The following announcement was written by Ancestry.com:

LEHI, Utah & SAN FRANCISCO--Ancestry^®, the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, today announced the appointment of Mark Thompson as chairman of the board.

“I'm honored to be named as Chairman of the Board for Ancestry and excited to support the next chapter in the company's success”

Thompson formerly served as President & CEO at The New York Times Company, where he led the 170-year-old brand’s transformation into the world's fastest-growing and most successful news digital subscription business. During his tenure, digital subscriptions grew nine-fold to over five million and the company's market cap increased nearly five times.

Thompson’s appointment at The New York Times Company followed an eight-year term as Director General (CEO and Editor-in-Chief) of the BBC. He is widely credited with expanding the BBC’s digital and global reach and overseeing development of the BBC iPlayer. He joined the BBC from Channel 4, where he was Chief Executive from 2002 to 2004.

“I'm honored to be named as Chairman of the Board for Ancestry and excited to support the next chapter in the company's success,” said Thompson. “Ancestry is already the world leader in its category but I believe it has the potential to grow much further. I’m looking forward to working with the board and management team to build the business through innovation, product enhancements and investment in records, technology and data science so that many more people around the world can embark on their own journeys of personal and family discovery."

David Kestnbaum, a Senior Managing Director at Blackstone, and Sachin Bavishi, a Managing Director at Blackstone, said, “Mark’s long history of leadership, coupled with his successful track record in leading subscription and content businesses makes him an ideal Chairman. He brings a great deal of skill and strategic expertise to Ancestry. The company and the board look forward to working closely with him to accelerate Ancestry’s next phase of growth.”

Thompson was educated at Stonyhurst College and Merton College, Oxford.

About Ancestry

Ancestry^®, the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, empowers journeys of personal discovery to enrich lives. With our unparalleled collection of more than 27 billion records and over 18 million people in our growing DNA network, customers can discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. For over 30 years, we’ve built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen us as the platform for discovering, preserving and sharing the most important information about themselves and their families.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

TheGenealogist has released New Who’s Who records into its expanding Occupational Records adding nearly a hundred thousand additional individuals. This release includes records covering individuals from all over England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, USA, New Zealand and further afield.

The records can be used to discover more about an ancestor’s achievements and are fantastic for identifying where next to apply your research. Who’s Who records will confirm birth dates and sometimes the place of birth. Often they give a father’s name and occupation and a great deal more useful information that may help to build a better family history.

Use these records to:

Add details to the lives of your ancestors

Discover their accomplishments

Fill in gaps in the information that you already have on an ancestor

Find other records and places to search for forebears.

These records will often allow us to recount a much more rounded picture of the life of a person and so enrich the telling of their story.

This latest release expands TheGenealogist’s extensive Occupational records collection that includes actors, apprentices, clergy, crew lists, directors, flight, freemen, law, railway, sports, teachers and biographies as well as a number of other Who’s Who books.

You can read TheGenealogist’s article: Who, What, Where, When? - Discovering Who's Who at:

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2021/who-what-where-when---discovering-whos-who-1371/

The records included in this release are:

• Who's Who in 1880
• Who's Who 1899
• Who's Who in Canada 1927
• Cheshire Who's Who, 1910
• Cox's County Who's Who Series. Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, 1912
• Cricket Who's Who, The Cricket Blue Book 1911
• Who's Who in Hampshire 1935
• Who's Who and Industrial Directory of the Irish Free State 1935
• Who's Who in Kent, Surrey and Sussex 1911
• Who's Who in Literature 1931
• Masonic Who's Who 1926
• The Methodist Who's Who 1913
• Who's Who in New Zealand 1925
• Who's Who and Record Quarterly 1934 July-September
• Who's Who in Science 1914
• Who was Who 1916-1928

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!

The following is an email message posted to the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) Public Records Access Monitoring Committee mailing list and republished here with permission:

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), part of the US Department of Homeland Security, posted in the January 29, 2021 Federal Register a notice about the preliminary injunction to its previously posted final rule and court orders effective September 29, 2020 and October 8, 2020. These injunctions were previously reported by the IAJGS Records Access Alert. While the predominant part of the original final rule was to increase fees for the immigration an citizenship benefits, genealogists were most interested as the fees for an index search and search request were being increased from $65.00 each for Form G-1041, Genealogy Index Search Request, when filed online as $160 and $170 when filed on paper and a fee for Form G-1041A, Genealogy Records Request, when filed online as $255 and $265 when filed by paper.

