The Department of History at the University of Limerick, Ireland is delighted to invite you to an event entitled Come Learn about the History of Family taking place on Wednesday 29 March, 1600-1700 (for those outside of Ireland click here to see what time this is for you). This event will appeal to anyone interested in history, including genealogists and family historians.

Join Dr Rachel Murphy, lecturer on the MA History of Family at the University of Limerick, to find out more about the history of family and some of the topics that historians of family research.

During the event, which is part of the Limerick Lifelong Learning Festival 2023, participants will be introduced to three graduates of the course who will present findings from their MA research:

There will be time for questions at the end of the session.

The event is hosted by the Department of History, University of Limerick. To attend the event please register here. A link to attend this live event will be sent to you close to the event date. If you have any queries or issues registering, please contact rachela.murphy@ul.ie

We look forward to welcoming you (virtually) on the day.

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com:   

(+) Lost 1820 U.S. Census Records Fou

Enrique Hurtado de Mendoza Collection of Cuban Genealogy

Tulsa Historical Society and Museum Adds 50,000 Photos to Online Archive

Monticello Awarded $3.5 Million Mellon Foundation Grant for Getting Word African American Oral History Project Expansion, Digital Archive

Georgia Historic Newspapers Update Winter 2023

Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Reveals Identities of Hundreds of People in Early 19th-Century Portrait Album

Augusta Genealogical Society Virtual Genealogical Program: "Call to Arms - Civil War Research"

Beethoven's Genome Offers Clues to Composer's Health and Family History

From TheGenealogist: Five Welsh Counties Tithe Maps Are Now Georeferenced to Modern and Historic Maps

FindMyPast Releases Two New Collections of Irish Probate Records

Newly-Digitized Historic Newspapers Added to Findmypast

Explore Stories of Military Ancestors With Findmypast

Recently Added and Updated Collections on Ancestry.com

Keep Loved Ones Digitally Close with Life360

Your CD and DVD Discs May Fail Sooner Than You Think

Fake FBI Bitcoin Phone Scam Involving “Spoofed” Department of the Attorney General Phone Number

The following announcement was written by the folks at TheGenealogist:

You can now explore Wales in the 1830s with the Welsh tithe maps in the Map Explorer™ tool 

Five Welsh counties Tithe Maps are now georeferenced to modern and historic maps

TheGenealogist has linked the tithe maps for the Welsh counties of Brecknockshire, Cardiganshire, Denbighshire, Flintshire and Monmouthshire to the Map Explorer™. For the first time TheGenealogist’s subscribers are now able to use these Welsh tithe maps, georeferenced to a variety of historic and modern maps. This will allow the researcher to see how the area has developed from Victorian times through to modern day.

General View Ebbw Vale

The tithe survey came about as a result of the Tithe Commutation Act 1836 designed to change tithes from a payment in kind to a monetary payment. These records are useful for researchers in that they record the names of owners and occupiers, from all levels of society at this time, and give details and value of their holdings. 

Originally tithes were made in kind (crops, wool, milk, young stock, etc.) and were collected mostly for the support of the parish church and its clergy. Generally representing a tenth of the yearly production from cultivation or stock rearing, almost all Welsh parishes were subject to this levy at this time.  

With Map Explorer™ researchers have the ability to display a variety of historical and modern maps so that family, social and house historians are able to view the same plot of land throughout time. Often this will reveal a landscape that has completely changed over the years, as we discover in this week's case study of a house developed in Victorian times. 

    • Total of 421,260 georeferenced tithe plots join those already released for England

    • 570 georeferenced maps have been added in this release 

    • Map Explorer™ now has a total of 5,630,801 georeferenced plots linking to Tithe records across 12,374 total georeferenced Tithe maps

See TheGenealogist’s article: Tracing a House in the Monmouthshire tithes to modern day https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/tracing-a-house-in-the-monmouthshire-tithes-to-modern-day-1678/ 

Find out more at TheGenealogist.co.uk/maps/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections. 

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!

The following announcement was written by the Augusta (Georgia) Genealogical Society:

When:  Saturday, April 22, 2023

Time:  11:00 am - 12:00 pm  EST 

Where: Online

Price:  FREE  to AGS members or $10 for nonmembers

Click here to register:  https://www.augustagensociety.org/

The registration deadline is April 20, 2023

Limited seating to view the virtual presentation will be offered at Adamson Library. To reserve a seat, please call (706) 722-4073.

