The following is a press release issued by Alabama Public Radio:

Invisible Histories in Birmingham has launched a new initiative called the Memory Keeper project, designed to empower individuals and organizations to conduct, record, and document oral histories that amplify the voices of the LGBTQ community.

Starting this year, the project will focus on community-based participants, who will be selected to attend three training sessions. These participants, known as Memory Keepers, will be responsible for gathering at least three oral histories from their own communities over the course of a year.

“We wanted to find ways to connect more with the community, so we developed the Memory Keeper project as a way to provide training for people in the various communities that they work in on how to do good oral histories,” said Megan Sullivan, co-executive director of Invisible Histories. “We're letting communities tell their own stories, instead of us coming in and trying to do them for them.”

The oral histories collected by the Memory Keepers will be preserved in the Invisible Histories archive. This initiative comes after recent shutdown of diversity, equity, and inclusion departments at Alabama public institutions and universities following the introduction of SB129.

“We can't depend on us being included in mainstream history, so we have to come up with new and also old ways of retelling our stories,” said Sullivan.

In addition to the Memory Keeper project, Invisible Histories is also offering to archive materials related to LGBTQ, diversity, and multicultural centers. This effort is in response to concerns from state employees who fear these materials could be seized or destroyed following the bans.

“History is powerful. It empowers people. You learn about where you've been, and so to organize, to fight back, becomes a lot easier when you've got generations of people at your back. I think [achieving] it's a direct threat to people who would like to silence progress and to harm marginalized communities, to have this history not just existing, but thriving and being shared,” said Sullivan.

To qualify for to be a Memory Keeper for Invisible Histories, applicants must be a community leader, member organizer, activist, or culture maker in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia or the Florida Panhandle. Applicants must also be willing to conduct a year long project to preserve three local oral histories. Applications to become a Memory Keeper closes on September 22. Applicants will be notified about their status by September 30.

23andMe co-founder and chief executive Anne Wojcicki would be open to considering third-party takeover proposals for the company, a regulatory filing, opens new tab showed on Wednesday.

The genetic testing firm's shares were up 2.8% at $0.31 in extended trade.

In July, Wojcicki, who has been trying to take the company private, proposed to acquire all outstanding shares of 23andMe not owned by her or her affiliates for $0.40 per share.

The filing also said the CEO continues to evaluate and negotiate a deal.

A special committee formed by the company rejected Wojcicki's previous proposal, deeming it insufficient and not in the best interest of the non-affiliated shareholders.

Other alternatives will be pursued to maximize value for shareholders, in the absence of a revised offer, the committee said last month.

23andMe, best known for its saliva-based test kits that offer users a glimpse into their genetic ancestry, went public in 2021.

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Today, in collaboration with Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy along with local and international cultural institutions, we invite everyone to explore The Next Chapter of our ongoing project showcasing Ukraine’s heritage on Google Arts & Culture.

In the words of First Lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska: "In a time when Ukraine is facing the most difficult challenges, our culture remains our strength and inspiration. The 'Ukraine is Here' project on Google Arts & Culture gives everyone an opportunity to discover outstanding Ukrainians who have glorified our land all over the world: Mykola Leontovych, Solomiya Krushelnytska, Maria Prymachenko, and Kateryna Bilokur and many more. Today, when Russian occupiers are trying to destroy our heritage, this project is especially important. It not only preserves Ukrainian culture but also promotes it worldwide. So let us together reveal the beauty of Ukraine to the world – its art, history, and traditions, because they are our strength and identity."

Ukraine is Here is a long-term initiative to digitize and share Ukraine’s vibrant cultural history. It has now vastly expanded since it was first announced two years ago offering an unprecedented digital resource of immersive stories, virtual galleries, 3D historic treasures and videos — all in one place for global audiences to explore.

Below you’ll find some of the highlights of what’s new from the National Museum of Decorative Arts of Ukraine, Lviv Historical Museum, Ancient Lviv Museum, Ukrainian Institute, Skeiron, Ukraine House, Hopchytsya History Museum and many more partners.

You can read a lot more in an article by google.com web site at: by Amit Sood published in the Google web site at: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/arts-culture/discover-ukraines-culture/. 

What is All About That Place?

A unique free learning event brought to you by the Society of Genealogists, the Society for One Place Studies, British Association for Local History and Genealogy Stories.

Running over 10 days from Friday 27 September to Sunday 6th October, All About That Place is packed with 140 recorded 10-minute talks on genealogy and local history. You'll learn research techniques, social history, tools, websites, archives, record keeping tips, ways of creating and sharing your findings... and much, much more!

