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

WARNING: This article contains personal opinions.

For decades, the standard method of genealogy research has been to peruse original records as well as compiled genealogies, looking for information about each ancestor, one fact at a time. In modern times, we typically have used IMAGES of the original records published on microfilm and, more recently, images that appear on our computer screens. We then supplement these original records with compiled genealogies from many sources, including printed books, online web sites, and even GEDCOM files online or on CD-ROM disks. Experienced genealogists also understand the importance of VERIFYING each piece of information, regardless of where it was obtained. Yes, even original hand-written records made at the time of an event may contain errors.

Compiling a genealogy typically requires hundreds or thousands of hours of work, sometimes great expenditures of money, and, when original records have not been easily available locally, additional time and money on travel.

To be kind, I will simply say that the results have been variable.

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/10504599

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.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

TheGenealogist is marking the anniversary of the famous Royal Air Force Dambusters raid on the Ruhr Valley dams in May 1943 by releasing a massive tranche of fully searchable RAF Operations Record Books (ORBs) including those ORBs for the famous No 617 Squadron giving an insight into their lives.

Wing Commander Guy Gibson and his crew boarding their Lancaster bomber

With a release of 1,550,018 records, bringing the total to 6,748,021 these new diary-like RAF documents paint a picture of the goings on in a squadron on a day-to-day basis for those units under British control.

These are uniquely fully searchable by:-

• • Forename and Surname

  • Squadron

  • Date Range

Using keywords users can also search for Service Number, Rank, and Duty, Aircraft type and location where the fields appear in the record. This makes it possible to easily find your Royal Air Force ancestors and discover more about their war time activities on the base and in the air.

See the usefulness of these contemporary daily diary entries in a short video that spotlights the famous leader of No 617 Squadron, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, V.C., D.F.C. and Bar, D.S.O. and Bar as he and his unit prepare for their mission to drop the bouncing bombs on the German dam targets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd0gcQdbV_4

The Operations Record Books are for squadrons primarily from after the First World War, although there are a few early squadron records from 1911 to 1918. These ORBs follow the daily happenings in the air and on the base, and frequently name the brave aircrew who battled against the odds.

You can use the collection to follow an airman’s war time experiences from these fully searchable Air Ministry operations record books which cover various Royal Air Force, Dominion and Allied Air Force squadrons that came under British Command. The AIR 27 records allow the family history researcher a fascinating insight into their relatives serving in a number of wartime air force units, as can be seen in the video and article that shines a light on Wing Commander Gibson and his squadron.

• • See the wartime operations of air crew

  • Discover pilots, navigators, radio operators and gunners mentioned in the diaries

  • Find airmen receiving an Honour or a Medal

  • Note the names of squadron members wounded, killed, or who did not return

  • Fully search these National Archives records and images

Find out more about the AIR27 recordset here: https://www.TheGenealogist.co.uk/Air27

This release expands TheGenealogist’s extensive Military records collection for Diamond subscribers.

To take a deeper look into these records read TheGenealogist’s feature article and see how 617 Squadron recorded the famous Dambuster operation in the ORBs from the time.

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2021/guy-gibson-and-the-dambuster-raid-found-in-raf-operations-record-books-1411/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, which puts 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 announcement was written by Findmypast:

Discover remarkable war stories and more with Findmypast’s latest Friday releases. This week’s update includes new and exclusive WW2 service records, updates to Findmypast’s British medal collection, colour photos of thousands of Norfolfk headstones and memorials along with a whole host of new newspapers.

British Army Service Records

Search exclusive Scots Guards' service records from the Second World War and beyond. Some documents even include photos.

Ronald Tillotson from Dewsbury enlisted in 1938. View his full record.

The records range from a couple of pages to complete service histories documented over many different types of army forms. This is the first time this important collection has been digitised and published online and it's only available at Findmypast.

Britain, Campaign, Gallantry & Long Service Medals & Awards

Discover decorated military ancestors in thousands of new medal records. The latest additions cover:

• • Indian General Service Medals 1854-1895, 1908-1935 and 1936-1939
  • China War Medal 1900
  • Second China War Medal 1857-60
  • General Service Medal 1918-1962
  • India Medal 1895-1902

You can focus your search on any of the above awards by selecting it from the 'Medal type' filter on the search page. The records can reveal important details for tracing someone's military past including service number, rank and regiment.

Norfolk, Churchyard Graves and Memorials Image Browse

See if you can spot your Norfolk relatives’ graves or memorials in thousands of unique colour photos.

Gravestones and memorials can be full of useful family tree information. View this photo in detail.

Norfolk resident Louise Cocker provided these amazing photos. Louise's mission is to document all of the graves and memorials in her home county and we'll be adding more to the collection over time. Could you take on a similar challenge in your area? Photograph your local cemetery and give the snaps to your local family history society. Genealogists the world over will be forever grateful.

