According to an article in the U.S. National Archives News:

"Photographs of Buffalo Soldiers serving at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY, during the early 20th century recently came to light at the National Archives. The images were discovered by a preservationist who was digitizing thousands of nitrate negatives transferred from the Academy to the Still Picture Branch of the National Archives at College Park, MD. Recognized for their expertise in riding, African American cavalry noncommissioned officers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments were stationed at West Point to serve in the Academy’s Detachment of Cavalry and teach Academy cadets military horsemanship. Starting in 1907, the detachment became a “colored unit” composed of African American soldiers during a time when the military was still racially segregated. The Buffalo Soldiers instructed cadets until 1947."

You can see many of the pictures at https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/buffalo-soldiers-west-point-photos.

If you have Moldovan ancestors who lived there in the 1950s through the 1970s, you will be interested in a photo project reuniting Moldovan villagers with their younger selves.

NOTE: I probably should mention that Moldova is a small, landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. Then again, if you have Moldovan ancestry, you probably already knew where the country is located.

In 2016, film school student Victor Galușca found the negatives for thousands of photographs in an abandoned home in the northern Moldovan village of Roșietici. The 4,000 vivid portraits were taken of the people living in the village between the 1950s and the 1970s. The photos belonged to Zaharia Cușnir (1912-1993), an amateur photographer who worked as a teacher before the Soviet occupation but was forced to take on manual jobs — such as metalwork, construction, and shepherding — by the new regime.

The results give a glimpse into the tumultuous changes that have marked these people’s lives over the past half-century. Shot in their homes, against typical rugs hung on walls, Christian icons, or in bed, these portraits are also metaphor for the disappearing world of the Moldovan village amid post-communist economic instability, and mass emigration.

The incredible archive was made into a photo book, showcased at exhibitions in Chișinău and Bucharest, and is now available to view online. But the publicity also meant that people who recognized themselves in Cușnir’s photographs got in touch with Galușca. The young photographer decided to embark on a new project: taking pictures of Cușnir’s former subjects with the black-and-white portraits of their younger selves. Victor Galușca is especially interested in the residents of Roșietici that have since left and emigrated to other countries.

Vera Borș: Then and Now

If you would be interested in finding a photograph of a relative taken 50 to 70 years ago and especially interested in adding a later photo to that collection, read the article Lost and Found: The Photo Project Reuniting Moldovan Villagers With Their Younger Selves by Paula Erizanu and published in The Calvert Journal at http://bit.ly/3sm5Du8 for all the details.

Comment: I am sure the above article will be of primary interest to a small group of people: Moldovan descendants who read this newsletter. However, would you like to do the same thing by focusing on your ancestor's village? home town? or your home town? How about your grammar school class.

The possibilities are nearly endless!

The recently-added Genetic Groups on MyHeritage significantly increased the resolution of MyHeritage DNA’s ethnicity breakdown to 2,114 geographic regions. However, many people who have tested with services such as 23andMe, Ancestry or FamilyTree DNA Family Finder, were unable to join the fun. Now MyHeritage is making a special offer for a week:

From now through February 28, 2021, MyHeritage allows everyone to upload their DNA data from other providers and obtain DNA Matches for free.

Here is the announcement from the MyHeritage Blog:

Christmas came just a tad early for MyHeritage DNA users when we finally released a long-awaited enhancement to our DNA ethnicity results: Genetic Groups. This feature significantly increases the resolution of MyHeritage DNA’s ethnicity breakdown to 2,114 geographic regions. Our users have been raving about it ever since.

But many folks who have tested their DNA with other services, such as 23andMe, Ancestry, or FamilyTree DNA Family Finder, were unable to join the fun.

MyHeritage allows you to upload your DNA data from other providers and get DNA Matches for free, but a one-time unlock fee of $29 (or a Complete plan with MyHeritage) has been required to access the advanced DNA features — and that includes the Ethnicity Estimate and the new Genetic Groups.