Plus, throughout the event, you'll be supported in putting your learning into action by completing challenge activities.

Learn more at: https://www.sog.org.uk/all-about-that-place-2024/

FREE BCG-SPONSORED WEBINAR

“A Myriad of Slave Databases” 

by LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson, JD, LLM, CG, CGL, FASG

Tuesday, September 17, 2024, 8:00 p.m. (EDT)

In the summer of 2023, American Ancestors/New England Historic Genealogical Society announced the collaborative 10 Million Names project, an undertaking to recover the names of people of African descent who were enslaved in the area of the United States. This monumental task of centralizing datasets about African Americans is likely to take years to accomplish; in the interim, this webinar provides a useful survey of the many existing databases that serve a similar purpose though limited in scope. 

LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson was elected as a trustee of the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) in 2016 and served as President from 2019-2022. She was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists in October 2021. She enjoyed a 35-year career as a tax lawyer before her 2013 retirement as a partner from the big four accounting firm of EY. She is most proud of her service on the staff of the bipartisan, bicameral, Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress where she helped to craft the historical Tax Reform Act of 1986. LaBrenda is now a full-time genealogist focused on teaching and writing. Her research centers on African American families that survived American slavery, primarily in the Carolinas. LaBrenda has published in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, among other publications, and in 2016 she published a guide for researching African Americans in her home county in South Carolina, a book that was hailed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s long-running genealogy column as an important model for all counties of South Carolina and other states. LaBrenda earned a BA from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and both a Law degree and a Master of Laws degree from New York University. From 2017-2023, LaBrenda served as the Registrar General for the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, a national lineage society that honors ancestors who were enslaved in the United States before 1870. She completed ProGen 13 and served as the mentor of ProGen 37. LaBrenda is the SLIG Course Coordinator for the African American track, and is also on the faculty of the Genealogical Institute of Pittsburgh, the Genealogical Institute on Federal Records, and the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research. See  https://www.LabGarrettGenealogy.com.

BCG’s next free monthly webinar in conjunction with Legacy Family Tree Webinars is “A Myriad of Slave Databases” by LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson, JD, LLM, CG, CGL, FASG. This webinar airs Tuesday, September 17, 2024, at 8:00 p.m. EDT.   

When you register before September 17 with our partner Legacy Family Tree Webinars(http://legacy.familytreewebinars.com/?aid=9015) you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. Anyone with schedule conflicts may access the webinar at no charge for one week after the broadcast on the Legacy Family Tree Webinars website. 

“Education is one of the most significant ways of achieving BCG’s mission for promoting public confidence in genealogy through uniform standards of competence,” said President Faye Jenkins Stallings, CG. “We appreciate this opportunity to provide these webinars that focus on the standards that help family historians of all levels practice good genealogy.”

Following the free period for this webinar, BCG receives a small commission if you view this or any BCG webinar by clicking our affiliate link: http://legacy.familytreewebinars.com/?aid=2619.

To see the full list of BCG-sponsored webinars for 2024, visit the BCG blog SpringBoard at https://bcgcertification.org/bcg-2024-free-webinars.  For additional resources for genealogical education, please visit the BCG Learning Center (https://bcgcertification.org/learning).

Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library is pleased to announce the launch of a new online resource, the Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) Digital Archive. This resource is the product of an ongoing, three-year initiative at Columbia University Libraries to digitize and make available more than 15,000 residential drawings from the Frank Lloyd Wright archival collections.

The FLW Digital Archive supports the Libraries’ commitment to make collections as accessible as possible for in-person and online use. It facilitates global access to high-resolution images for use in teaching, research, and historic preservation worldwide. The archive launches with over 10,000 high-resolution images and will continue to expand as drawings are digitized, with an estimated completion date of spring 2026.

“We are immensely proud to make these digitized collections broadly available for public and scholarly use,” said Teresa Harris, Director of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. “The residential projects were at the very heart of Frank Lloyd Wright’s practice as Wright developed many of the enduring themes of his work in the context of designs for houses.  These themes including the meaning of organic architecture, the importance of place and materials, the reliance on hands-on learning, and an emphasis on affordable building techniques continue to resonate with researchers and enthusiasts alike. Public access to these collections honors the spirit of openness and iteration in Wright’s work.”

For example, the project sheds light on the many women who were instrumental in making design decisions for their homes, but were previously absent from the residences’ public descriptions. Archival research and enhanced item-level cataloging now allow each residence to be searchable by all known client names, rather than only one head-of-household. As she is no longer veiled under the moniker of “Mrs. Arthur Miller,” users will be able to search by Marilyn Monroe’s own name to discover the former couple’s iconic unbuilt residence, replete with expansive entertaining areas and dedicated space for costume storage.