Speaker:  Diane L. Richard, MEng & MBA

We often focus on the military service and pension records created due to the Civil War. We’ll take a quick peak at these and then dive into the records most don’t explore. If you don’t look further, you are missing out on some gems like old soldier home, voter registration, Freedmen’s Bureau, Freedman’s Bank, artificial limb records, detailed maps, compensation claims, legislative petitions, relief for indigent spouses, newspapers, and more! As an event that affected every citizen, there are many records we can mine as we pursue our ancestors.

Diane L Richard, MEng & MBA, Mosaic Research and Project Management (MosaicRPM),www.mosaicrpm.com, has been doing genealogy research since 1987 and, since 2004, professionally focused on the records of North Carolina and southern states. She regularly contributes to InternetGenealogy. She has authored over 500 articles on genealogy topics. In 2019 she published, Tracing Your Ancestors -- African American Research: A Practical Guide via Moorshead Publications. Since 2016 she has been the editor of the North Carolina Genealogical Society (NCGS) journal.

As a speaker, she has delivered webinars and in-person talks about the availability and richness of records documenting southerners, pursuing formerly enslaved ancestors and their descendants, genealogical research tips, techniques, tools and strategies, under-utilized resource collections (online and on-the-ground), and much more. She has appeared on "Who Do You Think You Are?" (Bryan Cranston episode).

She is a board member of NC Historical Records Online (NCHRO), http://nchistoricalrecords.org/, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing public access to high-quality images of original records and other relatedinformation useful to researching North Carolina history and genealogy.

The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum has now added 50,000 of its photos online. This means anyone can view pieces of Tulsa's history, any time they want and all for free.

"This has been a 20 year project, not as much time as been dedicated in the past to digitizing, but we've been putting a lot of hours into it currently," said archivist Luke Williams.

The archive is full of more than 250,000 photos and they are getting as many put online as they can.

Archivist Luke Williams said each photo has a unique number, and that's scanned in with the photo as well as a brief description.

"Digitizing is, we digitize on a scanner, convert the photo to a digital format, then we input that into our software, so there is some cataloging involved also," he said.

He said while they've been digitizing photos for years, it really became a priority during the pandemic when more and more people were viewing archives online.

He said this is a way to make sure people have access to Tulsa's history.

"Our mission is to preserve and safeguard Tulsa's history, we want to be able to tell everybody's story," he said.

You can read more in an article by Jordan Tidwell published in the newson6.com web site at: https://www.newson6.com/story/641e13bfc1bebf072ab90a16/tulsa-historical-society-and-museum-adds-50000-photos-to-online-archive 

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

The U.S. Census records for the extreme northern strip of land in Maine were missing for more than 150 years. The microfilms of the 1820 U.S. Census do not contain records for the towns of the Upper St. John River Valley in what is today Aroostook County, Maine. That was a problem for me, as several of my ancestors lived in the area in 1820 and were not listed in the 1820 U.S. Census. Or at least, I couldn't find them.

However, there is good news for those of us looking for ancestors in the Upper St. John River Valley. The records were located some years ago, although long after the microfilm copies had been made. In fact, a transcription of those missing census records is even available on the World Wide Web. I found some of my ancestors listed on the Web site, more than thirty years after I first looked for them in the National Archives microfilm!

The transcriptions are not available on genealogy web sites as the transcriptions on those web sites apparently were made from the microfilm images.

In 1820, the land of the Saint John River Valley in what is now Maine and New Brunswick was disputed territory, claimed by both the United States and Great Britain. A U.S. government official, such as a census enumerator, could have been arrested and incarcerated by the British authorities if he dared to enter this disputed territory. Likewise, British (Canadian) officials faced similar risks from the U.S. law enforcement officers of the time. 

When I found the towns were not listed in the 1820 U.S. census records on National Archives microfilm no. M33, reel no. 38, I assumed that the census takers (enumerators) never set foot in the disputed territory. It seems that I was wrong. In fact, one brave census enumerator, True Bradbury, did enter the disputed territory and did count the citizens he found, even those living on what is today the Canadian side of the border. However, the entries he made are not on microfilm no. M33, reel no. 38.

