Google has announced a $1 million grant to support the development of the "Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes" project through its philanthropic arm, Google.org. The initiative aims to deepen awareness and knowledge about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, reaching additional audiences worldwide through a live-streamed virtual tour. 

The project enables people unable to physically visit the camp, including those in remote locations, to engage with the history of Auschwitz. The virtual tour, conducted by a guide, includes survivor testimonies, multimedia materials, and interactive opportunities for participants to ask questions.

"The funding will help develop the technological platform and its accessibility, including real-time subtitles, AI-based translation into multiple languages, and the digitization of survivor testimonies," said Rowan Barnett, director of Google.org for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

"This support will also provide comprehensive training for guides and enhance the capacity to bring such visits to large communities worldwide, including partnerships with schools to educate more students about the Holocaust."

The online guided tour program, "Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes," was recently launched by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. This innovative initiative provides a virtual visit to the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.

Auschwitz concentration camp, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. (credit: WALLPAPER FLARE)

The two-hour tour is divided into two parts: Auschwitz I and Birkenau. Educators conduct the tours live, utilizing multimedia materials, archival photographs, artistic works, documents, and testimonies of survivors.

You can read a lot more at: https://bit.ly/3yLs1Fs.

A party invitation. A broken flipflop. A wig. Letters of complaint about road conditions, and an urgent request for more beer. It sounds like the aftermath of a successful spring break, but these items are nearly 2,000 years old.

They’re just some of the finds from Hadrian’s Wall – the 73-mile stone wall built as the northwestern boundary of the Roman Empire, sealing off Britannia (modern-day England and Wales) from Caledonia (essentially today’s Scotland).

While most of us think of Pompeii and Herculaneum if we’re thinking of everyday objects preserved from ancient Rome, this outpost in the wild north of the empire is home to some of the most extraordinary finds.

“It’s a very dramatic stamp on the countryside – there’s nothing more redolent of saying you’re entering the Roman empire than seeing that structure,” says Richard Abdy, lead curator of the British Museum’s current exhibition, Legion, which spotlights the everyday life of Roman soldiers, showcasing many finds from Hadrian’s Wall in the process. A tenth of the Roman army was based in Britain, and that makes the wall a great source of military material, he says.

But it’s not all about the soldiers, as excavations are showing.

You can read more in this fascinating story written by Julia Buckley and published in the CNN web site at: https://bit.ly/3X5KJ4K.

If you use Google’s search engine, you will want to know about this. The following was written by Rob Beschizza and originally published on the boingboing.net web site:

"&udm=14" is a URL parameter you can add to Google search result URLs that removes all the new AI and ad stuff. And udm14.com is a pseudo-search engine that redirects automatically to these simplified yet more substantial results for your query. It's the work of Ernie Smith, who describes &udm=14 as the "disenshittification Konami code" for Google.

The results are fascinating. It's essentially Google, minus the crap. No parsing of the information in the results. No surfacing metadata like address or link info. No knowledge panels, but also, no ads. It looks like the Google we learned to love in the early 2000s, buried under the "More" menu like lots of other old things Google once did more to emphasize, like Google Books.

Some report that it doesn't work for them; it might depend on an ongoing rollout of the underlying feature to users. If the URL trick works for you, the site will. It doesn't change ranking—for"verbatim" results you can add "&tbs=li:1" to a Google results URL. The code is on github if you're thinking of implementing it in some other way.

The following is a press release written by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS):

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) is proud to announce the launch of the National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive (NIBSDA), the first-ever digital archives database on Indian Boarding Schools. NIBSDA is a groundbreaking project aimed at preserving and bringing to light the history of the U.S. Indian Boarding School era. Over the last four years, NABS has been dedicated to compiling and digitizing records from Indian boarding schools.  

Indian Boarding Schools hold a complex and often painful legacy in American history. For generations, Native American children were forcibly removed from their families and communities and sent to these schools, where they were subjected to cultural assimilation and abuse. The repercussions of this traumatic chapter continue to reverberate through Native communities to this day.

