Since 1974 The Black Archives of Mid America has served Kansas City as the custodian of Black history in the metro. This year, it adds to that mission by offering courses to assist Black residents in uncovering their roots. 

“We had lots of people constantly calling us over the years to ask us if we could help them find records on their family,” said Carmaletta M. Williams, CEO at the Black Archives. “We don’t have the staff, but now we can show them how to find it.” 

The course provides novice researchers with information on navigating the daunting task of sifting through generations of records. 

The organization’s archivist, Laura Dillard and Preston Washington from the Mid-West Genealogical Interest Coalition (MAGIC) lead the courses. The archives asks that those attending bring as much research information as possible to help them with their search. Often people are starting at square one, with only a few names and dates of births. 

Representatives at the Black Archives know firsthand the challenge of trying to piece together a story with missing pieces. Because of hundreds of years of slavery and record keeping that reflected Black slaves as property instead of people, the information some are tracking can only go back so far. 

“A lot of folks come to us and tell us they have always wanted to do it but just don’t know how,” said Dillard. “If you are coming in and want to use our computers we can show you the programs and our instructor from MAGIC will help lead them through certain things and help them to learn what to use to find specific information.” 

Using online resources, researchers can look at census records, birth certificates, obituaries, year books and cemetery cards. The courses, a recent endeavor, are made possible from grants from Country Club Bank, The Hall Family Foundation and the Kaufman Foundation. 

Those grants cover the cost of genealogy software that carries an annual subscription price of more than $4,000. Though the endeavor is a pricey one, Williams believes that as the keepers of Black Kansas City history, the task goes hand in hand with the purpose of the Black Archives.

You can read more in an article by J.M. BANKS published in the Kansas City Star web site at: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article290153929.html.

 

Millions of Irish Americans, especially those in New York, might be directly descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, the most prolific warrior in Irish history.

A team of geneticists at Trinity College Dublin led by Professor Dan Bradley discovered that as many as 3 million men worldwide may be descendants of the Irish warlord, who was the Irish “High King” at Tara, the ancient center of Ireland from A.D. 379 to A.D. 405.

The legend of Niall of the Nine Hostages

The story of Niall of the Nine Hostages is already the stuff of legend, passed on to countless Irish schoolchildren over the years.

The supposedly fearless leader battled the English, the Scots, the French, and even the Romans, and struck fear into the heart of his enemies. His dynasty lasted for centuries, continuing up until the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland at the end of the 16th century.

Legend has it that it was Niall of the Nine Hostages who, on a raid in Wales, captured a young slave and brought him to Ireland. That slave would later escape and go to become Ireland’s patron saint, St. Patrick.

But one story not told to most Irish elementary schoolchildren was Niall’s prolificacy.

When it came to the bedroom, it seems that Niall of the Nine Hostages was even more fearless and energetic than he was on the battlefield.

This warlord was responsible for the very common Irish surname “O’Neill” (“Ui Neill” in Gaelic), which literally means ‘descendant son of Niall.'

One in 12 men in Ireland

The researchers also found that as many as one in 12 men in Ireland have the same DNA as the Irish king and in Ireland’s northwest, that figure rises to one in five.

"We sampled 60 people with these names and found the strongest association was with them,” Bradley told the UK Independent in 2006.

“Before this, everything was mythology, but now there does seem to have been a single male ancestor of this group of powerful dynasties."

"In many countries, powerful men historically have more children, and it's not that hard to believe that it happened in Ireland too.

"We estimate there are maybe two to three million descendants in the modern age, with a concentration in Ireland, obviously. Then there are Scotland and New York  - you find the particular chromosome in reasonable frequency in New Yorkers of European descent.”

You can read still more in an article in the IrishCentral web site  at: https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/genealogy/niall-nine-hostages-descendants. 

While poring over nearly century-old photos documenting the University of Cincinnati’s historic excavation at Troy, archivist Jeff Kramer was struck by just how many people worked behind the scenes for years to contribute to its success.

The archivist and research associate in UC’s Department of Classics created a digital archive of pictures and documents from UC archaeologist Carl Blegen’s influential 1930s project that identified nine periods of reconstruction and evidence of a great battle and fiery devastation that some historians said was suggestive of the ransacking of Troy.