Well, we don’t want you to feel left out just because you tested with another service! For a limited time only, between February 21–28, 2021, we are waiving the unlock fee. You can now upload your DNA data to MyHeritage and get access to your Ethnicity Estimate, Genetic Groups, and other advanced DNA tools such as the Chromosome Browser, AutoClusters, and Theory of Family Relativity™ — absolutely free! These features will remain free forever for the DNA kits you upload to MyHeritage during this week.

Upload your data to MyHeritage now

If you’ve already tested your DNA with another service, you don’t need to waste your time and money purchasing a new kit. We’re aware that people who are searching for family members — such as adopted people searching for their birth parents — want to “fish in multiple ponds” and try multiple DNA databases to find leads, and purchasing multiple DNA kits gets expensive. That’s why we offer users the option of uploading their DNA data to MyHeritage for free.

Here’s what one user, Joan Matalon, recently had to say about her experience uploading her DNA data to MyHeritage: “I uploaded my raw DNA from Ancestry to MyHeritage and in May last year I joined and it has been fabulous! I have found relatives that I never knew about! I would recommend MyHeritage to anyone who would like to learn more about their family! MyHeritage has so many features that are helping me with my research.”

If you tested your DNA with another service and haven’t uploaded it to MyHeritage yet, now’s the best time to do it! Upload your data to MyHeritage now. 

Enjoy!

Do you have any old VHS videotapes around? If so, you need to understand that the video quality of those tapes is deteriorating every year, even if you are not playing them!

Jeanette D. Moses explains all this and provides information on how to convert the VHS tapes to more modern (and longer-lasting) media in her article in the Tom's Guide website at: https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/digitize-vhs-tapes.

Elon Reeve Musk is a self-made multibillionaire business magnate, industrial designer, and engineer. He is also one of the richest people in the world.

Musk is the CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc., the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink; and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI.

Perhaps his obvious success is due to something in his genes.

Elon Musk may be transforming everything from power to space travel, but Elon isn’t the only entrepreneur in his family tree. A YouTube video explores the rest of Elon’s family. There are a LOT of entrepreneurs in the family!

You can watch the YouTube video at: https://youtu.be/nLT1A6XtjZ8.

Bay State College’s Boston Campus has donated its entire undergraduate library to the Internet Archive so that the digital library can preserve and scan the books, while allowing Bay State to gain much needed open space for student collaboration. By donating and scanning its 11,000-volume collection centered on fashion, criminal justice, allied health, and business books, Bay State’s Boston campus decided to “flip entirely to digital.”

You can read more about the move at http://bit.ly/3ugfpQ3.

Comment: OK, now here is a proposal I believe is worth pondering: Should we promote the same kind of moves for most (or all) genealogy libraries?

Most of the smaller genealogy libraries are woefully underfunded. Also, access to these libraries is a problem if the would-be patron lives a long distance away, such as in another country. Wouldn't it be better to place all books that may legally be copied or digitized online and make them available 24 hours a day, to every place in the world? (Optionally, the books could also be placed back on the shelves after being digitized for local use.)

Yes, I would even pay a reasonable amount to access them remotely. That would be a lot cheaper than what I have paid in past years for travel to remote locations, hotels, restaurant meals, and more expenses I don't even want to contemplate.

Yes, I am in favor of digitizing all sorts of things and make those digital images online. Is it a perfect solution? Absolutely not but I am sure that it is better than the present system of storing a few things here, a few things there, and lots of things not documented or not available at all because of travel constraints.

What do you think?

Are you contemplating a major effort to digitize old paper records, either at home or at a local archive? If so, read "Six Steps To Consider Before Scanning Vertical Files" in the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center Blog first. A bit of thought and planning might save you a lot of work later!

Look at https://www.digitalnc.org/blog/vertical-files/.

The following is an announcement from Findmypast:

Discover marriages, pub landlords and more this Findmypast Friday. Here's what's new this week.

Britain, Marriage Licences

Search over 100,000 new additions from the Diocese of Durham dating all the way back to the 16th century.

With records from as early as 1115, this useful collection covers fifteen English counties including London, Lancashire, Suffolk, Exeter, Lincoln, Yorkshire, and more. Marriage licenses will reveal your ancestor’s intended spouse, father’s name, and the intended marriage place.