The notice which may be read at:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-01-29/pdf/2021-02044.pdf  states the Department is complying with the terms of the two US District Court orders and is not enforcing the regulatory changes set out in the final rule. The USCIS will continue to accept the fees that were in place prior to October 2, 2020 and follow the guidance in place prior to October 2, 2020 to adjudicate fee waiver requests as provided in the Adjudicator’s Field Manual.  Any further guidance and updates regarding the litigation will be posted on the USCIS website:

https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-response-to-preliminary-injunction-of-fee-rule  on an ongoing basis.

To see previous postings about the USCIS and the fee increases,  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

From an article in Bloomberg News:

"Consumer DNA-testing company 23andMe Inc. is in talks to go public through a roughly $4 billion deal with VG Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company founded by billionaire Richard Branson, according to people familiar with the matter.

"A deal could be announced in the coming weeks if talks are successful, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information was private. Discussions could still fall apart, the people said.

"In funding rounds in both 2018 and 2020, 23andMe had a $2.5 billion valuation, separate people familiar with the matter said. A merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, would allow 23andMe to go public without the risk or uncertainty of holding an initial public offering."

There is more information in the full article in the Yahoo web site at: http://yhoo.it/2MdLxTh.

If you are using DNA to help identify your ancestry, you will be interested in the latest announcement from MyHeritage. According to the announcement in the company's blog at https://blog.myheritage.com/2021/01/genetic-groups-new-user-interface-improvements/

Last month, we announced the release of Genetic Groups: a long-awaited enhancement of MyHeritage DNA ethnicity results which accurately identifies ancestral origins with an incredibly high resolution of 2,114 geographic regions. This new feature gives users the chance to take a deep dive into their ancestral origins and discover the paths their ancestors traveled. Our users across the globe have been raving about Genetic Groups.

We promised further updates to this feature very soon, and we’re pleased to announce that the first set of updates has arrived. This update includes the addition of a Timeline Widget that allows you to follow the migration pattern of a Genetic Group over time — and a more detailed, better organized Top Places section, where you can see where members of a Genetic Group have lived during a given time period.

Timeline Widget

Since the launch, each Genetic Group has had a drill-down page with specific genealogical insights, including a description of the group, a heatmap showing the top places where the group’s members lived during different time periods, common ancestral surnames and given names in the group, the most prevalent ethnicities among the group’s members, and other Genetic Groups that have close affinity to the group.

Now, there is also a Timeline Widget (with a black background color) that allows you to switch easily between the different 50-year time periods when looking at migration patterns. This replaces a basic drop-down element that we had previously. The Timeline includes at its top right, the new option to play an animation that automatically cycles through all the periods and updates the heatmap automatically. In other words, the Timeline allows you to observe your Genetic Groups’ migration patterns more easily, either manually or with animation.

Timeline animation for the Genetic Group “Mormons in USA (Utah and Idaho) and in Canada”

The announcement goes on with a rather detailed explanation and includes numerous screen capture images. You can read the full announcement at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2021/01/genetic-groups-new-user-interface-improvements/.

The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:

During the month of February 2021, the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs will be offering three virtual programs streamed live on the Web. Two of these programs will be presented in commemoration of National African American History Month, an annual observance celebrating the invaluable contributions that the Black community has made to the culture and history of the United States. All programs are free and open to the public.

Go to the following for additional information and reservation instructions: https://history.delaware.gov/2021/01/21/hca-african-american-history-month-2021.

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot that lets you interact with dead loved ones sounds like something straight out of science fiction. But if technology in a patent granted to Microsoft comes to fruition, interacting with a chatty 3D digital version of the deceased could one day become de rigueur.

The patent, titled 'Creating a conversational chatbot of a specific person," details a system that would access images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages and the like to "create or modify a special index in the theme of the specific person's personality." In some cases, images and video could be used to create a 3D model of the person for extra realism.

It's an especially provocative notion when you consider the patent's suggestion that the tech "may correspond to a past or present entity."

You can read more in an article by Leslie Katz in the C|Net web site at: http://cnet.co/3iSbqEf.

It sounds a bit creepy to me! Then again, if someone could set up a chatbot of my great-great-grandfather, I have a few questions I'd like to ask him!

What happens to your digital assets when you die? This includes online assets previously uploaded by the deceased: photos, music, videos, email messages, and other digital content that are hosted on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and stored by tech giants like Apple and Google.

Now the state of Pennsylvania allows estate executors to take control of the deceased person's online assets.

The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), enacted on July 23, 2020, gives executors, administrators, trustees, holders of power of attorney, and guardians legal authority to manage and access electronic records, including email and social media accounts of decedents and incapacitated individuals. RUFADAA also creates a legal framework for third-party digital content platforms or custodians that process or store electronic records when releasing records to the estate fiduciary.

You can read a lot more in an article by Cozen O'Connor in the JDSUPRA web site at: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-law-gives-pennsylvania-executors-6944745/.