The following announcement was posted on the IAJGS Public Records Access List and is republished here with permission:

The National Archives of Australia (https://www.naa.gov.au/)  has signed contracts for the bulk digitization of more than 650,000 Second World war service records.

This is a four-year $10 million (Australian) contract of which 220,000 have already been digitized.

This project will ensure Australians can access almost one million of these records digitally by 2023.  This builds on the already digitized records of those who served in the First World War

To search by name is not difficult. Enter the name and select either World War 1 or World War 11 in the category filter. The digitized item column will indicate if a digital copy of a service record is available.To learn more go to: https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/defence-and-war-service-records

Thank you to Gail Dever and her blog Genealogy à la carte for informing us about these newly digitized records.

To read the previous postings about Australia’s National Archives 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

The following announcement was written by The Genealogy Guys:

The Genealogy Guys Learn subscription education site is on sale from October 15 through December 31, 2020 for $69 for your first year's subscription (new members only). This is our lowest price of the year! 

Genealogy Guys Learn currently offers 26 video and 26 written courses with new content added every month. Courses range from beginning to advanced topics. We also provide links to books and printed materials as well as links to helpful websites. (For a complete current list of courses, visit The Genealogy Guys Blog entry at http://blog.genealogyguys.com/ dated November 15, 2020.)

Learn from The Genealogy Guys, producers since 2005 of the longest-running genealogy podcast, expert researchers and presenters, and prolific authors!

Our regular annual subscription is $99 and the sale price of $69 is a $30 savings! This sale is only in effect until 11:59 PM Eastern U.S. time on December 31, 2020. Take advantage of this great price by going to the website at https://genealogyguyslearn.com/, click the red Enroll Now box at the bottom of the screen, fill in the information requested, and add the code Holiday2020 for your discount. 

Fill the coming year with new knowledge and make some great new discoveries!

Happy Holidays!

The following is an announcement from Findmypast:

New and Exclusive Records Available To Search on Findmypast

Warwickshire, Coventry Blitz, German Air Raids 1940-1941

A unique collection created by Findmypast to mark the 80^th anniversary of the Coventry Blitz, these records contain the details of casualties of German air raids over city between November 1940 and June 1941.

Details include name and home address, nature of casualty (killed, injured etc.) and where the casualty was treated. Close to 2,500 individuals are included on these lists, including some who remained unidentified.

The vast majority of casualties were citizens of Coventry, but there were also victims from the length and breadth of Britain whose names can be found on these lists, as well as military personnel and members of the Auxiliary Fire Service and Air Raid Precautions.

Coventry was badly hit many times, the raid of 14th/15^th November 1940 being the worst. For almost 11 hours, the Luftwaffe dropped around 500 tons of high explosive, 30,000 incendiaries and 50 landmines. This devastating attack left 176 dead, around 680 wounded, many families homeless and destroyed the ancient heart of the city including its 14^th century cathedral.

Children and adults alike are recorded in these lists, and surname searches quickly reveal whole families affected.

Records show how James Dawson and Arthur Young, both living at separate addresses in Cambridge Street were injured in the November 1940 raid, but Cambridge Street on the whole, escaped serious damage. 

Unfortunately that wasn’t to be the case when the Luftwaffe paid a return visit in April 1941. Numbers 133, 135 and 137 Cambridge Street were all hit, with members of the Arrowsmith, Webb and Sadler families, and other individuals besides, all killed.

British Armed Forces, First World War Soldiers' Medical Records

Thousands of additional records have once again been added to this important collection. Discover the names of injured soldiers, service details and where they were treated.

Held by The National Archives and only available online at Findmypast, the collection includes admission and discharge records from over 20 hospitals, field ambulances and casualty clearing stations during the First World War.

National School Admission Registers & Log-Books 1870-1914

Over 17,000 new Yorkshire school records are now available to search. This latest tranche has been made available thanks to our partners at the Calderdale Family History Society.

Yorkshire Baptisms

Unique to Findmypast, over 6,000 new baptism records from St Simon’s Church, Sheffield are now available to search.

Yorkshire Monumental Inscriptions

Over 4,600 new records from the West Riding of Yorkshire round off Findmypast’s releases from ‘God’s Own County’. The locations covered include Charlestown, Hebden Bridge, Langfield, Luddenden Foot, Lumbutts, Midgley, and Mount Tabor

Newspapers

New titles in this week’s update include the Somerset Guardian and Radstock Observer.

Further updates have also been made to the following titles:

Today is  Friday, the 13th of the month. That is an especially bad day for people who suffer from a phobia famously called triskaidekaphobia, a fear of the number 13. Any Friday that falls on the 13th of the month is especially bad, causing the fear of Friday the 13th, called paraskevidekatriaphobia, from the Greek words Paraskeví (meaning “Friday”), and dekatreís (meaning “thirteen”).

Surprisingly, this is the second Friday the 13th of this year. The first Friday the 13th of 2020 occurred back in March.

In the Christian world the number 13 has long been associated with many bad events. Jesus had 12 disciples, which meant there were a total of 13 people in attendance the evening of the Last Supper, with Judas being received as the 13th guest.

On Friday 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered Knights Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The Knights Templar were charged with numerous other offenses, such as financial corruption, fraud, secrecy, denying Christ, spitting on the crucifix, idol worship, blasphemy, and various obscenities. The soldiers arrested and imprisoned all the Knights Templar they could find. Most of those imprisoned were tortured until they died. Many in France were burned at the stake, including Grand Master Jacques de Molay. Only a few Knights Templar survived, mostly those who were in distant countries at the time, and they went into hiding.

The German Luftwaffe bombed Buckingham Palace on Friday, the 13th of September, 1940.