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/13144616.

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. 

Since the university was founded in 1972, Florida International University has always been an epicenter of Cuban heritage studies. The school now offers more than 70 courses related to Cuba across more than 20 disciplines, spanning the humanities and social sciences, the natural sciences, law, architecture and medicine. Of interest to genealogists is the Enrique Hurtado de Mendoza Collection of Cuban Genealogy, held in the Green Library at the univesity.

Florida International University Libraries has acquired this collection of thousands of books, handwritten and typed letters, photos and other primary documents relating to Cuba and Cuban genealogy, collected over four decades by Felix Enrique Hurtado de Mendoza. The collection includes rare 17th and 18th century books, long out-of-print publications and periodicals that few, if any, U.S. libraries hold in their catalogs. Additionally, thousands of unpublished family genealogies and manuscripts make this collection particularly significant.

The collection, which also contains genealogy books for countries in North, Central and South America, as well as Spain, France, Italy and other European countries, came to FIU in 200 boxes. It will facilitate historical, genealogical and anthropological research of Hispanic America, including Spanish Florida and Spain. The collection includes hundreds of sacramental and civil documents, unpublished Archive of the Indies records and beautiful old photographs of Cuban families.

You can learn more about the collection at the Florida International University's Digital Library of the Caribbean at https://dloc.com/collections/iFiuHurtado.

NOTE: This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I believe every U.S. resident should be aware of this issue.

Scammers are calling USA residents pretending to be Federal Bureau of Investigations (“FBI”) agents. The callers are lying and telling potential victims that they owe unpaid fines and are going to be arrested unless they immediately make a payment in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, or using other methods.

Comment by Dick Eastman: There is one statement in the above notice that bears repeating: "Law enforcement agencies, including the Department of the Attorney General and the FBI, will never — and I repeat, never — call Hawaiʻi residents on the phone ..."

If the FBI (or any other law enforcement agency or the IRS or the CIA or the Department of Homeland security or any other similar government agency) wants to talk to you about a "problem," they won't call you on the phone. For minor problems, they will send you a letter (probably by registered mail, return receipt requested) or they will send an agent to your residence in order to talk to you in person.

If you ever receive a phone call from someone claiming to be from the FBI (or any other law enforcement agency or the IRS or the CIA or the Department of Homeland security or any other similar government agency) and claiming that you owe money or that you broke some law, it is a scam. Period. No exceptions.

Hang up immediately.

The following is a press release written by the Mellon Foundation:

The Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities, recently awarded $3.5 million to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello to expand the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s pioneering Getting Word African American Oral History Project. Established in 1993, Getting Word is a decades-long initiative to collect and share the stories of Monticello’s enslaved community and their descendants. This transformational, multi-year donation from the Mellon Foundation represents an unprecedented investment in the project.

“The Mellon Foundation’s confidence in our boundless efforts to research, share, and rightfully acknowledge the history of Monticello’s enslaved community recognizes the Thomas Jefferson Foundation as a model in this important work,” said Gardiner Hallock, Interim President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “We are deeply appreciative of Mellon’s support, which will propel the Getting Word project forward and build upon the remarkable contributions of former and current staff as well as the hundreds of descendants of Monticello’s enslaved families who have generously shared their families’ oral histories with us over the past 30 years.”

Support from the Mellon Foundation’s “Monuments Project” program will launch the second generation of Getting Word with the capacity for national impact and international awareness, creating a model for other sites seeking to engage descendant communities in meaningful ways. The grant allows the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to hire program staff, robustly engage with project advisors, reach out to descendant communities nationwide, invite the public to bring history forward into national and global dialogues, and create a digital archive of documentary references to enslaved people. Ultimately, this support will enable Getting Word staff to conduct more than 275 oral histories with descendants of Monticello’s enslaved families over the next four years, doubling the number of oral histories collected over the last 30 years of the project.