Through NIBSDA, survivors, families, researchers, educators, tribal leaders, and the general public will have the ability to access information that allows them to gain a better understanding of what happened at Indian boarding schools. This digital repository will include documents, photographs, and oral histories, offering invaluable insights into the experiences of those who attended these institutions and the impact they had and continue to have on Native communities.

"This initiative marks a significant milestone in NABS commitment to truth, healing, and justice," said NABS CEO Deborah Parker (Tulalip Tribes). "The majority of all Indian boarding school records are currently not available to the public, by making these records accessible, we are taking a big step towards honoring the history and strength of Native peoples and building a more just and equitable future."

In August, NABS released our latest research, identifying 523 Indian boarding schools across the U.S. This is the largest list ever compiled, and we know it is going to take years and the support from all of Indian Country to collect records for all of these institutions. 

We invite the public to explore this resource and join us in our efforts to acknowledge the past and create a brighter future for generations to come. 

For more information and access to the Native Indian Boarding School Digital Archives, please visit boardingschoolhealing.org/nibsda/.  

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is available for interviews and further inquiries. Contact Joannie Suina, Director of Communications at JSuina@nabshc.org to schedule.

Nancy Battick has written an interesting article entitled "Mathematical Ancestry” that shows how to use some not-so-common research techniques to possibly find some difficult-to-find ancestors. You can find her article at: https://observer-me.com/2024/05/27/opinion/mathematical-ancestry/.

Here is an appropriate article published on Memorial Day plus it is a project where YOU can make a difference:

Tunis Cole was obviously proud of his service in the war and his role in the fight for American freedom.

And the Revolutionary War veteran hoped that he could have some measure of financial security in his old age. So Cole wrote to the U.S. government to ask for a pension made possible by a series of laws passed in the 1800s.

"...That having been encouraged to do so, (Cole) prays Government to look favorably upon his claims and grant him something to relieve his wants and give him comfort in this Autumn of his Earthly existence, that he may close his eyes in gratitude upon a nation upon whose altar of Freedom he has devoted many of the best years of his youth…"

Cole's 1848 pension application was written, like thousands of other veterans' applications, by hand – sometimes by the vets themselves, sometimes by their widows, sometimes by friends who helped the elderly farmers and tradesmen who'd taken up arms for their new country.

Because the records of the day weren't always reliable or consistent, many veterans had to include details to prove their service: their units, their deployments and leaves, their comrades in arms and commanding officers, the places they fought, and even the horrors they witnessed.

Now, almost 250 years later, Americans are hearing a new call to arms. Citizen archivists are needed to transcribe original pension applications from the nation's first veterans into a massive database − and help reveal their extraordinary and untold stories.

'America's first veterans' and the country's 250th birthday

The collaborative effort by the National Park Service and the National Archives targets the roughly 2 million pages of handwritten pension applications from the Revolutionary War that are already scanned and digitized. Organizers want a database that can be searched by battles, names, dates and more.

So far, according to Jason Wickersty of the park service, 52,360 pages have been transcribed, and 1,602 pensions completed.

You can read more at: https://bit.ly/3R1C3J9.

The following is from an article written by Abigail Martin and published in the digitalnc.org web site:

Thanks to our partners at the Winston Salem African American Archive, DigitalNC is proud to announce that nearly five hundred new records are now available online! This collection contains an astonishing variety of records from Winston-Salem’s African American history, and include records from businesses, churches, sports teams, and more. The records date from as far back as 1848 to as recent as 2020, covering nearly two centuries of history. While many of these records are from Winston-Salem proper, there are an astounding variety from towns such as Kernersville, Clemmons, and Lewisville.

The church records predominantly hail from Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. There are mid-century Sunday Service Bulletins, newspaper features on prominent pastors, and many photos of churchgoers, choir-members, and church events. A personal highlight of this collection is the inclusion of The Spotlight, a monthly newsletter published by New Bethel Baptist Church. Each issue of The Spotlight featured updates on the lives of its congregation, schedules for church events, and photos of previous events. This batch includes seven issues of The Spotlight, ranging from 1956 to 1974 and chronicling over a decade of New Bethel’s flock. 

