This is a quick note to announce that I think I am back in operation from my recent hospitalization and recuperation. I am not back to "my old self" but I do feel better than I did for the past week or so.

I want to thank everyone for posting the "get well soon" comments. There is no way that I can reply to every one. However, I have read everyone and I want to say a heartfelt "Thank You" for each.

I will add one comment. Several folks suggested I seek medical help. Indeed, I did just that. I lost count but think I saw at least a dozen different doctors, most of them specialists of one sort or another. It is because of their excellent care that I am back within a week. I cannot offer enough "thanks" to all the excellent medical care I had.

I do think my return to writing this newsletter will be a bit slow to begin with but I hope to be back to full speed before long.

Again, thanks for all the well wishes.

 - Dick Eastman

I am delighted with the comments from yesterday's announcement that I am offline for medical reasons. There is no way i can write individual replies to each person. But they are welcomed and I want to say a heartfelt "Thank You" for each.

In case you are interested: I spent lastnight in a local emergency room and today am in the hospital. I have had 2 cat scans and expect a 3rd and maybe more. In short, I am in good hands.

Sooner or later, I'll be back.

I had a small accident over the weekend and it looks like it will require several days to recuperate. In the meantime, posting new articles online (such as this one) seems to require a Herculean effort. So please excuse me if I crawl off to a quiet corner and heal.

Last Friday, after a long, long road trip. I arrived at the home of one of my passengers. When I went to get out of the automobile, I either tripped or slipped or stumbled (I don't know which) and then fell to the driveway pavement, hitting my head on the pavement in the process. 

It hurt. Big time. I saw stars and lightning and lots of other flashing lights. I stumbled back to my feet and tried to carry on as normal. But things weren't normal.

For the sake of brevity, I won't list everything that happened after that. But the short trip to my home was difficult. When I got home, I fell to the ground several times while walking from the garage to my bedroom. Dizziness was the primary culprit, aided by double vision, and various other impediments. 

It is now 48 hours later and I have improved significantly, but not completely. My vision is still somewhat blurred and even typing this brief message is arduous. I think I need a few more days to recuperate. So I'm going remain in a quiet corner and let things heal.

Unfortunately, I run this web site as a one-person operation. There is nobody waiting in a backup role to step in when I am out of commission.

I'll be back...

The following announcement was written by Find My Past:

Norfolk parish records 

13,795 new original images and transcriptions have been released to help you discover more about your Norfolk ancestors. There are 3,853 new baptisms from 1923, 9,703 marriages and banns from 1939, and 239 burials from 1998. 

Wales parish records 

For Wales, a total of 15,428 baptism records have been added from 1923, with the largest updates to Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire. You can also delve into 10,236 marriages and banns records, covering the year 1938 and 13 Welsh counties. All include transcriptions and original images.  

Newspapers 

One new title, updates to a further five, and over 783,245 new pages make up this week’s newspaper release. 

New titles: 

·         Farnworth Chronicle, 1906-1917 

Updated titles: 

·         Belfast News-Letter, 1952-1953 

·         Campbeltown Courier, 1987-1988, 1990-1994 

·         Hoylake & West Kirby News, 1988 

·         Sheerness Times Guardian, 1975-1978, 1980 

·         Suffolk and Essex Free Press, 1949-1958, 1965, 1974-1975, 1979, 1981 

Muncie Public Library (MPL) recently received a $100,000 grant from The Patricia Schaefer Foundation Trust and a $30,000 Historic Preservation Fund grant from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. The grants will be used for the restoration of the Carnegie Library in downtown Muncie. Carnegie Library was built with funds from industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and opened in 1904. The building has continuously operated as a public library and now serves as the Local History & Genealogy branch of MPL. It is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in Indiana.

The goal of the restoration project is to make the necessary repairs to the iconic Carnegie Library building to protect the structure and its contents from the elements while preserving the building’s historic integrity. A professional assessment by Arsee Engineers in 2022 identified several priorities to be repaired, including the concrete curb at the base of the limestone facade, failed seams in the roof, water collection issues in corner gutters, spalled limestone masonry, failed mortar joints, failed sealant joints in limestone and at the perimeter of windows and wall openings, and damaged plaster. According to MPL Library Director, Akilah Nosakhere, a series of fundraising events and opportunities will be planned in the near future. “These initial and generous grants will allow us to begin work almost immediately to save this community treasure,” she said, noting that project details and specifications will be publicized and made available to those interested in submitting bids for the project.

According to Sara McKinley, Local History & Genealogy Supervisor at Carnegie Library, the goal is to maintain the building as a library offering access to unique collections and educational opportunities while also preserving the beauty of a rare and iconic historic structure for future generations. “Preserving historic places supports a community’s sense of belonging, legacy, and pride of place,” she said.

The Patricia Schaefer Foundation Trust was established by Patricia Schaefer, a former Director of the Muncie Public Library from 1959 until 1986. Schaefer remains a dedicated MPL supporter. In 2011, she donated the beautiful Sonata glass sculpture created by glass artist Christopher Reis that is on display at Kennedy Library.

This project has been funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Fund administered by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology.

A homicide victim has been identified 26 years after his body was found in Flagler County.

