Here is another reason to quit smoking: it could prove your identification in a major crime.

New DNA recovered from a discarded cigarette has helped police in Washington state make an arrest in a decades-old cold case, authorities said this week.

Dorothy Marie Silzel was last seen alive on Feb. 23, 1980, in Kent, Washington, the Van Buren County Sheriff's Office said on social media. She was found dead in her condo three days later after a welfare check was requested. Local police found that she had been sexually assaulted and deemed her death to be a homicide via strangulation, according to the Seattle Times.

DNA evidence was collected from the crime scene, CBS affiliate KTHV reported, but it wasn't until years later that the technology would advance enough to help link that evidence to possible suspects. In March 2022, Kent police began pursuing possible DNA matches and came back with 11 suspects, according to the station. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on social media that his office's sexual assault kit initiative funded forensic genetic genealogy testing that "narrowed the list of suspects."

One of those suspects was Kenneth Kundert, who at the time was living in Van Buren County, Arkansas. He had lived and worked in Seattle in 1987, but no earlier records were available. Police also found that he had a family member who had lived near Silzel at the time of her murder, and he had misdemeanor convictions in King County throughout the 80s and 90s, according to the Seattle Times.

Kundert was already under investigation for assault in Arkansas, and during an interview with him about the crime, Van Buren County detectives tried to get a sample from him, but according to charging documents and police, he put extinguished cigarettes and a water bottle that he drank from in his pocket and declined to give a voluntary sample.

Kent police began conducting surveillance on Kundert while he lived in Arkansas. Eventually, he dropped a cigarette before entering a store. The cigarette was recovered and tested for DNA.

The DNA on the cigarette matched the DNA that was found in Silzel's condo, police said.

A note to readers in other countries: ITV is a British television network.

NI actor Jimmy Nesbitt is set to explore his ancestry in an ITV series. DNA Journey with Ancestry is returning with six new celebrity pairings.

The celebrity duos delving into their families’ histories this series are Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston, Jo Brand and Julian Clary, Fay Ripley and Hermione Norris, Sam Thompson and Marvin Humes, Sarah Parish and Jimmy Nesbitt, and John Simm and Philip Glenister.

A statement added: "In this fifth series produced by Voltage TV, Mitre Studios and Ancestry, the new celebrity twosomes set off in pursuit of where they come from and unearth secrets from their past in a life-changing and emotional voyage of discovery that takes us from Canada to London and France to Jamaica.

"Using advanced DNA technology and genealogy, the duos will unlock hidden secrets from their family trees as they discover amazing revelations about their descendants, fascinating stories of unknown ancestors and meetings with no living relatives that spark deep connections to the past and present."

Do you remember “Roots”, the TV series authored by Alex Haley? Or perhaps you do not remember it but would like to learn about the series? Either way, Nancy Battick has written an article that will interest you.

Nancy’s article, "What ‘Roots’ gave to genealogy?” may be found at: https://observer-me.com/2024/08/26/opinion/what-roots-gave-to-genealogy/

The following book reviews were written by Bobbi King:

The Genealogical Publishing Company continues to publish extensive compilations from David Dobson.

Irish Emigrants in North America, Consolidated Edition, Parts One to Ten.                                  2023. 835 pages.

The earliest Irish immigrant to America likely arrived to Roanoke, Carolina, in 1586, signaling the flow of Irish immigrants into the 1600s and 1700s, comprised mostly of indentured servants and prisoners of war banished to the plantations. In the 1600s, forced transports of Irish sent them to the West Indies. After the Napoleonic Wars of 1815, the British Government sent former soldiers and their families to Canada. Through the 1800s, the growth of transatlantic trade and the sufferings of the potato famine solidified Irish emigration into American ports and inland communities wherever their labors were needed.

This one book holds the ten editions of the Irish Emigrants in North America books published from 1994 to 2020. Each book is reproduced exactly as originally published.

Jana Broglin’s very comprehensive index of names covers all ten editions, including persons within the emigrant entries who might be otherwise overlooked, such as spouses, other next of kin, signatories, ship captains, and others.

Scottish Trade with Colonial Charleston, 1683 – 1783. 2018. 369 pages.

Charleston, or “Charles Town” then, dominated commerce of the southern region of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia during America’s colonial years. During the 1700s, the Scotch-Irish and the German peoples were predominant emigrants settling the Thirteen Colonies. 

This is a study of the trade between Scotland and Charleston, focusing on examinations of the slave trade; types, quantities, and origins of goods shipped; the importance of family connections and networking in the success of trade; and the sizes and types of ships.

Scottish Soldiers in Colonial America, Part Six and Scottish Soldiers in Colonial America, Part Seven. 2023.

Scottish soldiers were present in the Americas during the 1600s, serving in English regiments as well as Netherlands or other European power militias. Former soldiers, after the wars, settled in the colonies and Canada well into the 1800s. These books contain names of settlers, the units in which they served, and their places of settlement.

The Covenanters of Scotland, 1638 – 1690. 2023. 263 pages.