Also included in this collection are an excellent series of records highlighting Black owned businesses from 20th century Forsyth County. Two issues of the N.C. Minority Business Directory provide resource guides for the years 1995 and 1992, and a set of photographs picture business owners relaxing, smiling, or working in their shops. Businesses featured in this collection include the Twin City Bus Line, WTOB Radio Broadcasting, and Wilson’s Grocery Store.

Perhaps the most colorful feature of this batch, however, is the amazing arrangement of sports records from Winston-Salem’s history. This collection has an amazing variety of material, from color photographs to football programs to sticky notes. The author’s personal favorite (perhaps of this entire batch!) are the two football programs from Atkins High School. Each of these programs feature amazing cover illustrations, photographs, and team rosters. The programs are filled to the brim with care and attention, with margins in each program featuring notes on referee signals, illustrated in an iconic mid-century copy.

If you’re interested in digging in to this treasure trove of Forsyth County history, you can find all of the new records online at DigitalNC here.

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, I am publishing it because I am interested in the topic (I was born and raised in Maine in a small town on the edge of the "Northern Forest Region." I suspect others may be interested in this subject also.)

Tucked away in a quiet, climate-controlled building on the University of Maine campus is a collection of old film. Donated to Fogler Library’s Special Collections by the James W. Sewall Company (Sewall) in 2019, the collection includes over 3,000 large canisters, each with a bright yellow “Kodak” sticker on the front and 250 photos contained within. 

Taken from airplanes between 1946 and 2015 for land surveying purposes, much of the photo collection tells a story of the forest spanning the northeastern United States — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and beyond. They have sat mostly unused since their donation, waiting for a student with the right academic background to come along and figure out how to use them — and for what purpose. 

Peter Howe, a Ph.D. student in the School of Forest Resources at UMaine, will be working with the photographs to create the Northern Forest Historical Atlas. The project, which Howe is working on in collaboration with Paul Smitherman, a library specialist in Special Collections, will result in the digitization of tens of thousands of photos into mosaics made with photogrammetry software.

Howe, who has an undergraduate degree in geography from Middlebury College in Vermont, was raised in central New Hampshire and spent his formative years studying, working and adventuring around the woods of New England. There he nurtured a passion for mapping and ecology that led him to work with historical photographs as a window into the past. He graduated from Middlebury in 2018 and worked as a freelance GIS consultant and cartographer before starting the Ph.D. program at UMaine in fall 2023.

During his time at Middlebury, Howe produced novel maps of historical tree line shift in the White Mountains of New Hampshire dating back to 1943.

“I had gotten into this kind of niche area of mapping and working with historical photographs, using them as a record of the historical landscape and to understand change across time,” he said.

You can read a lot more in an article published in the University of Maine's web site at: https://bit.ly/3yBEvzy.

A new public archive facility in Grande Prairie will help preserve the history of Alberta's South Peace region for generations to come. "People can come and … contribute to their own history," Ellyn Vandekerkhove, executive director of the South Peace Regional Archives, said at a grand opening on Wednesday.

Previously housed in the Grande Prairie Museum, the archives is now occupying 7,555 square feet of space in Centre 2000, a community facility in Grande Prairie's Muskoseepi Park.

Members of the public and researchers can examine the archival materials in the reading room. The materials are stored in a vault, where they reside in boxes on metal shelves. The archives now takes up more than 7,500 square feet in Centre 2000, a community facility in Grande Prairie, Alberta.

You can read more in an article in the ca.news.yahoo web site at: https://yhoo.it/3wHkw1X.

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

NOTE: This article contains personal opinions.