According to the Flagler County Sheriff's Office, deputies found the man's body in the intracoastal waterway in Flagler Beach on Sept. 10, 1997.

Deputies determined the male had been bound, shot and stabbed multiple times before being dumped in the water.

"The male had been bound, shot and stabbed mutiple times," Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly said.

The victim was unidentifiable until 2021, when his bones were submitted to Othram, a private forensic genetic genealogy corporation.

With the help of their genetic genealogy team, the victim was identified as Robert Bruce McPhail, who was 58 at the time of his death. He went by Bruce. 

The ID is a huge step, but the sheriff says there is much more work to be done.

You can read more at https://www.wesh.com/article/flagler-county-cold-case-robert-bruce-mcphail/44838951.

Dropbox, a provider of online data storage, is ending its unlimited option, saying a small handful of customers were using massive amounts of resources that had the potential to degrade the cloud service for the rest of its clients. From a report:

The company's highest-tier "all the space you need" storage plan will be capped at about 5 terabytes per user for new customers, the company said in a blog post.

While the plan was designed for businesses, some clients were instead using it for cryptocurrency mining, pooling storage with strangers, or re-selling the cloud service, Dropbox said. These uses "frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers," the company said. [...] The change follows Alphabet's Google removing "as much storage as you need" product branding for its highest-tier Workspace plan in May, according to copies of its website hosted on the Wayback Machine.

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I find it interesting. Perhaps you will also.

Want to watch YouTube with friends or family online? Here are several ways you can do that while syncing the video playback.

It's a great joy to share a YouTube video with friends. It's even better to watch it with them. Unfortunately, this isn't always possible, especially if you live apart.

So, we have compiled a list of ways to watch YouTube together with your friends. As well as helping you watch YouTube together, these services help you sync playback so that you and your friends are watching the same thing at the same time.

You can learn how to do this in an article by Joe Keeley published in the Make Use Of web site at: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/watch-youtube-together/. 

There are many reasons why every genealogist can use the Reimagine app for iPhones and Android phones. MyHeritage recently listed a few:

Reimagine is a photo app that allows you to harness the power of MyHeritage’s AI photo features and scan multiple photos in seconds right from your mobile device. This innovative app has really resonated with our users, who have already scanned, colorized, enhanced, restored, and animated hundreds of thousands of photos using the app.

Download Reimagine now

If you haven’t gotten in on the action yet — you’re missing out. Here are 7 reasons why you need the Reimagine app in your life:

1. To futureproof your photos (and beat procrastination)

2. To revisit your favorite memories and see them in a new way

3. To seize every opportunity to collect photos from your childhood

4. To share your memories and improved photos with family and friends

5. To declutter your living space without getting rid of important mementos

6. To organize your photos into customized albums and collections

7. To create unique and powerful gifts for loved ones

Interested? You can learn more about these features and more in the MyHeritage Blog at: https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/08/7-reasons-you-need-the-reimagine-app/.

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it contains information about the FREE word processor. spreadsheet, PowerPoint replacement, and other applications that I use and prefer over the Microsoft and Apple products:

The free competitor to Microsoft Office and Apple iWork just got another update.

LibreOffice is a popular open-source software suite, serving as a replacement for Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other applications. It's a great option if you want to edit documents and spreadsheets without paying a subscription for Microsoft 365

, especially since LibreOffice has more features and supports more file formats than many other free alternatives. The Document Foundation has now released LibreOffice 7.6 across all platforms, making the office suite even better.

LibreOffice Writer, the equivalent to Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, has a few useful improvements in LibreOffice 7.6. Adding the current page number to a document in the header or footer is now just one click, with the updated "New Page Number Wizard" option in the Insert menu. Tables of Figures can now be generated based on paragraph styles, instead of just from categories or object names, and bibliography entries can be edited more easily. The Paragraph Style dropdown menu also now gives you a list of styles used in the document, rather than the full list of available styles.

LibreOffice Calc, the Excel and Apple Numbers replacement, also has some great changes. There's a new compact layout for pivot tables, spreadsheets copied to another document don't lose their print range anymore, the autofilter can sort by color, and the Import Text feature (used for opening unformatted text or CSV files) has been improved.

Finally, there are a few new features for LibreOffice Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent) and Draw (a vector graphics tool). There's a new panel for switching slides while viewing a presentation, auto-fitting text scaling that now works more like Microsoft Office, and fonts for CJK and Arabic languages have been improved.

You can download LibreOffice 7.6 from the official website as the "Community" version, which is intended for personal home use, with Enterprise versions available for businesses and other groups who need custom features and dedicated support. The update should also roll out to Linux package repositories, the Mac App Store, and other places soon. Interestingly, LibreOffice isn't giving up on Windows 7 and 8 just yet, like we've seen from many other applications over the past year — it still works on Windows 7 SP1 or newer, as well as macOS 10.15 or later.

The Document Foundation also confirmed that this will be the last update in the LibreOffice 7.x family, as the group is moving to a new version scheme based on the year and month, like Ubuntu Linux. The next major update will be LibreOffice 2024.02 in February of next year.

You can learn more at: https://www.libreoffice.org/.