Following a report last week, 2 On Your Side has been able to help positively identify a woman who could not confirm her name or remember where she came from. The woman had provided several names to a community outreach coordinator. It was a genetic genealogy specialist who saw the story and found her family.

Sandra Smith first met the woman in October and knew then she had to help.

"Her name is Brenda Lee Jones and she's from Little Rock, Arkansas," Smith said.

Smith called 2 On Your Side last week hoping that someone might recognize the woman. It was Shayna Landry who saw the story and helped connect the dots. Landry did her own digging as a genetic genealogy specialist, finding Brenda's family members and positively identified her.

"I was able to get in touch with her sister's daughter and her brother's daughter and they both confirmed she was their favorite Aunt Brenda," Landry said.

You can read more in an article by Brittany Weiss published in the wbrz.com web site at: http://tinyurl.com/3h6dunwm.

As investigators in Orange County, CA, Lauren Felix and Robert Taft have applied what they’ve learned as part of the University of New Haven’s Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy online graduate certificate program, solving two cold cases and providing the families of the victims with answers after more than four decades.

When Lauren Felix learned about the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo – better known as the Golden State Killer – in 2018, it sparked her interest in forensic investigative genetic genealogy (FIGG). The case was especially relevant to Felix, a deputy for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in southern California, since the killer’s victims included individuals from within the department’s jurisdiction.

Felix says she was “blown away” when she learned how investigators had used FIGG to identify DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer. Inspired to learn how to use FIGG in her work, she began researching programs that could teach her. That’s how she found the FIGG online graduate certificate program at the University of New Haven.

Felix, who earned her graduate certificate as part of the program’s 2022 cohort, and her partner Robert Taft, a member of the 2023 cohort, have already applied what they’ve learned in the program. They recently solved two of their department’s cold cases, identifying victims who had been known as “John Does” for more than four decades.

“I’d done my own family tree, but I’d never done genealogy beyond that,” explained Felix, who has been a deputy for 12 years and who previously served as a crime analyst with the department. “The highlight of the University’s program for me was my internship with the DNA Doe project. It took everything I learned through the courses and put it together. I feel like that’s really where I began to grasp all the concepts we learned.”

‘They’re always thankful’

Drawing on their training in the program, Felix and Taft identified the remains of Lonnie Raymond Thomas, who was found in the spring of 1980 near an oil well in an unincorporated area in north Orange County. The case is now a homicide investigation.

Felix and Taft were grateful to be able to provide Thomas’s mother and half-sisters with answers regarding what had happened to Thomas more than four decades earlier.

“I can’t imagine being in the position of having a loved one or a family member simply disappear and never know what happened to them,” said Taft, who has been with the department for more than 30 years. “They’re always thankful for at least giving them some resolution for what happened to their loved ones.”

You can read more on an article by Renee Chmiel published in the University of New Haven web site at: https://www.newhaven.edu/news/blog/2024/figg-cold-case.php.

Many of us will have turned to the Internet to grieve and remember the dead — by posting messages on the Facebook walls of departed friends, for instance. Yet, we should give more thought to how the dead and dying themselves exert agency over their online presence, argues US sociologist Timothy Recuber in The Digital Departed.

In his expansive scholarly analysis, Recuber examines more than 2,000 digital texts, from blog posts by those who are terminally ill to online suicide notes and pre-prepared messages designed to be e-mailed to loved ones after someone has died. As he notes, “the digital data in this book are sad, to be sure, and they have often brought me to tears as I collected and analyzed them”. Yet, they are well worth delving into.

Recuber brings a fresh lens to studies of death culture by focusing on the feelings and intentions of the people who are dying, rather than those of the mourners. For example, he finds that a person’s sense of self can be altered through blogging about their illness. Writing freely helps people to come to terms with their deaths by making their suffering “legible and understandable”. Reflections on family and friends also reveal a sense of self-transformation. Indeed, many bloggers “attested to the positive value of the experience of a terminal illness, for the way it brought them closer to loved ones and especially for the wisdom it generated.”

This theme of self-transformation, which Recuber refers to as ‘digital reenchantment’, continues throughout the book. This terminology relates to the work of German sociologist Max Weber, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, argued that humans’ increasing ability to understand the world through science was robbing life of magic and mystery — a process he called disenchantment. When the dead seem to be resurrected through digital media, Recuber argues, they regain that mystery.

