, there are several methods of creating your own server(s) in the cloud. Today, I will focus on one method that is simple to accomplish at low expense by anyone with modest technical skills. If you already have an old computer sitting in a closet and gathering dust, the price for creating your own cloud-based server with nearly infinite storage space can be surprisingly low although probably not quite free.

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/10700297.

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.

Police in Tampa say a cold-case arrest was possible because the suspect had entered his DNA into a genealogy database, ultimately allowing detectives to match it to a sexual assault from 14 years ago.

According to police, it was back in January of 2007 when an unknown man initially offered to help the drunk woman get home to her University of Tampa dorm after Gasparilla. But the woman says that's where the stranger raped her in the shower, then fled when her roommate returned home.

DNA evidence collected at the time did not turn up any matches, and the case sat unsolved for years. In 2020, the case was revisited to see if genetic genealogy testing could turn up any matches. Detectives found a possible match after a search of the DNA databases on GEDmatch and FamilyTree, two services often used by people looking to research their ancestry. The lab identified Jared T. Vaughn as the suspect.

You can learn more about how the culprit was identified in a YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBOuo_eHz8Q.