Artificial intelligence supporting Luxembourg’s printed heritage.

Sam Tanson, Minister for Culture, Claude D. Conter, Director of the BnL, and Carlo Blum, Deputy Director of the BnL, invited members of the press and media to discover the new chatbot on the eluxemburgensia.lu portal. Capable of understanding French, German and English, the chatbot assists users in exploring Luxembourg’s history and offers answers based on historical newspaper articles.

Drawing on a technology in use at ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-based chat agent developed by OpenAI, the BnL’s experts have indexed digitised Luxembourgish documents and prepared a high-performance database that supports semantic searches. This breakthrough marks a major milestone in the BnL’s mission to offer easier and enhanced access to its digitised Luxembourgish resources.

The chatbot is a free and experimental tool that can be accessed remotely. To use it, all you need to do is log in using your library card or a Google account.

You can learn more and even access the Luxembourg chatbot at: https://bnl.public.lu/en/a-la-une/actualites/communiques/2023/chatbot-eluxemburgensia.html.

The following book reviews were written by Bobby King:

The Intrepid David Dodson 

David Dobson, an industrious gentleman whose collections of names and data might otherwise have remained forever unnoticed, has had published these recent books. His dedication to his work has, no doubt, been important to the genealogies of persons of Scottish ancestry. 

Each book has an introduction describing the places and people, and a reference guide in the back that explains the source initials in the entries.

The following books, authored by David Dobson, are published by the Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, Maryland.

The People of the Grampian Highlands 1600 –1699.

The Grampian Highlands are situated in North East Scotland and extend from Aberdeenshire through Kincardineshire, the Braes of Angus, to Eastern Perthshire. The region was populated with small burghs, where a Gaelic-speaking people engaged in agriculture. Emigration did not occur until early 1700s, except for war prisoners who were banished to the Plantations.

Example entry: FLAGER, DUNCAN, and his wife Agnes Bowman, in Kirkton of Lochlee, Angus, testament, 1627, Comm. Brechin. [NRS].

The People of Glasgow and Clydesdale at Home and Abroad 1800 –1850.

Glasgow’s rapid industrial growth, in the early 1800s, while beneficial to entrepreneurs and industrialists, brought social unrest to the working class with poor wages, child labor practices, and epidemics. Emigration from Glasgow to the newly-industrializing United States appealed to the working class and white-collar insurance and banking professionals. This book identifies people from Glasgow and neighboring Clydesdale who emigrated during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The People of Barbados 1625 –1875.

Captain John Powell claimed Barbados in 1625 for the English Crown, and two years later settlers from England followed to the island. English and Welsh entrepreneurs set up tobacco, sugar, and cotton plantations utilizing for laborers indentured servants, skilled artisans, rebels, criminals in chains, and African slaves. As the population increased and land became scarce, a second migration of laborers, planters, merchants and slaves set out for the Americas. 

The People of North East Scotland at Home and Abroad 1800 –1850.

This book identifies people from old counties of Nairnshire, Morayshire, Banffshire, Aberdeenshire, and Kincardineshire. The main clans and families here were Rose, Grant, Dunbar Brodie, Innes, Gordon, Leslie, Ogilvie, Keith, Forbes, Hays, Barclay, Fraser, Skene, Farquharson, Arbuthnott, Burnett, Irvine, and Douglas.

The People of Aberdeen at Home and Abroad 1800 –1850.

Old Aberdeen, founded 1125, and New Aberdeen, founded 1214, merged in the mid nineteenth century to become a major city and port embracing fishing and agricultural industries, exporting textiles, shipbuilding, and papermaking. This book contains references to people of Aberdeen from 1800 to 1850.

The People of South West Scotland at Home and Abroad 1800 –1850.

This book identifies people in or from the counties Renfrewshire, Ayrshire, Dumfries-shire, Kirkcudbrightshire, and Wigtownshire. Emigration from South West Scotland shifted from Ulster in the seventeenth century to North America and Australia by the nineteenth century.

People of the Hebrides at Home and Abroad 1800 –1850.

This book identifies residents of the Hebrides, a group of islands off the west coast of Scotland, especially Skye, Islay, Mull, Lewis, and Harris, and Hebrideans who emigrated to the Carolinas, Maritime Canada, and Australia during the early nineteenth century. 

The People of Leith at Home and Abroad 1600 –1799.

This book identifies residents of Leith during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Leith lies on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, and with a thriving seafaring economy of shipbuilding and whaling, was the most important port of Scotland until the Clyde ports of Glasgow-Greenock became predominant. 

The People of Fife at Home and Abroad 1800 –1850.