Recuber explores how X (formerly Twitter) hashtags can act as a form of collective online rememberance. He focuses on photos and stories shared in posts that use two hashtags, sparked by violent deaths of Black people in the United States: #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, in response to Sandra Bland’s death in prison in Waller County, Texas, in July 2015, and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, which remembers Michael Brown, who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. The “thousands of individual micro-narratives” posted in these threads, Recuber writes, amount to a “collectively composed story affirming the value of all Black lives and legacies”. They are memorials for the lives that have already been lost and for those that might be in future.

You can read the entire article at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00016-9. 

Here is an interesting article written by Peter Wolinski and published in the tomsguide web site:

How to save Chrome downloads directly to Google Drive

Learning how to save files from Chrome directly to Google Drive is super useful, and will save you a lot of time if you regularly use both Chrome and Drive. 

If you regularly save images or files from the web, which you then upload to Google Drive for use across multiple devices, there's an extension that helps you completely cut out the middle steps — that is to say, it removes the need to save files to your physical device storage and then upload them to Google Drive.  You simply save the image or screenshot directly to a folder on your Google Drive.

This is particularly useful if you use Google Drive as your main storage platform and/or if you want to save physical storage space on the computer you're using. Personally, my job here at Tom's Guide requires me to regularly save down images to produce tutorials, and I often use Drive to transfer those images onto different devices. This extension saves me a lot of time — I just wish I'd found it earlier.

Here's how to save files from Chrome directly to Google Drive.

The following is a press release written by the U.S. National Achives and Records Administration:

WASHINGTON, January 8, 2024 – Original copies of handwritten letters to federal government officials by Oneida Nation activist Mary Cornelius Winder helped connect some of her descendants with her legacy during a visit to the National Archives at New York City this past summer. Left to right: Sequoia Shenandoah, Dianne Schenandoah, Michelle Schenandoah, Shane Hill, Shirlee Winder, Wanda Wood, and Mary Winder pose for a photo outside the National Archives at New York City. They are all descendants of Mary Cornelius Winder (1898–1954), an activist for the Oneida Nation. (Photo courtesy of Wendy Mella Carreño) The visit came about after the National Archives at New York City received a research request from the Syracuse Stage’s Backstory program, which is producing a play called Our Words Are Seeds, centered on Winder. Backstory is an educational theater program that tells historical figures’ stories for middle and high school students. Kate Laissle, the theater’s director of education, first came to view the collection on July 14, 2023. She returned for a second visit with the theater’s director of community engagement Joann Yarrow and seven members of the Winder family from central New York, on July 31. “Holding her letters in my hands made me feel so close to her,” said Michelle Schenandoah, great-granddaughter of Mary Cornelius Winder. “If I had only known that her letters were close by all those years.” Michelle Schenandoah had spent several years searching for information about the legal history of her people’s land claims when she attended New York Law School, only a few blocks away from the National Archives at New York City. Mary Cornelius Winder  (1898–1954) was an activist for the Oneida Nation, one of the founding First Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. From 1920 until she died in 1954, she conducted a campaign of writing letters to federal government officials regarding Oneida land claims, petitioning the government to give the Oneidas back their land. The letters demanded compliance with the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which called for the return of all the land illegally seized from the Oneida Nation. Instead of honoring the treaty, in 1919 the U.S. Government acknowledged only 32 acres in what are now Madison and Oneida counties in New York, where a handful of Oneida families remained in their homelands. Due to these illegal land takings, in the early 1800s, most Oneidas relocated to Wisconsin and Canada, and a few families moved nearby to live among the Onondaga Nation, including Mary’s family.   Michelle Schenandoah looks through her great-grandmother, Mary Cornelius Winder’s (1898–1954), written correspondence at the National Archives at New York City. (Photo courtesy of Wendy Mella Carreño)  Winder family descendants viewed some of the original letters sent by Winder to federal officials, which are contained within Bureau of Indian Affairs administrative files. A related correspondence series contains additional materials related to Mary Winder and other family members. Work to scan and upload these materials into the National Archives Catalog is in process. In 1948, Mary Winder wrote to Bureau of Indian Affairs officials: I am writing in behalf of the Oneida Indians of N.Y.S living on the Onondaga Indian Reservation. . . . Just why we do not get any satisfaction from the Indian Department is more then I can see, for my sister and I have been to your office twice with no satisfaction at all, we have lands that N.Y.S. never paid for, and it seems that the Indian department should look into this for us. Either the New York state pay our people or give back our lands then we can have our own reservation too. I think the Oneida people deserve attention from your office. The family members who viewed Mary Winder’s letters spanned multiple generations. The eldest descendants present were granddaughters Wanda Wood and Mary Winder, who both lived with Winder as children and recounted many memories during the visit. The other five descendants were granddaughters Diane Schenandoah and Shirlee Winder, great-grandchildren Michelle Schenandoah and Shane Hill, and great-great-granddaughter Sequoia Shenandoah (Onondaga). “At the end of their time with the records, they invited staff to join hands as they offered words of remembrance and a song led by Diane Schenandoah, a traditional Faithkeeper of the Oneida Nation Wolf Clan,” said Chris Gushman, Director of Archival Operations in New York. Diane’s daughter Michelle brought a set of replica wampum belts that commemorate treaties made with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, to which the Oneida Nation belongs. Shane Hill (left) and Sequoia Shenandoah (right) examine correspondence from Mary Cornelius Winder (1898–1954), their great- and great-great grandmother, at the National Archives at New York City. (Photo courtesy of Wendy Mella Carreño)  Gushman said that while the New York City staff were accustomed to seeing how genealogy researchers react when making personal connections with the records, the visit with Winder’s descendants was on a different scale. “We knew we had these records and kind of understood what they were, but it wasn’t really until the family got here and we got the whole story from them and saw them experience the research, that we understood what we have in our collections and their importance to not only family, but the community,” he said. “Many of Mary’s descendants over the generations have been influenced by her work and carried on her legacy to reclaim Oneida lands,” said  Michelle Schenandoah. “Most inspired by this visit to the National Archives was her great-great-granddaughter Sequoia, who said she wants to become a lawyer to work for our Haudenosaunee people.”  Mary Cornelius Winder died three years after the Oneida land claim was officially filed. Today, the Oneida Nation has regained more than 18,000 acres of their original homelands—the most they have had recognized sovereignty over since 1824. “This visit really drove home the importance of the National Archives and how the work we do to preserve and provide access to our holdings can make an impact,” said Gushman. Winder’s letters and work are also featured with other Indigenous leaders in an exhibit, Native New York , in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian–New York branch , located in the same building as the National Archives at New York City.

