The following is for this newsletter's Plus Edition subscribers only

If you downloaded the Weekly Plus Edition newsletter earlier this week from https://eogn.com/Plus-Edition-Members, you ended up with a version without any images. That was my error. I apologize for the shortcoming.

It has been now fixed and re-uploaded.

You can now go back to https://eogn.com/Plus-Edition-Members and click on this week's version (in either the HTML version or the PDF version) and it should retrieve the new version with images.

If it retrieves the previous version (without images), you might need to reload the version that is cached in your web browser.

There is an interesting story by David Oliver about people who take DNA kits and suddenly realize they have previously-unknown brothers or sisters. You can read the article at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2023/09/19/ancestry-dna-family-secrets/70707516007/. 

The following is an announcement written by the Society of Genealogists:

Announcing “All About That Place” - the One-Place Study Challenge Event taking place Friday 22^ndSeptember to Sunday 1^st October 

Celebrating the 10^th Anniversary of the Society for One-Place Studies, this unique event is spearheaded by the Society of Genealogists, the Society for One-Place Studies, Genealogy Stories, and the British Association for Local History.

“History is like a patchwork of different perspectives, techniques, and resources. Local history helps us to weave together the past and present, families and communities, big and small histories. It helps us to understand places in the present and connects us to the past” – Joe Saunders, BALH.

Join like-minded history lovers to explore the places your ancestors lived in, all from the comfort of your own home. Inside our pop-up Facebook Group you’ll be able to enjoy over 100 free recorded talks, delivered by a wide range of expert historians, such as Nick Barratt, Janet Few, Daniel Horowitz, Jen Baldwin, Gill Thomas and more!

With event sponsors including eminent organisations like The Genealogist, Name & Place, University of Strathclyde, Pharos Tutors, The Historic Towns Trust and Family Tree magazine, you can be sure to enjoy a truly engaging educational opportunity like no other.

This one-of-a-kind event isn’t just about idly watching though! It’s specially designed to help you to take part. Alongside the wide collection of talks on research tools, analytical techniques, and place history, you’ll be provided with motivating challenge instructions to help you explore local history. You’ll be able to download a free challenge workbook to record your learning activity and complete challenge tasks.

Plus, to celebrate your amazing progress you’ll be offered the opportunity to enter a prize draw consisting of a wide range of history goodies (1-year membership to the SoG, the Curious Descendants Club, BALH, Name & Place, My Heritage and 4 Historic Towns maps)!

To learn more and jump into the Facebook Group sign up here.

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

Elizabeth Lotts has published an article that I think should be required reading to all newcomers to genealogy... and also can be very useful to old-timers as well. 

Before you spend money on your research, check into these ten genealogy resources.

You can find the list at: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/10-ways-to-research-your-family-tree-for-free/ar-AA1gRC0Q 

The National Center for Biotechnology Information is excited to introduce Pebblescout, a pilot web service that allows you to search for sequence matches in very large nucleotide databases, such as runs in the NIH Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and assemblies for whole genome shotgun sequencing projects in Genbank – faster and more efficiently!  

Pebblescout uses short segments of your query sequences to identify database records with matches. Matches are based on the frequency of a segment’s occurrence in a database. Result produced for each query is a ranked list of matching records where the ranking utilizes informativeness of matching segments. 

You can read more at: https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2023/09/14/introducing-pebblescout/ 

How many languages do you speak? Thanks to AI, that number could be as many as seven. Los Angeles-based AI video platform HeyGen has launched a new tool that clones your voice from a video and translates what you’re saying into seven different languages. If that wasn't enough, it also syncs your lips to your new voice so the final clip looks (and sounds) as realistic as possible.

Called Video Translate, the tool allows you to upload a video of yourself speaking in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Hindi or Japanese. The requirements are pretty basic so you don’t need any fancy cameras, microphones or software. The clip has to be at least 30 seconds long and should ideally feature just one person. But other than that, you just upload your video and in a single click HeyGen can translate what you’re saying.

You can choose whether you want the output to be in Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese or English. Support for even more languages is also expected by the end of September.  

You can read more in an article by Christoph Schwaiger published in the Tom's Guide web site at: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ai-video-tool-clones-your-voice-in-7-languages-and-i-almost-tried-it 

On Wednesday, September 13, two projects were presented in the library's lecture hall by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts.

Trausti Dagsson from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies and Luke O'Brien presented Speech Analysis of the website Ismus.is and the construction of a text library for older speech that was done in collaboration with the Árni Magnússon Institute and the technology company Tíró and handled about the creation of speech that was trained with audio recordings from the Folklore Museum. The recordings have now been made searchable and accessible.

Bragi Þorgrímur Ólafsson from the National and University Library of Iceland and Unnar Ingvarsson from the National Archives of Iceland presented the Icelandic database in Transkribus. The Transkribus software is made for the purpose of creating an Icelandic base for handwritten texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. The project was carried out in collaboration with experts from the National Archives of Iceland and the National and University Library of Iceland. You can access the Icelandic base by downloading the Transkribus software.

In addition, history student Una Haraldsdóttir told about her project about the diaries of Svein Þórarinsson and the experience of using Transkribus in that project. You can learn more about Una's project (in the Icelandic language) on the website Akureyri.net.

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

The question is…  “Why do we study genealogy?”

What makes anyone so curious about his or her family tree? What drives us to dedicate time, effort, and sometimes expenses to go find dead people?

What is it inside of us that makes us spend hours and hours cranking reels of microfilm, then we go home and report to our family members what a great day we had? 

I must admit that I have asked that question of many people and have received several answers. Some people report that it is simple curiosity… and I tend to believe that is a part of the answer. Others report that it is part of an intriguing puzzle that they wish to solve.

The theory on the puzzle bothers me. First of all, I am devoted to genealogy, but I could care less about other puzzles. I don’t do the daily crosswords in the newspaper, I don’t put together those picture puzzles, and I do not seem very interested in any other form of puzzles. If genealogy is solely a puzzle, why would I be attracted to it and yet not to other puzzles? That doesn’t make sense to me. In short, I think there is more to genealogy than there is to a crossword puzzle.

The simplest and most direct answer for many people is because it is a religious requirement. Indeed, members of the LDS Church are encouraged to find information about their ancestry for religious purposes. And yet, of all the LDS members that I meet at most genealogy conferences, most met their religious requirements years ago but continue to look further and further back. In fact, many of them become so addicted that they help others do the same.

Yes, I can accept that religion is a major motivator, but I believe there is still more. I constantly meet people, LDS members and non-members alike, who keep searching and searching, further and further back. Why?

I do not have all the answers, but I do have an observation or two. I believe that most all humans have a natural curiosity. We are curious about many things, but for now, I will focus on our curiosity about our origins and ourselves.

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/13255212.