Cambridgeshire, Licensed Victuallers

Were your Cambridgeshire ancestors pub landlords? Discover the name of their establishment, its location and when they ran it.

The surviving records for Cambridgeshire 1764-1828 are kept in the Cambridgeshire Archives in Ely. They have been photographed and transcribed by members of the Cambridgeshire & Huntingdonshire Family History Society, which has kindly licensed the records for the use of researchers on Findmypast. 

Each record normally includes the name and abode of the victualler, the name of the alehouse, tavern or inn, and the name and abode of the person providing surety.

United States, Inspection Roll Of Negroes, 1783

Search the records of Black Loyalists evacuated by the British from New York in 1783 after defeat in the American War of Independence. Please note that the terms used in historical records reflect the attitudes and language of the time and may now be considered inappropriate, derogatory or offensive.

A page from the Inspection Rolls documenting Harry Washington (see attached), former slave of George Washington, who escaped to British lines in 1776 and rose to the rank of corporal in Lord Dunmore's regiment of "Black Pioneers".

The records in the Inspection Roll are highly detailed. The exact content varies according to the status of the individual evacuee (for instance, whether free, or former slave, or slave of a Loyalist), but most will include a combination of their name, age, status, physical description and the vessel they were evacuated on.

Newspapers

Explore11 new titles covering diverse locations from India, China, Dominica and Antigua to Beverley, Birkenhead and Blandford. Brand new to the collection this week are:

Findmypast have also added additional pages to 19 existing titles as follows;

In partnership with the Center for Family History and Genealogy at BYU (Brigham Young University), and the Center for Family History and Genealogy at BYU, a research effort is underway with one major goal: to prevent hereditary cancer.

Leaders behind the project say Utah is the best place to start because people in the state know their family history really well.

Brian Shirts, an M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington is spearheading a research effort to prevent hereditary cancer. In partnership with Brigham Young University (BYU), Shirts joined Jill Crandall, the director of the Center for Family History and Genealogy at BYU, and an associate professor in the history department, and professor of family history, along with Julie Stoddard, the center coordinator at the Center for Family History and Genealogy at BYU, to conduct such research.

Dr. Shirts had a thought: what if people knew about their cancer risks based on their family history? And he started to dive in to the question.

“We’re working in conjunction with the University of Washington to identify individuals who may have cancer-causing genetic variants,” Stoddard said. “These individuals are identified through genealogical research on the different lines of these participants who have the same variants.

“What Dr. Shirts does is he finds these participants who have the variant and then he sends them to our BYU team. We do the research on their pedigrees to help them identify which ancestor may have had the variant. And then look for those descendants of those ancestors so they can be identified, and the participants can reach out and tell them of their increased chance of cancer.”

“Hereditary-cancer risk is something that affects about 1 percent of the population. But this is inherited in families, so it’s not just a random 1 percent of the population,” Shirts said.

These inherited genes — such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 that cause breast cancer or one of four genes that causes Lynch Syndrome, which creates a higher risk for developing certain types of cancer, particularly of the colon — cause more than a 50 percent lifetime risk of cancer for the people who inherit them, Shirts observed.

You can read a lot more in an article by Curt Gresseth publish in the KSL News web site at: https://kslnewsradio.com/1943437/genealogy-cancer-research-beginning-in-utah/.

A new study looked at a stretch of DNA on chromosome 12 where a haplotype — a cluster of genetic variants that are inherited together — that affects susceptibility to the coronavirus is located. For each copy of the Neandertal haplotype a person inherited, the risk of needing intensive care fell approximately 22 percent, researchers report in the March 2 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The variants may affect the activity or function of genes involved in a biochemical chain reaction that ends with the destruction of viral RNA, including the coronavirus’s. The protective variants are largely absent among people in sub-Saharan Africa, where few people carry genes inherited from Neandertals. About 25 to 30 percent of present-day people of Asian and European ancestry carry the protective variants. Some Black people in the Americas also inherited the protective haplotype, presumably from Asian, European or Native American ancestors.

You can read more at https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2026309118.