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com: 

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

One of the vexing problems with old cemeteries and historical sites is the difficulty of finding the locations of unmarked graves. In many cases, the desire is to locate the graves so that they may be identified and left undisturbed by new construction. To be sure, the locations may have been marked at one time with wooden or even stone markers. However, the ravages of time, weather, animals, vandals, and acid rain over the years may have removed all traces of those markers. Locating unmarked graves is also vitally important in solving murder cases.

Historically, the only method of finding unmarked graves has been to start digging – not a very practical solution. However, modern technology now allows cemetery associations, historical societies, family societies, genealogists, archaeologists, police departments, and others to identify the locations of buried bodies and other objects with no digging required.

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/13297672.

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

With a total of 22,608 new records added, there are so many heroic stories to discover this Findmypast Friday. 

This week, immerse yourself in the lives of your military ancestors like never before. We've added over 22,000 new British Army records to our collection, with new additions spanning across England and Wales. We also added a brand new newspaper title, as well as a million free-to-view pages.

From photo albums to attestations, read on for a full rundown of this week's fascinating new additions.

British Army, Coldstream Guards 1800-1981

This week's biggest update comes to our Coldstream Guards collection, to which we've added 17,896 photo album records and 497 attestations. Founded in 1650, the Coldstream Guards is one of the British Army's oldest regiments. It has historically been responsible for the protection of the Royal family, and is thus is also considered to be one of the army's most prestigious regiments.

With this update, our Coldstream Guards collection now totals in at over 167,000 records, making it easy to track down relevant information about your ancestors that may have served with this regiment between 1800 and 1981.

The first part of this record update consists of images and transcriptions of over 17,000 photo album entries. Glean high quality images from some of history's key moments - who knows, you may even spot a familiar face or two.

But that's not all - on top of these detail-rich images, there are also attestation records for you to explore. As indicated by Thomas William Andrew's attestation record from 1957, you can expect to learn a name, regimental/soldier number, birth year and place, enlistment date, and date of discharge from records within this set.

Explore this record.

Spanning from the Napoleonic era right up the Cold War post-1945, our Coldstream Guards record collection may contain key information about the life of your military ancestor.

British Army, London Regiment, Surrey Battalions 1914-1940

This week's second addition consists of 3,517 British Army records from London's Surrey Battalions, between 1914 and 1940. Though this brand new set doesn't stretch until the end of World War 2, it covers the outbreak of the First World War, the interwar period, and a year of the second major global conflict. It may just be able to provide some much-needed insight into the stories of your wartime ancestors.