A worker holds a clay pot on a workbench. Full Gallery 

Foreman Emin Kani Barin holds a pot he reassembled while working at Troy. Photo/UC Classics

But in the four double volumes published on the project, the workers who made the team’s discoveries possible are mentioned briefly and only once, Kramer said. While this omission was hardly unusual in the early days of archaeology, Kramer said it ignores their important contributions to our understanding of ancient civilizations.

“All the big excavations owe their results to these individuals who are unheralded and unacknowledged,” he said. “They’re not given their due. They’re simply not mentioned.”

One worker in particular stood out in the extensive documentation from the seven-year project:  an Albanian laborer named Emin Kani Barin who went by Kani. Kramer wrote about him and the broader question of acknowledging the invisible workers of archaeology in a paper published in the journal Bulletin of the History of Archaeology.

“These are the people who put shovels in the ground and swung the picks. They were the ones who pulled the artifacts out of the ground,” he said.

Excavations at Troy. Full Gallery 

UC Classics Professor Carl Blegen led excavations at Troy that profoundly changed our understanding of ancient civilizations in the Mediterranean. Photo/UC Classics

Troy of legend

Troy was the backdrop for one of Greek mythology’s most dramatic stories: the Trojan War between the Greeks and Trojans and the ransacking of Troy mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid.

You can read a lot more written by Michael Miller published in an article in the University of Cincinnati’s web site at: https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2024/07/uc-archivist-explores-troys-invisible-workers.html 

The following is an excerpt from a much longer article written by the National Park Service:

Acadia National Park, Cape Cod National Seashore, Cape Lookout National Seashore, Cumberland Island National Seashore, Fire Island National Seashore,more »

Climate change compels National Park archeologists to use science to save valuable data from deteriorating and disappearing back into the sea. In response, the National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center (SRC) and its partners are expanding their shipwrecking timber tracking initiative, the Shipwreck Tagging Archaeological Management Program (STAMP), to encompass all national parks with bodies of water.

What is STAMP?

Through STAMP, the public helps archeologists monitor shipwrecks to understand how sites change over time. Natural conditions like wave action, storms, tides, and currents can all cause coastal and intertidal submerged sites to erode and degrade. Human factors like vandalism and looting, construction, dredging, and development also have adverse effects on these sites. Occasionally both natural and human factors can detach or disarticulate wooden timbers from historic shipwrecks. These timbers may wash ashore, become covered or uncovered by sand, wash out to sea again, and travel enormous distances pushed by waves and wind. Tracking these timbers will increase knowledge of site formation and change and may even lead to the discovery of previously unrecorded wrecks.

The Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) initiated STAMP at Gulf Islands National Seashore. The first FPAN workshop tested STAMP documentation and tagging on a timber brought to the park as an example of how STAMP can help archeologists track the degradation of shipwrecks over time and how storms and hurricanes affect these sensitive archeological sites.

An intertidal shipwreck in Fire Island National Seashore marked with STAMP tags for park visitors to engage. NPS photo. The Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) initiated STAMP at Gulf Islands National Seashore. The first FPAN workshop tested STAMP documentation and tagging on a timber brought to the park as an example of how STAMP can help archeologists track the degradation of shipwrecks over time and how storms and hurricanes affect these sensitive archeological sites.

How does STAMP work?

STAMP projects consist of two distinct execution phases: tagging and recording. During the tagging phase, trained staff and volunteers participate in documenting shipwreck remains.

You may find the full article at: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/shipwreck-tagging-archaeological-management-program.htm. 

Most research in human genetics has historically focused on people of European ancestries—a long-standing bias that may limit the accuracy of scientific predictions for people from other populations.

Now, a team of Johns Hopkins University scientists has generated a new catalog of human gene expression data from around the world. The increased representation of understudied populations should empower researchers to attain more accurate insights into genetic factors driving human diversity, including for traits such as height, hormone levels, and disease risk.

The work deepens the scientific field's understanding of gene expression in populations of Latin America, South and East Asia, and other regions for which limited data existed.

Published today in Nature, the findings may improve future studies of human variation and evolution.