The archive will also soon be available on Columbia Libraries’ website and will continue to grow as already-digitized materials outside of this project are added. Avery Library also aspires to digitize and make publicly available further Frank Lloyd Wright materials including non-residential drawings, photographs and correspondence.

The following is a press release issued by the Institute of National Remembrance (in Poland):

On 6 September 2024, a press conference was held at the President Lech Kaczynski Central History Point in Warsaw, regarding the IPN project “Personal losses and victims of repression under German occupation in 1939-1945.” Its result is a publicly accessible online database known as the straty.pl database.

The database allows the users to set queries (searching by type, place and year of repression). It can also be used by historians and journalists. It does not contain scans of documents on the basis of which the data are entered, but it indicates the places where these documents can be found.

Since January 2020, 912,000 new records have been entered into the straty.pl database. Today there are 5.5 million records in our database. There is no family in Poland that has not been affected by the tragedy of World War II to some extent. I would like to appeal to all those who have such a family history to turn to the Institute of National Remembrance so that our work can be completed next year. On the one hand, it is a database of materials that are in the IPN Archive, prosecution materials, investigative materials from the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, but on the other hand, it is also information that comes from you all, said the IPN President during the conference.

The Director of the IPN Archive Marzena Kruk informed that the IPN archival collection amounts to nearly 4 km of archival materials that relate to the period of World War II.

As of 2 September 2024, the database provides information on 5,565,892 victims and people repressed by the German regime, including Archbishop Antoni Julian Nowowiejski, Henryk Ząbek, Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann, as well as two women: Irena Szydlowska and Anna Stolowska, whose wedding rings were found as a result of search work in the Valley of Death in Chojnice.

The press conference was accompanied by an exhibition of documents and artifacts prepared by the IPN Archive, including files stored in matchboxes.

We encourage you to report information about your relatives repressed by the Germans, who are not included in our database yet. We would like also to encourage other institutions to join the project by providing information.

Video of the conference on the IPNtv channel: https://straty.pl/.

California investigators have utilized new DNA technology to finally identify the identity of a man found in a waterway in 2001.

Authorities announced last week Craig William Ott was the person found in Minor Slough on Ryer Island near Rio Vista in Solano County on March 11, 2001.

After discovering the body, investigators spent the next year trying to identify the person, but ultimately were not successful. 

However, as identification technology advanced over the next 20-plus years, investigators opted to reopen the pursuit of identifying the body in 2023.

This decision was made as part of an initiative called the Doe Cold Case Project, which seeks to use new advancements in science and technology to identify previously unidentified bodies. The project is run by the Solano County Coroner’s Office to re-open and re-investigate cases of people who haven’t been identified in several years. 

Authorities exhumed the body and spent over a year trying to find an identity. Ultimately, new DNA testing and forensic genetic genealogy enabled the forensic staff and coroner to identify the body as Ott.

You can read more in an article in the forensicmag web site at: https://tinyurl.com/4w8mee7h.

The remains of two women were discovered back in 1994 in one case and in 2013 in the other. Since then, police had no idea who they were, let alone who killed them.

Albuquerque police say they were able to use DNA from the victim’s remains and turn that into a profile. From there, they’re able to upload the profiles to genetic testing sites like 23andMe.

If they get a match, then they start the process of tracking down the victim’s family.

“You can take DNA that’s left behind at a crime scene or that from a victim in this case, and we turn it into an ancestral profile,” said APD Commander Kyle Hartsock. 

It’s science based on chance.

“As you’re doing these investigations, new people can upload their DNA. So one day you log in, and all of a sudden you have a first cousin who tested, and yesterday you only have a third cousin,” said Hartsock. 

Hartsock says the department and the FBI are using genealogy to solve cold cases.

“It gets us on a path, it gives us a lead,” Hartsock said. 

After uploading a victim or suspect’s DNA to a genetic testing site, they wait for a hit. From there, Hartsock says they do old-fashioned detective work.

“You have to get very close to actually confirm who it is. And then, while talking with the families, they said, ‘Oh yeah, we haven’t seen our daughter or granddaughter since this time,’” said Hartsock.

APD and the FBI were able to do this, this year, identifying Carmela Vivian Duran, and Terry Matthews as the remains discovered in 1994 and 2013.

You can read more in an article by Monica Logroño published in the kob.com web site at: https://shorturl.at/Am6kV