The images and transcriptions within this set can tell you a name, rank, service number, battalion and regiment, as well as the dates of enlistments, transfers and discharges. 

The attestation of Stephen George Dousdall, who enlisted in Bermondsey on 29 March 1922. Before joining the army aged 18, Stephen was a clerk. View this record in full.

As always, be sure to consult the original record to ensure you glean all the information from each source - some images contain a birth place, attestation place, occupation and spouse's name. 

British Army Service Records, South Wales Borderers

This week's last military addition takes the form of 698 new transcriptions from South Wales, added to our British Army Service Records set. They document the military service of men from the South Wales Borderers line infantry regiment, which was founded in the late 17th century.

These transcriptions cover the 1890s and the year 1915. During this time, the regiment was involved in active service across the world, from the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) to the First World War in 1914. If your ancestor fought with the South Wales Borderers during this time, their name may just appear within this collection. 

The information contained within these service records varies depending on the document type, from pensioners' discharges to medical records. You'll see the document type listed on each transcript.

Field Service Offence Report of South Wales Borderer Robert John Davis, 1917. Explore this record.

In general, you can expect to learn a full name, birth date and place, service number, rank, regiment, unit, age at attestation, residence and pension status. In the case of fatalities, you'll also find a death date.

Discover new pages from Bromley to Buxton

We've kicked the new year off with a bang, adding a brand new title - the Coleraine Times - to our newspaper collection, in addition to a million new free-to-view pages. 

Published weekly in the Londonderry town of Coleraine on the mouth of the River Bann, the Coleraine Times is a tabloid title that was founded in the latter half of the 20th century. In addition to local news and community updates, you'll find articles on sports and special interest topics within the Coleraine Times' pages.

Owned in the 21st century by National World Publishing, this newspaper is still published today. We've added pages from 1990 to 1999 to our newspaper collection this week, offering you an in-depth insight into Northern Ireland in the 1990s.

In addition to this new Northern Irish title, we also made massive updates to our free collection at the end of 2023. With a million new pages updated, we now have 3.4 million free-to-view historical newspaper pages available for you to explore.

These recent additions cover over 100 years of history, between 1798 and 1900. They aren't limited to Britain - in addition to pages from the United Kingdom and Ireland, we have stories from the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Antigua. 

Between this week's update and the free-to-view pages added at the close of 2023, here's a full rundown of all that's been added to our newspaper collection in recent weeks.

New titles:

Updated titles:

New free-to-view pages:

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.

In the last record update of 2023, we added almost 20,000 workhouse records, school registers, and memorial inscriptions. Be sure to discover the full update for yourself here.

Left to right: Photographer Asahel Curtis in Mount Rainier National Park, circa 1915. A parade in Seattle captured by Curtis in 1908.

A photographer who was integral to documenting Washington State will have his vast archive preserved and made available to the public thanks to a $25,000 grant. 

Asahel Curtis was an active photographer in the Pacific Northwest from the 1880s to 1941 and his collection is described as an “invaluable resource” by the Washington State Historical Society (WSHS).

But up until now only 10 percent of his work has been digitzed and made available. Head of collections at the WSHS Margaret Wetherbee says there are 50,000 unknown images lying hidden. 

“We really feel like it can’t be that one person goes through a collection and says what’s important anymore,” Wetherbee tells King5. 

“That’s not the standard. Our public expects to have free and public access to our materials and the 5,000 images that are currently digitized prior to the project were the work of one person’s view.”

You can read more in an article by Matt Growcoot published in the petapixel web site at: http://tinyurl.com/w22xpuyc.

23andMe blamed the poor password practices of some of its users for the data leak that affected nearly 7 million of its users in October.

Class action lawsuits against 23andMe that resulted from the cybersecurity incident allege the company violated state privacy laws including the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA) and the Illinois Genetic Information Privacy Act.

A lawyer representing 23andMe denied the allegations in a Dec. 11 letter to lawyers representing the plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits. The letter, first published by TechCrunch on Jan. 3 asserted that users — not the company — are responsible for the unauthorized access.

“[…] users used the same usernames and passwords used on 23andMe.com as on other websites that had been subject to prior security breachers, and users negligently recycled and failed to update their passwords following these past security incidents, which are unrelated to 23andMe,” the letter stated.

You can read more in an article by Laura French published in the scmagazine.com web site at: http://tinyurl.com/mr2x8nkm