The annual RootsTech conference is opening this morning in Salt Lake City. (Well, technically it opens a couple of hours from now. It is 6:00 AM local time as I write this.) However, as with any major conference, activities really started the day before with “sessions before the opening.” I see lots of people I know in the local restaurants and elsewhere so it is obviously a good-sized crowd gathering for this conference.

I am going to make one important point this early in the morning: if you cannot be here in person, you can still attend (FREE of charge) virtually. Simply open your computer, smartphone, or tablet computer and watch many activities from your living room or any other location of your choice.

Multiple activities are being broadcast worldwide on the Internet and the conference organizers are expecting thousands of people around the world to attend “virtually.” Some of them probably will lose sleep because of timezone differences.

In countries where English is not the dominant language, many viewers will listen to the events spoken in local languages being spoken by native speakers located near them in their local countries or nearby.

Yes, this is a major production involving thousands of people (both producing the conference as well as attendees) from around the world.

To attend the conference virtually with your computer, open a web browser and go to: https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/.

To attend from your smartphone, tablet computer, or other mobile device, go to the Apple App Store or to the Google App Store as appropriate, and search for RootsTech. Once you find it, click on INSTALL or DOWNLOAD to download a special app created for this conference and within a minute or two, you can be watching the events live from Salt Lake City. The apps and the web site also provide all sorts of information about schedule times, speakers, and much, much more

.NOTE: Many, of the events are also being recorded on videotape and will be available “on demand” on your computer, smartphone, or tablet at a later date and time after being edited a bit. The dates of the rebroadcasts have not yet been announced but will be announced as the videos become available.

OK, I am going to shut down and go participate in today’s activities live.

See you at RootsTech (either in person or virtually!)

The following press release was written by  Vivid-Pix:

Public interest in genealogy is at an all-time high. At the same time, many genealogy organizations are challenged to expand public outreach. With millions of DNA testers and even more people interested in family history, there is an imbalance between the public’s interest in genealogy and its understanding. The Family Matters program is designed to help the genealogy community and society.

“Family Matters provides organizations with the tools needed to connect with the public, combining the Vivid-Pix Memory Station™ scanning, image improvement and story-capturing software; education on photo organization, family history, storytelling and photo reminiscence; and turnkey marketing to attract new audiences to the wonderful work that these organizations do,” said Rick Voight, CEO of Vivid-Pix.

“We are particularly excited that the toolkit includes a focus on memory care,” said Matt Menashes, Executive Director of the National Genealogical Society. “Many of us, Rick and myself included, have cared for loved ones, aging parents and grandparents with cognitive decline. Family history and photo-reminiscence help capture the stories of loved ones and improve cognition. With programming for caregivers and family members, the genealogy community can have a big impact on society and an even bigger impact on an individual’s quality of life.”

Genealogy organizations now have access to a turnkey solution for public programming. The program assists organizations to reach new audiences, including caregivers, that can help more people do their family history. In doing so, organizations gain opportunities to increase membership and develop new volunteers and leaders.

Video about the program is available at: https://www.vivid-pix.com/familymatters/

About Vivid-Pix
Vivid-Pix helps individuals, families, friends and organizations with their most treasured memories by inventing and harnessing technologies. Vivid-Pix Solutions (https://www.vivid-pix.com/solutions/) assists family historians, as well as paid and unpaid caregivers, to assist with cognitive decline and dementia through Photo Reminiscence Therapy. Vivid-Pix patented software has been sold in over 120 countries, improving old, faded photos and documents.

About NGS
Founded in 1903, the National Genealogical Society (NGS) inspires, connects, and leads the family history community by fostering collaboration and best practices in advocacy, education, preservation, and research. We enable people, cultures, and organizations to discover the past and create a lasting legacy. The Falls Church, Virginia, based nonprofit is the premier national society for everyone, from the beginner to the most advanced family historian.

Black History Month is coming to a close, but there are more resources than ever to learn about African American legacies in Atlantic City.

The Atlantic City Free Public Library marked Black History Month by touting its newly digitized repository “The City of Dreams: The Atlantic City Experience.” The repository, the digitization of which was facilitated by a federal grant, features about 14,000 items from 25 collections that tell the story of the Black community in Atlantic City and the impacts it has made in South Jersey and across the country.