Newspapers

Six new papers from England, Scotland and Ireland have been published on Findmypast this week along with substantial updates to 17 existing titles. Brand new this week are;

• • Ballina Herald and Mayo and Sligo Advertiser covering 1891-1892, 1915-1924 and 1926-1927
  • Beacon (Edinburgh) covering 1821
  • Beacon (London) covering 1822
  • Glasgow Courier covering 1802
  • Midland Mail covering 1898, 1902-1910 and 1913-1923
  • Weekly Journal (Hartlepool) covering 1901-1904

While coverage has expanded in;

• • American Register from 1895
  • Argus, or, Broad-sheet of the Empire from 1841-1843
  • Barnsley Telephone from 1918
  • Blandford and Wimbourne Telegram from 1885
  • Bridport, Beaminster, and Lyme Regis Telegram from 1881 and 1886
  • Glasgow Sentinel from 1821-1823
  • Lancaster Standard and County Advertiser from 1907
  • London Daily News from 1912-1920
  • Lynn Advertiser from 1971-1977, 1980-1989
  • Nelson Chronicle, Colne Observer and Clitheroe Division News from 1893
  • Northern Weekly Gazette from 1924 and 1929
  • Pictorial Times from 1845 and 1847
  • Pierce Egan’s Life in London, and Sporting Guide from 1824-1825 and 1827
  • The Age from 1825, 1828, 1831, 1833-1834 and 1837-1845
  • Weekly True Sun from 1834, 1836, 1838 and 1840-1842
  • Weymouth Telegram from 1887
  • Y Tyst from 1884

Make amazing discoveries for less with a 20% discount on all subscriptions

There is still time to claim a 20% discount on any 1 and 12 month subscription but hurry, offer ends May 15^th!

The following book review was written by this newsletter’s Book Review Editor, Bobbi King:

A Taylor Double Ancestry

By Arthur Orison Taylor (1923); edited by E.F. Vogt (2021).
Self-published. 2021. 215 pages.

It’s a generous person who edits and publishes another author’s work. Particularly when the original manuscript was typed and handwritten nearly a century ago, crafted onto one hundred fifty-eight fragile onionskin papers, spent decades in storage, with an expansive hand-notated diagram that charts twenty-eight generations of ancestors. The chart is reprinted in the back of the book with its meticulous hand lettering and rigorously-drawn connecting lines, truly a family gem of a document.

The original author of this Taylor genealogy is Arthur Orison Taylor, born in 1858 and died in 1948. He assembled the ancestries of his father’s and his mother’s families, both his parents being born coincidentally with the same surname; hence the title of the book: A Taylor Double Ancestry. The record was safeguarded by his family, passed down to his granddaughter, then to her daughter and husband Lynn Munroe Vogt and Eugene Francis Vogt, who thus became the curators of the family genealogy.

The Vogts have painstakingly edited through all the material, checked as many sources as they could, and published A Taylor Double Ancestry. The book is divided into two parts: Part I is about the paternal Taylors, and Part II is about the maternal Taylors. The two parts are divided into chapters, with each chapter devoted to one surname. There are fifty-two surname-chapters with descriptive narrative, charts, and reference notes.

All the book’s content is of the author’s 1923 work, none of the editors’ own, except for the editing and footnoting. So the information reflects work done in 1923, and backwards from that date. The only current information is a genealogy descendant chart for the author, Arthur Orison Taylor, which illustrates his descendants up to today. So you won’t find much information about the Taylors after 1923, but there is plenty to read about for all the generations previous to this time.

The fruition of the Vogts’ work honors the original author and contributes to an enduring Taylor legacy.

A Taylor Double Ancestry, written by Arthur Orison Taylor with editing and updates by E.F. Vogt, is available from a number of online book stores. You can find many of them by starting at: https://bit.ly/2RScHRY.

A web site you looked at some time ago may have since been deleted. If you want information from that now-unavailable web page, did you know that you might be able to find the information from an online archive?

An article by Mark Hill has been published on the Discover Magazine web site that describes the Internet Archive and its subsidiary, the Wayback Machine. It also describes how to use them.

You might want to read the article now. In addition, I would suggest you bookmark that page so that you can find it in the future anytime you have a need to retrieve data from a no-longer-available web page.

NOTE: As explained in the article, not all web pages are archived forever. However, millions of pages have already been archived and many more are being added every day.

You can read all this and more at: https://bit.ly/3bqANKD.

Would you like to hold dual citizenship? Namely in your present country plus another country? (In these turbulent times, that is strongly recommended. See https://nomadcapitalist.com/ for dozens of articles about legally obtaining multiple passports.) Does your DNA test indicted that you have ancestry from Sierra Leone?

If so, you will be interested in this announcement from AfricanAncestry.com:

WASHINGTON, May 13, 2021 -- AfricanAncestry.com, the Black-owned pioneers of genetic ancestry tracing for people of African descent, today announced an unprecedented partnership with the Sierra Leone government through the Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Affairs and its facilitating agency The Monuments and Relics Commission that formalizes a citizenship offering for customers whose ancestry trace to the fifth most peaceful country in Africa.

On April 29 in State House, Freetown, AfricanAncestry.com President and Co-founder Dr. Gina Paige and Sierra Leone Minister of Tourism Madam Memunatu Pratt marked the occasion in a special Agreement Signing, presenting 59 Sierra Leone passports to the inaugural recipients under the new partnership. The Agreement was signed in the presence of Sierra Leone's President His Excellency Dr. Julius Maada Bio, who underscored his commitment to the partnership.