"We now have this global view of how gene expression contributes to the world's diversity, the broadest picture to date in populations that have been poorly represented in previous studies," said senior author Rajiv McCoy, a Johns Hopkins geneticist. "We're trying to better understand the connection between variation at the level of our DNA and variation at the level of our traits, which previous genetic studies have looked at but with a really persistent bias that often excludes non-European ancestry populations."

You can read more in an article by Roberto Molar Candanosa published in the Johns Hopkins Magazine's web site at: https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/07/17/diversity-bias-genetics/.

An 83-year-old Holocaust survivor who was rescued as a toddler, grew up knowing nothing about his origins, and finally discovered his long-lost family thanks to a MyHeritage DNA  DNA test. Last week, Shalom finally met his newfound relatives for the first time in the United States.

Their reunion was covered by many major news outlets from all over the world, including ABC News, NBC News, the Associated Press, and the Post and Courier. You can read the full story on the  MyHeritage blog. or on a different video on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/vY22oNZnNdQ.

This is an incredibly important story that highlights the importance of DNA testing especially for older family members.I suspect you will enjoy the full story at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2024/07/orphaned-holocaust-survivor-83-reunites-with-the-family-he-never-imagined-he-had/.

Hungary is a main provider in the publication of synchronized, or in other terms, georeferenced maps of the Napoleonic era. As a result of a new research, Hungarian and German researchers have synchronized maps produced during the Napoleonic wars about Southern Germany with modern databases, which has made it possible to track a wealth of interesting information, historical and environmental changes.

Working with Arcanum Databases Ltd, several archives in Europe and scientists at ELTE, the Hungarian experts have gained considerable experience in georeferencing historical maps, often hundreds of years old, with modern databases. As a result of their work, the portal, formerly known as MAPIRE, now known as Arcanum Maps, allows users to browse the changes in Europe's natural and built environment from the 1700s to the early 20th century on maps that are all mapped into the coordinate system of today's databases, so that they can be overlaid on each other. The landscapes of our country and the Carpathian Basin, for example, are seen in this database for almost two decades.

In a recently published scientific paper, Gábor Timár, head of the Department of Geophysics and Space Sciences at the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, and Eszter Kiss, of the German Federal Office of Cartography and Geodesy in Frankfurt am Main (Hessen), describe the synchronization process of the map of Southern Germany, completed in 1797 by the Habsburg military survey, with today's maps. The interesting thing about the project is that this map was produced in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars, and very quickly, as no one knew when the war would break out again. This meant that actual field surveys could only be carried out where no previous field information was available. Rather, map-making consisted of redrawing existing atlases, maps and sketches for various purposes into a common system with a unified map legend. This paper presents this unified coordinate system, analyzing archival sources and errors in synchronization.

It is relatively rare that classical archival work coupled with mathematical analysis is successful, but this is exactly what happened here. The above map fragment is taken from a document found by the authors in the War Archives of the Austrian State Archives. It is assumed that this sketch was the basis for the map work; the rectangles show the positions of the future map sections, with some typical landmarks used for later map drawing. The network of rectangles is accompanied by a coordinate system rotated by 5 degrees in relation to the rectangles, with a text clearly using the vocabulary of the Cassini cartographic coordinate system.

But why would Habsburg cartography have used the French survey system, especially, as the work shows, with Paris as the starting point, when the “black & yellow” army was drawing the map in preparation against the French? It is because the first survey of the territory, during the Seven Years' War alliance, was carried out by Jean-François Cassini along the Danube and the Rhine, and the points (still available in Google Books) were used as 'imported material', as were other map sketches of the time. Thus, if the 1797 map is synchronized with Cassini's projection, the residual errors are smaller than if other map systems are chosen.

The researchers' work has thus resulted in the publication of a 220-year-old sketch-based map work on the MAPIRE portal with errors of a few hundred meters, taking into account the residual errors.

The paper on this work was published in the June issue of the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information: https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/13/6/207

The following is an an announcement from the (US) National Archives and Records Administration:

The (US) National Archives (NARA)  will soon have digital access to the morning reports of Army units during the final year of World War ll. These will offer descriptions of unit locations, award nominations and soldier personnel movements.

The records have been transferred to a digital format that now exist on microfilm at the National Archives facility in St. Louis, MO.  The project, which also includes more than a decade’s worth of post-war draft registration cards, was announced this year as part of a partnership with Ancestry. All records will be available to the public and were not previously available online.  Using the reports, researchers can track a veteran from the date that they joined a particular unit to the date that they left it.