In 1638, Scotland enacted a National Covenant, demanding Scottish parliaments and assemblies completely free of the royal control of King Charles I. The Covenanters, supporters of the Covenant, were soldiers and countrymen who formed an army that confronted the regiments of King Charles. This book contains names of Covenanters who participated in the conflicts. Entry examples:

DUNBAR, ROBERT, born 1634, son of Ninian Dunbar of Georgehill, a prisoner of war who was transported to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1650, died on 19 September 1693.[Source].

DUNGALSTONE, NICOLL, in Larg, was accused, in Kirkcudbright in October 1684, of conversing with rebel John Carsan in June 1684. [Source].

Scots-Irish Links, 1575 – 1725, Part Eleven. 2021. 125 pages.

This volume continues the compilation of names of Scottish settlers in Ireland. This volume sources documents in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the National Records of Scotland where records document the economic links and shipping ports that facilitated emigration to Ireland.

Anglo-Dutch Links, 1560 – 1860. 2020. 104 pages.

This book identifies English people who settled in the Netherlands, as well as Dutch or Flemish people who settled in England. Religious refugees, traders and craftsmen, and the establishment of universities facilitated settlement of populations between the two countries.

The People of Argyll, Bute, and Dunbarton, 1600 – 1699. 2023. 174 pages.

This book identifies persons living in the regions of Argyll, Bute, and western Dunbartonshire during the 1600s, families mostly of Gaelic origin. A rural area with few burghs, conflicts ensued among Scottish clansmen and the English kings. The documents in the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh are largely the sources for this compilation.

David Dobson continues to assemble a substantial set of collections serving the Scottish and Irish researchers.

Mr. Dobson’s books are available from the publisher, Genealogical.com as well as from Amazon.com.

Here is an article that is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it may interest  anyone who wants to know about AI-Image Generators:

A new user-friendly website lets anyone create up to 25 AI-generated images for free. Here's how to try it.

Need a good AI image generator? You can now try Midjourney's dedicated website for free. Midjourney CEO David Holz has announced via a Discord message that anyone can go to the website and start making images. As a special invitation, the site lets you generate as many as 25 images through a free trial.

In the past, Midjourney users had to go through Discord to create and refine AI-based images. That process required a fair amount of fiddling with text-based prompts, an often clumsy and frustrating experience. To draw in people who didn't like the Discord method, Midjourney kicked off a dedicated website late last year.

But the website was initially limited to users who had generated at least 10,000 images via Discord, excluding a lot of people. Now that the site is accessible to anyone, all Midjourney users should enjoy a much easier and smoother experience.

Signing up for the website requires an account with Google or Discord. If you've already created images via Discord, you can use that account to retrieve a history of the images you generated in the past. You can then merge your Discord and Google accounts to be able to sign in with either one. Otherwise, signing in with a Google account is easier.

After you sign in, a sidebar on the left displays tabs for different sections and tasks. Going to the Explore section lets you check out images that other people have created. The Create section displays a brief but helpful video that shows you how to get started with Midjourney. That video is also viewable in a post on X. From here, you can then request an image. Just type your prompt in the field at the top and see what Midjourney cooks up.

During the upcoming renovation process to the John McIntire Library, the Muskingum County Library System will be relocating some of its affiliated services that call the library home. 

Muskingum County Genealogical Society Treasurer Brooke Anderson shared what the organization brings to the public, along with plans for how they will continue their services throughout the library’s renovations process.

“Genealogy Society will be moving to the library at Herrold Hall at Ohio University Zanesville,” Anderson said. “Our last day here, open to the public, is Saturday, September the 13th. We then hope to reopen by either the end of October or beginning of November, out at OUZ. We will not be able to take all of our materials with us because of space. So we will be focusing on our family histories, our yearbooks, and the items that pertain more to the local area.”

The Genealogical Society is having a book sale during their normal hours of operation that will consist of duplicate materials and historical literature that has less to do with local genealogy.

“Once we are at Herrold Hall, we will announce that opening date on our Facebook, on our public library site and all of those usual sources. And we plan to be open right now, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. We looked at some other spaces but that was the one that had the most space to give us. That is a temporary location. Once the remodeling is done, we will be back in our same location, with a little bit more room than we have right now,” Anderson said.

The Genealogical Society has been a fixture of the John McIntire Library since 1992 serving the public by providing access to hard to find documentation inside a convenient location.

LibreOffice is my preferred word processor/spreadsheet/presentation program and otherwise is my preferred program to be used in place of Microsoft Office. I use LibreOffice multiple times per day, including once today to write this article. Not bad for a FREE program! Don’t waste your money on the (overpriced) Microsoft Office!

LibreOffice just got a major update that adds new privacy, security, productivity, and accessibility features across all its apps. It is a free and open-source productivity suite that includes a word, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing apps, supporting both open source and proprietary (mostly from Microsoft Office) file formats

LibreOffice claims that it’s “the only software for creating documents that may contain personal or confidential information that respects the privacy of the user.” To that end, LibreOffice 24.8 introduces a new privacy feature that lets you remove personal and trackable information from any file before exporting it. Metadata like timestamps, version history, printer identifiers, author information are usually embedded in most documents. Exporting via this privacy feature makes them harder to track. Plus, LibreOffice gives you one more mode to encrypt ODF files with passwords (an open source document format).