"We welcome you to acquire land, live in our communities, invest, build capacity and take advantage of business opportunities," said President Bio during the citizenship conferment ceremony.

From Your DNA to Your Passport

AfricanAncestry.com's Partnership Director and an architect of Ghana's Year of Return Diallo Sumbry worked closely with the Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Affairs to foster the relationship and establish core guidelines for the now official program. The first step is to obtain an authentic AfricanAncestry.com Certificate of Ancestry featuring a special Seal validating Sierra Leone ancestry. With a second trip to the country scheduled for this fall as part of the AfricanAncestry.com Family Reunion trips, people interested in getting started can submit a request at travel@africanancestry.com.

"This partnership is perhaps the most significant milestone for African Ancestry since we created a way for Black people to trace their African roots using DNA 18 years ago," said Dr. Gina Paige. "It has transformed the total experience of what it is to be an AfricanAncestry.com customer," said Paige.

AfricanAncestry.com looks to expand the program to the more than 30 countries in Africa where they trace ancestry in the coming years. Visit www.AfricanAncestry.com for more information.

What killed grandma?

If you find a death certificate for great-great-grandma and it lists the cause of death as "Hectical Complaint," you probably will ask, "What's that?"

Yes, I had to look that up. Luckily, there is a one-page "dictionary" on USGenNet that can be a very useful tool for any genealogist who is reading old documents. It shows old medical terminology and then shows the modern-day name for each.

You can find Old Disease Names Frequently found on Death Certificates at http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ar/county/greene/olddiseases1.htm.

My thanks to Pierre Clouthier of Progeny Genealogy Inc. for pointing to that page.

This is an extract from an article by Lisa Kanarek:

Our elders have rich stories to share. There’s no better time than now to sit down and hit Record.

Getting Started

First, don’t assume that your subject will agree to be interviewed. Last year I asked my mom to let me record her life story. Her response? “No. I don’t have anything to say.” It turns out that her attitude is common.

There are times when you find someone who says, ‘No one wants to hear my story,’” says Kate Carter, founder and CEO of LifeChronicles, a nonprofit that records life stories of seniors and seriously ill patients. She suggests telling a loved one, “This would mean so much to me and to future generations of our family.” By making it about the family, it takes the pressure off the person being asked to share their memories.

There is much, much more in the article. You can read the entire article at: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-tech-capture-family-history/.

With the world’s citizens confined to their homes during the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans spent time delving into genealogy research. Interest in family history research is certainly not new — the success of TV series like “Who Do You Think You Are?” and the popularity of home DNA testing kits has fueled a more than decade-long trend — but the pandemic has spurred greater enthusiasm in finding family roots. As international travel restrictions are eased, this surging interest could translate into heritage trips, particularly to Europe.

The thrill of tracing family lineage online pales in comparison to the excitement of in-person revelations, making a trip more meaningful by fostering a deeper personal connection with a destination.

Prior to the pandemic, European ancestry tourism was booming in popularity. Increasingly, hotels have rolled out special heritage programs and tour operators have developed personalized itineraries for genealogical tourists; Ancestry.com even partnered with Cunard to launch a transatlantic “Journey of Genealogy” aboard the Queen Mary 2. For Americans with European family trees, the most popular destinations for such trips are Ireland, Italy, Germany, Scotland and Eastern Europe.

The full story may be found in the Travel Agent Central web site at: https://www.travelagentcentral.com/tours/meteoric-rise-ancestry-trips-to-europe.

Have you planned a trip back to your ancestral homeland(s)?

Last week, just weeks before the trial of Dr. Gerald Mortimer was scheduled to begin, the court dismissed the case with prejudice – meaning the case is permanently over.

It’s not clear exactly why the case was dismissed after three years, however, generally, if a judge agrees to dismiss a case at such a late stage, it is because an out-of-court settlement between the parties has been reached. Settlement agreements are not open to the public.

Mortimer admitted to using his own sperm to inseminate several of his patients after one of his former clients, Sally Ashby, and her daughter, Kelli Rowlette, filed a lawsuit against him in 2018. Ashby sought Mortimer for fertility treatments in 1980, when she and her then-husband, Howard Fowler, struggled to conceive naturally.

Last week, just weeks before the trial of Dr. Gerald Mortimer was scheduled to begin, the court dismissed the case with prejudice – meaning the case is permanently over.

It’s not clear exactly why the case was dismissed after three years, however, generally, if a judge agrees to dismiss a case at such a late stage, it is because an out-of-court settlement between the parties has been reached. Settlement agreements are not open to the public.

Mortimer admitted to using his own sperm to inseminate several of his patients after one of his former clients, Sally Ashby, and her daughter, Kelli Rowlette, filed a lawsuit against him in 2018. Ashby sought Mortimer for fertility treatments in 1980, when she and her then-husband, Howard Fowler, struggled to conceive naturally.

You can read more in an article by Grace Hansen in the East Idaho News web site at: https://bit.ly/2Rc0IyP.