This book identifies residents and former residents of Fife, a coal mining region and major producer of textiles that lies on the east coast of Scotland. In the Dark Ages, it was a Pictish province which, in the nineteenth century, became a center of heavy industry.

The many books by David Dobson are available from the Genealogical Publishing Company at: https://genealogical.com/store/?gpc_search=1&textinput_author_last_name=Dobson as well as from Amazon.

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it strikes me that every American should keep themselves up to date on these issues.

Former President Donald Trump is a defendant in a sizable number of criminal and civil cases. To help readers parse through these complex legal developments, the JustSecurity web site has centralized information on Trump’s major cases in the most comprehensive clearinghouse of its kind. On the web site, you will find links to relevant court proceedings, key statutes, government documents, and defense documents – as well as Just Security resources and analysis, media and other guides.

The site promises to continue updating this page with new information as the trials develop. They hope this repository of information will be useful for analysts, researchers, investigators, journalists, educators, and the public at large. 

If you think the Trump Trials Clearinghouse is missing something important, please send recommendations for additional content by email to lte@justsecurity.org.

In the meantime, the Trump Trials Clearinghouse may be found at: https://www.justsecurity.org/88175/trump-trials-clearinghouse/. 

For more than half a century, the banker’s box containing details of a young couple’s heartbreaking final hours on this Earth gathered dust. That box in Great Falls, Mont., had plenty of company in police department storage rooms across the U.S. and Canada.

Duane Bogle was discovered face down in his car on Jan. 3, 1956. He had been shot in the head. His girlfriend, Patty Kalitzke, was found the next day. She had been sexually assaulted, then shot to death.

The decades passed until 2001, when a small amount of sperm was located on a vaginal sample from Kalitzke. Serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards and Boston mob boss “Whitey” Bulger were ruled out.

Then using genetic genealogy, they made a link to the children of Kenneth Gould, who died in 2007. He was the killer.

Gould is the oldest case cleared using genetic genealogy — technology that rose to prominence with the arrest of the Golden State Killer. It uses DNA websites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe to find the killer’s family.

Now, genealogist Marc McDermott has established a database for cold cases cleared using information provided by the Forensic Genetic Genealogy Project led by Dr. Tracey Dowdeswell of Queen’s University.

You can read more in an article by Brad Hunter published in the TorontoSun web site at: https://torontosun.com/news/crime/genetic-genealogy-database-hot-on-heels-of-cold-case-killers. 

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I suspect many readers of this newsletter have older computers in their possession and wonder what they can do to keep them useful for many more years.

When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That's the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions. Yesterday, the OCLP team announced version 1.0.0 of the software, the first to formally support the recently released macOS 14 Sonoma. Although Sonoma officially supports Macs released mostly in 2018 or later, the OCLP project will allow Sonoma to install on Macs that go back to models released in 2007 and 2008, enabling them to keep up with at least some of the new features and security patches baked into the latest release.

Comment by Dick Eastman:

I have a Macintosh laptop that is now more than 10 years old and no longer accepts updates from Apple. I didn’t want to throw it away so I took a different approach: i simply replaced the (now obsolete) Macintosh operating system with a current Zorin Linux operating system.

Zorin OS is an alternative to Windows and macOS designed to make your computer faster, more powerful, secure, and privacy-respecting. It is also updated frequently and is at least as robust as the Macintosh operating system (and perhaps even MORE robust). It was a lot easier to install than following the rather complex method described above in this article. I am quite pleased with Zorin. It works on Macs and on PCs as well.

You can learn more about Zorin at: https://zorin.com/os/

How do you turn a piece of onionskin paper into an online archive? Or a huge map? Or a piece of paper almost completely torn up? Or all of that combined, times a billion?

A few months into her tenure, Colleen Shogan, the current Archivist of the United States, already has plenty on her plate. But it’s a little more complicated than just placing a document on a scanner.

President Joe Biden appointed Shogan to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in August 2022. Since her confirmation in May, Shogan and the NARA staff have been hard at work digitalizing the 13 billion records in the agency’s possession. That, according to Chief Innovation Officer Pamela Wright, requires various different scanners and technology to make sure it’s done right.

As the archivist, Shogan is the steward and protector of all of those documents, which include the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But digitalization is a key part of her plans for the agency — primarily because of the access it provides.

“I’m looking forward to serving as a passionate advocate for the work we do, namely strengthening our nation’s democracy through access and accountability,” Shogan told Technical.ly in an email.

To start, she’s focused on reducing the backlog of veterans’ requests, which piled up during the pandemic, at the National Personnel Records Center. These documents can help veterans and families with the documents they need for benefits. The agency has already made its way through a lot of the backlog, Shogan said, and is on track to eliminate it by January 2024.