“The unit’s clerk would type the reports onto long strips of paper and send them in batches to the Army, she said. The Army used this form of morning reports until 1974 when it switched to a system of personnel data cards. The Navy and Marine Corps kept similar records but in large diaries as opposed to individual papers.” 

Once this round of records is transferred to a digital format, full sets of morning reports from 1944 through 1946 will be available online.

Once the process is complete, the records will be available to access through the National Archives website https://www.archives.gov/. 

Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/history/2024-07-15/army-records-national-archives-morning-reports-14494497.html

The following announcement was written by the folks at Projectkin.org:

Projectkin will celebrate the role of “place” in family history by sponsoring a new Pacific Edition of the Society of Genealogists’ 2024 challenge program, “All About That Place,” from September 27 to October 6, 2024.
 
The Society of Genealogists, Society for One-Place Studies, British Association for Local History, and other generous UK-based contributors are sponsoring this event with pre-recorded talks released online hourly between 8 AM and 8 PM for ten days. Unfortunately, 8 AM in London is midnight in California. 
 
To encourage genealogists and family historians with one-place studies in the New World and the Pacific Rim, Projectkin is creating a variation of this fabulous event with 5 live programs starting at midnight in London, or 4 PM in California and early morning in Australia. These five program days will feature 1, 2, or 3 different speakers and time for discussion. 
 
To learn more and sign up to give a talk, please visit Projectkin.org/AATP24. 

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 some old timers (such as myself) who still enjoy copyinh rather high speed Morse Code:

On July 12, 1999, the last Morse code message was sent from a Bay Area radio station, marking the end of an era. Every July 12, the Historic KPH Maritime Radio Receiving Station in Point Reyes revives the golden age of maritime radio, with volunteers exchanging Morse code messages worldwide. The Mercury News reports: 

Friday's "Night of Nights" event, which commemorates the long-gone stations and the skilled radiotelegraph operators who linked ships to shore, starts at 5:01 p.m. -- precisely one minute after the 1999 message ended. Operators will keep working until 11 p.m. "We're carrying on," said historical society president Richard Dillman, 80, who learned Morse code as a boy. "Morse code is not dead."

The event, based at KPH's stations that are now part of the wild and windswept Point Reyes National Seashore, northwest of San Francisco, is not open to the public. But amateur radio operators around the world can participate by sending messages and exchanging greetings. The operating frequencies of the historical society's amateur station, under the call sign K6KPH, are 3550, 7050, 14050, 18097.5 and 21050. Radiogrammed messages arrive from as far away as New Zealand and Europe, rich with memories of rewarding careers or poignant tributes to lost loved ones. "Dear dad, we love you and we miss you so much," said one. The station uses the original historic KPH transmitters, receivers, antennas and other equipment, carefully repaired and restored by the society's experts. [...]

All over the Pacific coast, stations closed. KPH's receiving headquarters -- an Art Deco cube built between 1929 and 1931, its entrance framed by a tunnel of cypress trees -- was acquired by the National Park Service in 1999. Its transmission station is located on a windswept bluff in Bolinas. [Historical society president Richard Dillman] and friend Tom Horsfall resolved to repair, restore and operate KPH as a way to honor the men and women who for 100 years had served ships in the North Pacific and Indian Ocean. "It was a brotherhood," said Dillman. "There was camaraderie -- a love of Morse code and the ability to do a job well." [...] They pitched their ambitious plan to the National Park Service.

"At first, I was skeptical about their proposal," said Don Neubacher, the Seashore's former Superintendent. "But over time, I realized the Maritime Radio Historical Society, led by Richard Dillman, was a gift for the National Park Service." "I was impressed by the overwhelming knowledge of early wireless and ship-to-shore communication," he said, "and their lifelong commitment to saving this critical piece of Point Reyes history." With a dozen society volunteers from all over the Bay Area -- all over the age of 60, self-described "radio squirrels" -- they went to work. They meet on Saturday mornings over coffee and breakfast "services" dubbed "The Church of the Continuous Wave," sometimes ogling over radio schematics. Then, for a few hours, they broadcast news and weather.