Hip hop star Tupac Shakur died on Friday, September 13, 1996, of gunshot wounds suffered in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting.

The Costa Concordia cruise ship crashed off the coast of Italy, killing 30 people, on Friday, the 13th of January 2012.

In 1907, Thomas W. Lawson published a novel called Friday, the Thirteenth, with the story of an unscrupulous broker taking advantage of the superstition to create a Wall Street panic on a Friday the 13th. The novel became a best seller of the time.

In addition, the month of April is double trouble, according to Chaucer. Just as he fashioned April to be the “cruelest month” in his Canterbury Tales, he also fashioned Friday to be a day “of misfortune.”

Then, of course, we have the hockey mask-wearing killer named Jason in the movie Friday the 13th, released in 1980.

How many Friday the 13ths have you survived? A calculator embedded in an article by Philip Bump in The Washington Post gives the answer. You can check it out at: https://wapo.st/2GE9u1Y.

In spite of these misfortunes, there is no truth to the idea that Friday the 13th is unlucky. Still, I am not taking any chances. You won’t see me this Friday as I am taking the day off and staying in bed.

"Stories Behind the Stars" is a nonprofit initiative that seeks to compile stories of the 400,000-plus fallen in one central database, accessible from a smartphone or other technology device.

It is a monumental task that no one man, not even someone of Don Milne's talent and aspirations, can handle.

To date, volunteers from 47 states and 10 countries, are dedicating time to "Stories Behind the Stars" as researchers and writers. Each volunteer receives training and free access to ancestry.com research tools.

The goal, according to project creator Don Milne, is to allow visitors to hallowed sites such as war memorials and cemeteries the opportunity to scan the names of the fallen with a smartphone and gain instant access to the biographies, and photographs, hosted in the central database at www.fold3.com.

"Stories Behind the Stars" is searching for more volunteers to find more information and to transcribe the data onto the project's online database. All you need is a smartphone and a desire to help.

You can read more about this nonprofit project in an article by Jon Pompia in The Pueblo Chieftain at https://www.chieftain.com/story/news/local/2020/11/11/stories-behind-stars-chronicle-400-000-who-fell-wwii/6249630002/.

You also can watch a video about the "Stories Behind the Stars" project at: https://youtu.be/lW_FN_wHQnA.

The following is an announcement from FamilySearch:

RootsTech Connect 2021—the world’s largest family celebration event—announced its first wave of keynote speakers hailing from Australia, Italy, Mexico, and the United States. Speakers include New York Times bestselling author and international motivational speaker, Nick Vujicic; Lorena Ochoa of Mexico, a retired top female world golfer; Francesco Lotoro of Italy, musician, composer and collector of music composed in captivity during the Holocaust; and Sharon Leslie Morgan, author and genealogist dedicated to promoting healing by providing resources for African American genealogical research.

RootsTech Connect, February 25–27, 2021, is a free online conference to discover, share, and celebrate family and heritage connections.

The following was written by the National Genealogical Society (NGS):

The National Genealogical Society (NGS) introduced today the newest course in its Continuing Genealogical Studies series, Reading Old Handwriting. This illustrated course is essential for everyone researching their family tree. It offers family historians tips to understand hard-to-read handwriting in documents such as wills and deeds. Its practice exercises teach how to read and interpret handwritten land records, probate files, and, of course, your ancestors’ personal letters.

NGS Education Director Angela McGhie states, “…the ability to read old handwriting is a foundational skill for understanding many of the documents family historians discover in their research. Being able to read old handwriting is the first step in interpreting genealogically relevant facts. Our new course Reading Old Handwriting complements NGS’s course, Transcribing, Extracting, and Abstracting Genealogical Documents, which was released in June 2020.

The course guides genealogists through ten modules. Every module has multiple hands-on exercises to help family historians develop expertise in reading documents from a variety of locations and time periods. Course author Carla S. Cegielski is a freelance genealogical researcher and author of the Tech Tips column in the quarterly NGS Magazine.

For more information and to register, visit Reading Old Handwriting on NGS’s website.

The following announcement was written by the American Society of Genealogists:

The Fellows of the American Society of Genealogists held their annual meeting on Saturday, November 7, 2020. Caleb H. Johnson of Paulden, Arizona, was elected to the Society as its 168th Fellow.

Caleb H. Johnson has conducted trailblazing genealogical research on the Mayflower passengers and their descendants for the past twenty-two years. In that time he has produced five books, a large number of scholarly articles, and an informational website, mayflowerhistory.com. This body of work includes the discovery, at first on his own and more recently in partnerships with two English scholars, of the origins of no fewer than twelve Mayflower passengers. From 2011 to 2014, Mr. Johnson was editor of Mayflower Descendant and contributed much of the material in that journal for those years.

The following announcement was written by the American Society of Genealogists:

At the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Genealogists on November 7, 2020, Dr. Neil D. Thompson, our 100th Fellow, was elected as a Fellow Emeritus, in recognition of his lifetime of contributions to genealogy. Among Dr. Thompson’s many contributions to the field is the journal The Genealogist, which he founded in 1980 and edited and published for many years; it is now published by the Society.

The following announcement was written by the American Society of Genealogists:

At the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Genealogists on November 7, 2020, the Society voted to give its Donald Lines Jacobus Award to The Littlefield Genealogy: Descendants of Edmund Littlefield of Wells, Maine, Through Six Generations, 2 vols. (Waterville, Maine: Maine Genealogical Society, 2020), by Priscilla Eaton.

A Great Migration immigrant from Titchfield, Hampshire, England, Edmund Littlefield’s descendants grew to become one of the largest families in Maine, with branches extending to southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Quebec. Eaton’s research, supported by extensive documentation and detailed analysis, covers more than three thousand of Edmund’s descendants.