Longer-term, the NARA has committed to digitalizing 500 million pages of records and making them available online to the public in the National Archives Catalog by Oct. 1, 2026. This will be achieved through a mix of in-house, contracted and public-private partnership-based digitalization. She also wants to improve the catalog’s search functionality, so the public has an easier time accessing what they need, and double down on providing documents and resources for educators to help student scores in history.

You can read a lot more about the future plans of the new Archivist in an article by Michaela Althouse published in the technical.ly web site at: https://technical.ly/civic-news/national-archives-record-administration-digitalization/. 

An anonymous former state employee came forward Friday claiming to have evidence that the Arkansas governor’s office doctored documents and unlawfully withheld financial records that should have been made public under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

Attorney Tom Mars, who is representing the whistleblower, sent a letter today to Sen. Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana) offering to have his client speak to auditors. Hickey yesterday requested that Legislative Audit, a nonpartisan agency independent from the executive branch, look into what’s come to be known as “podiumgate.”

The controversy concerns the $19,000 purchase of a lectern (or podium) by the governor’s office from an out-of-state events company earlier this year, as well asGov. Sarah Sanders’ successful efforts to newly block access to certain governmental records.

Austin Baileyl, the Little Rock lawyer behind the Blue Hog Report blog, from accessing those records. Campbell’s FOIA requests uncovered the lectern purchase to begin with.

You can read more in an article by Austin Bailey published in the Arkansas Times web site at: https://tinyurl.com/2s49p9xu.

The following book review was written by Bobbi King:

Remembering Eckhardt & Haug Ancestors from New York City 
by Louise A. Eckhardt. Published by Genealogy Publishing Group (Amherst, Mass.). 2022. 173 pages.

Right away, what’s striking about this book is the abundance of pictures. Nearly every page has at least one type of illustration: sepia-toned family photographs, colorized postcard pictures, black and white snapshots, images of documents that are sharpened with contrast and easy to decipher, pictures of places and scenes; there is such a profusion of pictures that highlight the chronicle being told that the reader’s interest is engaged even before the story gets looked at. 

In a well-produced book (which this is), having such crisp, readable text alongside the many expertly curated illustrations leaves the reader with a reading experience that is both pleasurable and meaningful. 

The story is about William and Anna Eckhardt, Edward and Louise Haug, and Eva (Haug) Lenning. These are the author’s four grandparents and great-aunt Eva, whose family history writing served to preserve irreplaceable family history. A chapter is devoted to each of the five persons. Color-coded descendant charts help clarify the relationships; visual aids are always a welcome assist in keeping straight who belongs to whom.

They were all longtime New Yorkers: the Eckhardts were in the garment industry and the Haugs were in business and active in community affairs. Their life stories reflect New York life in the twentieth century set amid mundane daily activities, political movements, epidemics, cultural changes, and the regular celebrations of marriages, births, and Sunday dinners. The family story envelops the times of New York City and the twentieth century. 

The author spent 12 years writing her book. Twelve years that leaves her family with a distinctively notable and rich family history that will occupy a special place on their family bookshelves for a long time to come.

And the pictures are the best part of the book. 

Remembering Eckhardt & Haug Ancestors from New York City may be purchased from Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Eckhardt-Haug-Ancestors-York/dp/1935052934 and from many other bookstores.

In honor of German Reunification Day, all 197.5 million German historical records on MyHeritage will be completely free to access from October 1 until October 5, 2023.

Did you know that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 17% of Americans claim German roots?

October 3 marks German Unity Day, and to celebrate, we are offering free access to all German records on MyHeritage. This is an exciting opportunity for all our users who have German heritage to connect with their roots. 

German Unity Day celebrates the reunion of East and West Germany in 1990. It symbolizes freedom, unity, and democracy, ending the division the country faced post World War II. It’s a day when German people celebrate their shared history and values. To commemorate this significant event, MyHeritage is offering free access to over 197 million German historical records from October 1–5, 2023!

Search all German records now

MyHeritage is home to 65 valuable historical record collections from Germany. Alongside birth, marriage, and death records going back to the 16th century, MyHeritage offers a number of exclusive record collections from Prussia, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Hesse, as well as emigration records from Southwestern Germany and Hamburg to Australasia.

You can read more in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/10/free-access-to-all-german-records-on-myheritage/

Updated collections this month include the Foreign Legal Gazettes, which now features new issues of from Burkina Faso, the Philippines, and Ecuador. And two new sections were added into the Occupational Folklife Project collection: Training the Troops: Military Role-Players of Fort Polk, Louisiana and Immigrant Women Artists in Oklahoma : Archie Green Fellows Project, 2020-2021.

Read this and more at: https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2023/09/new-loc-september-2023/.