LibreOffice

The new LibreOffice Writer interface is getting new formatting, linking, and search features. New bullet styles and a Find deck have been added to the navigator. It also offers finer control over hyphenation and drag-and-drop navigation. 

Calc, the spreadsheet editor, has nine new functions (many of them for better sorting and filtering). Calc also supports two new chart types (Pie-of-Pie and Bar-of-Pie) and makes them compatible with proprietary chart formats from Microsoft Office. The text inside these charts is now easily formatable via the dedicated character window. And it has been optimized for better overall performance. 

Impress (the presentation app) also gets some minor updates. You can scroll between slides, and edits made to a presentation are immediately reflected in a running slideshow. The new LibreOffice 24.8 is now available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This new version is also the first to offer native support for Windows PCs built on the ARM architecture.

You can read more about the new release of LibreOffice at: https://www.howtogeek.com/libreoffice-24-8-release/.

Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council

A wedding party photographed in the village of Shafton, Barnsley, England

People curious to know whether their ancestors committed a crime can now access historic court records online.

Barnsley's borough archives have been made available on family history website Ancestry.

It is the first time the material has been accessible digitally and means researchers no longer have to visit the archives in person.

It is hoped the records will provide "a rich source of information" and "a fascinating glimpse" into the lives and struggles of ordinary people.

The Barnsley Archives and Local Studies service supplied 100,000 entries from baptism, marriage and burial registers to Ancestry, as well as transcriptions of more than a million cases heard in Barnsley Magistrates' Court between 1841 and 1923.

The two databases were collated and can now be viewed by Ancestry users worldwide.

The parish registers include more than 100 different churches and chapels that existed across the Barnsley area.

The colourful court records detail the petty criminals charged over matters such as theft, poaching and drunkenness.

The archives were previously only available to browse at Barnsley Town Hall.

'Valuable'

Councillor Robin Franklin, cabinet spokesperson for regeneration and culture, said: "It’s a great opportunity for people interested in the history and heritage of our borough to discover more about their ancestors and the lives they lived. 

"Whether you are looking for information on your family's and friends' religious background or if you have a criminal relative, you now have access to thousands of records from anywhere in the world.

"This is a valuable resource that we are sure people will love exploring.”

Listen to highlights from South Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.

More than 150 films and audio reels from Richmond Police Department surveillance records will be preserved and made publicly accessible by Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries as part of a new project documenting aspects of the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

The Surveillance Media Collection includes 156 films and 13 audio reels dated between 1961 and 1973. Footage includes Black Panther Party meetings and activities; anti-draft, anti-war and anti-busing protests; student protests at local universities; and marches related to the Poor People’s Campaign, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the trial of H. Rap Brown.

“In my experience, this Surveillance Media Collection is unique,” said Brian Daugherity, Ph.D., a Civil Rights Movement historian and professor in the Department of History in VCU’s College of Humanities and Sciences. “There are few archival collections – and none that I know of in the South – dealing with the Black Power movement, Black Panther Party and related individuals nationwide. The preservation and digitization of materials in this archive offers the possibility of investigating new aspects of the civil rights struggle in the South.”

The project is supported by a $24,585 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources as part of its “Recordings at Risk” program, which is made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation. CLIR is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning.

You can read more in an article at: https://tinyurl.com/vhfafj7h.

The following is a press release written by the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute Diabetes Education Team:

A free and trusted comprehensive online library of educational videos that cover all you need to know about diabetes has been launched.

The online resource, DIABPEDIA, provides evidence-based information for people wanting to understand more about the management of type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes and gestational diabetes.

The videos are delivered in bite-sized pieces and topics include “What is the glycaemic index?”, “What is diabetes distress?” and “Diabetes monitoring and technology”, and useful resources like “Managing type 2 on sick days” and “Food label reading”.

DIABPEDIA was developed by the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute Diabetes Education team with funding support from the Telematics Trust. The online resource launched at the Australian Diabetes Congress in Perth this week.

“A diabetes diagnosis can be overwhelming, and incorrect or poor management of diabetes can have significant impact on the health of someone living with diabetes, so it’s vitally important that people can access correct and appropriate information,” Associate Professor Neale Cohen, head of the Baker Institute Diabetes Clinical Research lab, said.

“We developed DIABPEDIA because we wanted there to be a comprehensive resource that is a trusted, single destination for diabetes information.

“There is a lot of information that can be found about diabetes online and on social media, but it’s not always evidence based. Our team of diabetes experts at the Baker Institute have pulled together the information contained on DIABPEDIA so visitors to the site can be safe in the knowledge that the information they are seeking is accurate, up to date, and backed by research.”

While DIABPEDIA does not replace a diabetes management team, it is a useful resource for anyone touched by diabetes, including those who live with the disease, their carers, and teachers and sports coaches.

 DIABPEDIA builds upon the suite of evidence-based resources housed on the Baker Institute website’s Health Hub, which includes fact sheets, diabetic-friendly recipes, and information about the Institute’s clinical research trials.