Atlantic City Library Director Robert Rynkiewicz said he and his colleagues chose to prioritize digitizing its Black history collection. He cited the depth of the collection itself, calling it “robust”, and cited its widespread popularity.

“We all felt there was a lot of interest in that history, in that community,” Rynkiewicz said. “The Black community built this city in a lot of ways.”

Atlantic City Library Archivist Jacqueline Silver-Morillo was the director for the City of Dreams digitization project. She said she frequently receives requests from people to view the collection and was excited to expand access to the storied photographs and readings.

“Instead them having to come into the library to view the collection, they can now view it from their homes,” Silver-Morillo said.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Atlantic City Library a grant for more than $122,000 in 2021 in support of the digitization project.

The NEH grant funded the purchase of the needed equipment for the project, including a scanner that could digitize books, maps, photographs and scrapbooks, as well as three-dimensional items, in the collection. It also helped the library hire assistance, including Digital Archives Assistant Kate Rowland, of Stockton University, and Special Collections Librarian Heather Perez from the university’s Richard E. Bjork Library. Rynkiewicz said the importance of the project became clear at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when public-health shutdowns demonstrated how critical it was for modern libraries to have their collections available virtually.

You can read more in an article by Christopher Doyle at: https://pressofatlanticcity.com/news/local/black-history-month-at-atlantic-city-library-strengthened-by-digitized-collection/article_07c4cb8c-b68b-11ed-95b6-df52bdb93a92.html

Starting tomorrow, I will leave home and fly to Salt Lake City. I plan to attend RootsTech, the big genealogy conference. 

RootsTech has been noted in the past as being the largest genealogy gathering in the world. I suspect the same will be true this year, despite the fact that the world is recuperating from the covid pandemic. While the attendance may not be as large as past years, I suspect it will still be the largest genealogy conference of 2023.

I'll be traveling with a MacBook laptop computer and I'll also be carrying an audio recorder, and a camera. I hope to capture some of the show's highlights digitally and will provide them in this newsletter's web site in the following days.

I expect to spend most all day Wednesday in the air and will be rather busy at the conference on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Sunday will again be spent in the air as I fly home. 

Since I will be busy, I expect to post fewer articles to the newsletter during the next few days. Most of the articles I do post will probably be about the RootsTech conference. 

If you are planning to be at the RootsTech conference, I'll see you there! If you see me walking through the hallways, flag me down and say “Hello!” (I’ll be wearing “the hat.”) If you are not at the conference, you can read about it at http://www.eogn.com.

Economics professor Joseph Price said he believes it is possible to love a billion people. He grows that love one day, one handwritten to-do list and one census record at a time.

Price and his team of more than 50 students work at the BYU Record Linking Lab to grow FamilySearch’s genealogical tree through record attachment, the development of auto-indexing technology and other projects.

Price’s passion for family history began several years ago as a hobby. “I was at BYU Education Week, gave it a try and just fell completely in love,” he said.

Before long, he was spending 10 to 15 hours per week working on family history, he said. It was not until a conversation with a colleague at an economics conference that he said he realized the potential of technology to accelerate family history work.

“This little light went on in my head. I just wondered what would happen if we brought the two approaches together,” he said.

Price said he created the Record Linking Lab in response to this perceived gap at the intersection of economic research, machine learning and genealogy. 

The RLL partners with FamilySearch, a genealogical database operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to grow the site’s family tree.

One of the lab’s earliest projects was focused on linking records of families with children in the 1910 census, which Price said is “getting really close to complete coverage.”

Since then, the lab has expanded its reach to other censuses and other continents. One of Price’s recent and fast-growing efforts has been with BYU-Pathway students in Papua New Guinea and nine African countries. 

You can read more in an article by Emma Everett published in the BYU web site at: https://universe.byu.edu/2023/02/27/byu-professor-connects-the-human-family-with-research-lab/.

Plans are moving ahead to create the Peter and Mary Kalikow Genealogy Research Center at Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Lower Manhattan following a visit by Peter Kalikow and his daughter, Kathryn Kalikow, with Museum President and CEO Jack Kliger. The three reviewed plans for the Center, a new facility that will allow Museum visitors to access Jewish genealogy resources and discover their own unique Jewish history.

The new facility will use the Museum’s respective collections and JewishGen, the Museum’s wholly owned affiliate and the world’s largest and most significant resource for Jewish genealogy, to give visitors the opportunity to preserve their Jewish family history and heritage for future generations.