“We are inspired by the Mellon Foundation’s grant to Getting Word ,” said Andrew M. Davenport, Public Historian and Director of Getting Word. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to build upon the project’s mission to collect and preserve family histories from the eras of slavery and abolition to the present. Through archival research and collaboration with descendants, Getting Word historians have reconnected families riven apart by slavery and its aftermath. The project, as an archive and as a community, has helped to recontextualize Monticello as a Black heritage site of reflection, remembrance, and reunion. The Getting Word archive and the community are inextricably interwoven, and Mellon's support will propel the project into its next generation.”

The Monuments Project is an unparalleled $250 million commitment by the Mellon Foundation to transform the nation’s commemorative landscape by supporting public projects that more completely and accurately represent the multiplicity and complexity of American stories. Launched in 2020, the Monuments Project builds on the Mellon Foundation’s efforts to express, elevate, and preserve the stories of those who have often been denied historical recognition, and explores how we might foster a more complete telling of who we are as a nation.   

As a result of Mellon’s generosity, Monticello will hire additional Getting Word staff to support this important work. The organization currently seeks a Public Historian to join the project, with more positions posted in the near future. Please visit monticello.org/jobs for the latest information.

******

About The Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation was incorporated in 1923 to preserve Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Today, the foundation seeks to bring history forward into national and global dialogues by engaging audiences with Jefferson’s world and ideas and inviting them to experience the power of place at Monticello and on its website. Monticello is recognized as a National Historic Landmark, a United Nations World Heritage Site and a Site of Conscience. As a private, nonprofit organization, the foundation does not receive ongoing government support to fund its twofold mission of preservation and education. For information, visit monticello.org.

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.

Newspaper publishing returns with a bang this week, with 1.6 million new pages, four new titles, and updates to a further 54.

New titles:

· Camberley News, 1987-1988

· Grimsby Target, 1986-1992

· Luton on Sunday, 1997

· Wrexham Mail, 1993

Updated titles:

· Airdrie & Coatbridge World, 1994, 1996

· Ayrshire World, 1993

· Beaconsfield Advertiser, 1995

· Birkenhead News, 1995

· Bridgend & Ogwr Herald & Post, 1993

· Bristol Evening Post, 1998

· Bristol Times and Mirror, 1912

· Buckinghamshire Advertiser, 1998

· Caernarvon & Denbigh Herald, 1993

· Cardiff Post, 1995

· Chatham Standard, 1993, 1996

· Chertsey & Addlestone Leader, 1994

· Derby Daily Telegraph, 1996-1997

· Dumfries and Galloway Standard, 1897

· Dunmow Observer, 1996

· East Kilbride News, 1993

· East Sussex Focus, 1991

· Farnborough News, 1988

· Fulham Chronicle, 1999

· Glamorgan Gazette, 1992-1993

· Grimsby Daily Telegraph, 1924-1928, 1933, 1935-1938, 1940-1949, 1951-1953, 1955-1964, 1967, 1969, 1975-1979, 1985

· Hamilton World, 1993-1994

· Hammersmith & Shepherds Bush Gazette, 1998

· Hinckley Free Press, 1897

· Hoylake & West Kirby News, 1993-1994, 1996

· Leicester Advertiser, 1850

· Lincoln Target, 1998

· Lincolnshire Echo, 1996

· Llanelli Star, 1993, 1995

· Manchester Evening News, 1980-1981, 1995, 1998

· Middlesex Chronicle, 1973-1976, 1978-1979, 1981, 1983-1984

· Neath Guardian, 1989

· New Observer (Bristol), 1993

· Northwich Chronicle, 1997, 1999

· Nottingham Guardian, 1863, 1889, 1910

· Nottingham Recorder, 1999

· Pinner Observer, 1995

· Rhondda Leader, 1993

· Rhyl, Prestatyn Visitor, 1993

· Rossendale Free Press, 1993

· Rutherglen Reformer, 1996

· Salford City Reporter, 1887, 1993

· Sandwell Evening Mail, 1997

· South Wales Echo, 1999

· St. Neots Weekly News, 1996, 1998

· Staines & Egham News, 1993-1996

· Strathearn Herald, 1997

· Uxbridge Leader, 1998

· Vale Advertiser, 1997

· Wales on Sunday, 1993-1995

· Wembley Observer, 1993, 1995

· Western Daily Press, 1997, 1999

· Widnes Weekly News and District Reporter, 1999

· Wishaw World, 1993-1994, 1997