In case you have not heard the news, many genealogy libraries are struggling financially these days. For this article, I will focus solely on the larger societies that have their own buildings or perhaps rent a significant amount of space in other buildings. I will also look only at societies that have libraries that are not funded by taxpayer dollars. Many of them have paid employees, although not all do. 

An example of one such library would include the New England Historic Genealogical Society. The same may be true of the Society of Genealogists’ library in London. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) library in Washington, D.C. also is a huge, non-profit resource, although the sponsoring organization is not limited to genealogy interests. The DAR library does seem to fit in the same business model as the libraries of large genealogy societies. 

You can find hundreds of smaller examples, including the Vesterheim Genealogical Center and Naeseth Libraryin Madison, Wisconsin; the Hagen History Center (formerly known as the Erie County Historical Society’s Library) in Erie, Pennsylvania; and the American French Genealogical Society in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and many more. The Godfrey Memorial Library in Middletown, Connecticut, may also fit into this category although it is not a part of any society. It is an independent genealogy library, but with business and financial realities similar to the libraries sponsored by societies. 

Each of these libraries holds thousands of books of value to genealogists. Yet I believe that each of these libraries is in danger of extinction. Like so many species of creatures that saw their source of sustenance dwindling, some will evolve and others will disappear.

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society in New York City sold its headquarters building, including an extensive genealogy library. The National Genealogical Society also closed its library and gave away the 17,000+ books in its collection to a much larger organization many miles away in 2001, then sold its headquarters building. Will other genealogy libraries face the same fate in the next decade or two?

The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) remains alive and vibrant with a well-organized and growing library in Boston. Indeed, NEHGS is well funded, and the future of the society and its library seems assured for many more years. Even so, NEHGS did shut down its lending library a few years ago because of financial losses. Revenue derived from lending books did not cover more than a fraction of the expenses of staffing and running the lending library. Members can no longer borrow books by mail directly from NEHGS. 

NOTE #2: I am a former employee of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston and loved the time I spent there. I managed to sneak into the Society’s vast library at every opportunity I could find. I also used this library many times as a member for twenty years or so before I became an employee. 

NOTE #3: I will ignore the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. While not supported by taxpayer dollars, this library is supported by a religious organization with financial reserves that are not typical of other genealogy libraries.

I must also say that I love using old books. It is a thrill to open a leather-bound book printed 100 years ago. The smell and the texture of the book gratify the soul and the senses. I also find it fascinating to read the information that came from the mind of an expert many years ago and was then set in print on old-fashioned printing presses. I can imagine the printer bending over the type case with tweezers in hand, selecting each and every individual letter of that book, one at a time. That was done so that I and other future genealogists could benefit from the knowledge of that time. As much as I love technology, there is an appeal to holding old books in the hand that I never enjoy when I read the same information on a computer screen.

I also enjoy walking up and down the stacks of any genealogy library. However, I believe the days are numbered when we will be able to do so. 

Running a library of any sort requires money. In many cases, it requires a lot of money. Property values and other expenses in New York City, Boston, or in the NGS’ former library location of Alexandria, Virginia, can be astronomical. In some cases, salaries of the employees, along with their medical plans, 401K retirement plans, and other associated labor costs, can be the highest expense of all. These expenses can be critical in a non-profit organization that is funded by membership dues and by financial gifts and fund-raising.

Anyone in business can tell you that such expenses never decline and, in fact, rarely remain level. Labor expenses, building expenses, insurance, and even postage costs keep escalating. The amount budgeted a decade ago for library operation and maintenance won’t begin to pay today’s bills. These libraries need hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and those expenses increase year after year. 

The expenses over a ten-year or fifty-year period are staggering. One genealogy library I know spends more than one million dollars per year to keep the library in operation. That number increases 5% to 10% a year. Even at a modest 5% annual increase, the society will need to spend more than $12 million in the next ten years simply to maintain status quo. If we use assume a 10% annual increase in budget, the total required will be close to $16 million over ten years. Of course, projecting further into the future yields astronomical figures. 

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/13361540. 

(A Plus Edition password is required to access that article.)

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077.