HJ Kalikow president Peter Kalikow said, “My family believes that knowing and embracing one’s family history is one of the most powerful connections we have to our heritage. By utilizing the latest technology, coupled with the enormous data resources of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, this new research center will have the means of connecting Jews with their own personal history that would have otherwise been lost to time or the infamy of the Holocaust.”

A new chapter in Black American history is unfolding at the Newberry Library, courtesy of a recently acquired glass slides collection highlighting the significance of Chicago and several other Northern cities during the Great Migration in the early 1920s.

The Great Migration was the movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Midwest, Northeast and West.

The slides are believed to have been produced between 1922 and 1923 by the Methodist Episcopal Church and, according to the Newberry Library, “are the most complete set known to survive, and few, if any, of the images have ever been published.”

Will Hansen, 43, the Newberry Library curator, says the slides were purchased at auction in October.

“We had our eye on an auction of African Americana and knew that would be something incredibly fascinating for the Newbery and to have in Chicago,” Hansen says.

The slides are glass sheets with an image placed between them. They are based on black-and-white images that have been hand-colored.

“They are a series of lantern slides, also known as sort of magic lantern slides,” Hansen says. “These slides were most likely created to raise funds for the Methodist Episcopal Church’s operations supporting migrants as well as Black communities.”

Miriam Thaggert, a former Newberry research fellow, says the images create a strong connection between the viewer and the people pictured in the slides.

You can read more in an article by Vanessa Lopez published in the Chicago Sun-Times web site at: https://tinyurl.com/2p8hpe8h

The following announcement was written by the folks at Trent Park House (located at Trent Park, Cockfosters Road, Barnet, EN4 0PS, England).

People who have a connection to the incredible history of Trent Park House will have their memories recorded for a new museum.

Memories and stories from people connected to the history of Trent Park House will be recorded and “brought to life” thanks to a new lottery-funded project.

The Grade 2-listed Georgian mansion – which played a key role in the Second World War when the conversations of captured Nazis were recorded by a team of ‘secret listeners’ – is currently being restored. A new museum had been due to open this year, but this has now been put back until 2025.

Last year The National Lottery Heritage Fund announced it was giving £225,000 to Trent Park Museum Trust for an oral history project which would “bring Trent Park to life”. This week the Cockfosters charity announced it was now launching the project, with the aim of preserving the rich history of the house through the collection of stories and memories from those who have a personal connection to it.

The personal stories will be shared through a variety of mediums, including audio recordings and transcripts. They will form an online archive that will explore the history of the Second World War secret listeners as well as being used for the museum and website, which are currently under development.

The oral history project will be led by Rib Davis, who has been actively involved in the collection and dissemination of oral history for over 40 years.

Anyone with a personal connection to Trent Park House are encouraged to get in touch with the museum trust: Visit trentparkhouse.org.uk

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

(+) Essential Things I Never Travel Without – Part

Jerome E. Anderson, R.I.P.

Family History Knowledge Helps American Adolescents Develop Healthy Sense of Identity

Could There be a Royal Title in Your Family Tree?

Limerick Historian 'Blown Away' by Discovery of Documents

University of New Hampshire Library Digitizes Town Reports for Entire Granite State

Webinar: The Seven Phases of African American Genealogy

Genealogical Society of New Jersey (GSNJ) Spring Conference, 22 April 2023

YIVO to Digitize Millions of Documents From Jewish Labor Bund

UArizona Helps Launch Archive Sharing Stories of Detained Immigrants

‘Inaccessible’ RTÉ Archives in Ireland to be Made More Open to the Public Under Proposed Legislation

San Francisco State Bay Area Television Archive Is a Treasure Trove of History on Film — and Streaming Online

WWII Love Letters Hidden Behind Wall in New York Home Delivered to Family 80 Years Later

Vatican Secretariat of State Publishes Full "Jews" Series of Historical Archive Online

OGS Call for Lecture Proposals for 2024 Annual Conference

More Than 355 Square Miles of Additional Lloyd George Domesday Records Released on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™

Findmypast Adds More Than 200,000 Unique Records

The Unusual Cause of Death of Allan Pinkerton

Make Old Low-Resolution Images Look Great on Linux With Upscayl

Storj Next Could Make Decentralized Storage More Appealing to Both Supply and Demand Sides

4 Things Genetic Counselors Want You to Know About At-Home DNA Tests