Allan J. Pinkerton (25 August 1819 – 1 July 1884) was a Scottish American detective and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Pinkerton emigrated as a young man to seek his fortune in the United States of America. A self-educated man, he had little formal training in any of the professions usually available to immigrants. However, that never slowed the ambitious young man.

He settled in Dundee Township, Illinois, fifty miles northwest of Chicago. He built a cabin and started a cooperage (making barrels). His home soon became a stop on the Underground Railroad, smuggling escaping slaves northward to Canada.

Pinkerton worked with the local sheriff to identify some counterfeiters who were working nearby. Soon he was appointed as the first police detective in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois. In 1850 he partnered with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in forming the North-Western Police Agency, one of the nation's first private detective services. The company later became Pinkerton & Co and finally Pinkerton National Detective Agency, still in existence today as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, a subsidiary of Securitas AB. 

Pinkerton's business insignia was a wide open eye with the caption, "We never sleep." People in the area soon started referring to the company as "private eyes," a term still in use today.

Pinkerton's agency solved a series of train robberies during the 1850s, and he soon had all the business the fledgling company could handle. He never seemed to be afraid of danger. In many cases he personally chased down and arrested dangerous criminals. As a staunch abolitionist, he attended the secret meetings held by abolitionists John Brown and Frederick Douglass in Chicago along with abolitionists John Jones and Henry O. Wagoner. At those meetings, Jones, Wagoner, and Pinkerton helped purchase clothes and supplies for Brown. Jones' wife, Mary, guessed that the supplies included the suit Brown was later hanged in after the failure of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in November 1859.

During the first two years of the Civil War, Pinkerton served as head of the Union Intelligence Service and reportedly was involved in numerous dangerous undercover missions. He not only sent his men out as spies, but Pinkerton often personally became a spy himself. If captured, he undoubtedly would have been hanged.

After the Civil War, Pinkerton continued his pursuit of train robbers. He was hired to capture the infamous train robber Jesse James but failed at first. The railroad canceled the contract. Frustrated, Pinkerton refused to concede defeat. He continued to chase Jesse James at his own expense and even paid his employees out of his own pocket to continue the chase. He still failed and eventually gave up after James allegedly captured and killed one of Pinkerton's undercover agents (who was working undercover at the farm neighboring the James family's farmstead).

Allan J. Pinkerton continued to manage his detective agency and to find and apprehend outlaws, often doing the most dangerous work himself.

There is a bit of a question about the cause of Pinkerton's death. As an older man, he developed several ailments, including malaria, which he had contracted during a trip to the southern United States. He also suffered a mild stroke when he was about 65 years of age. However, the most common story is that this man – who had spent his life personally chasing many of the most dangerous outlaws in the country and being a spy in wartime – was walking his wife's poodle one day when the dog reportedly wrapped its leash around Pinkerton's legs. Pinkerton tripped, fell to the concrete, and severely bit his own tongue. He died of a gangrene infection of the tongue a few days later.

After Pinkerton spent a lifetime of danger, a poodle brought him down, something the most notorious badmen of the time had been unable to accomplish.

Allan J. Pinkerton is buried in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago.

References:

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Pinkerton

Encyclopædia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/461110/Allan-Pinkerton

Works by or about Allan Pinkerton at the Internet Archive: http://bit.ly/2v3Svjw

The "Jews" archival series of the Historical Archive of the Secretariat of State—Section for Relations with States and International Organizations (ASRS)—is now fully available for consultation on the internet.

The series consists of 170 volumes containing requests for help addressed to Pope Pius XII by Jews, both baptized Catholics and many who were not, from all over Europe, after the beginning of the persecutions by fascist governments in the 1930s and 1940s.

You can read more in an article in the Vatican News at: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-02/vatican-secretariat-state-jews-archives-fully-online.html.

From an article by David Jackson published in the Newswire.net web site:

Family trees are big business right now - and with good reason. It can be fascinating to learn more about the people in our distant families, those long-forgotten ancestors who lived generations ago.

A hero from the war, a local legend from our home town - or the Holy Grail of family trees; a link to royalty - there aren't many people who wouldn't love to find some of these gems in their ancestral line.

Famous, Rich or Royal Connections

There are some people who just love the historical aspect of tracing their family origins. Perhaps they're keen to uncover a family mystery that has baffled relations for years. Or maybe they're curious about how some members of the family can be so widely spread across the globe.

It can be fascinating to learn more about our ancestors, and for many who get hooked on tracing their roots, it can even become an obsession - it's why sites such as ancestry.com are so popular, and why the new technology that allows for rapid genetic profiling has become such a booming industry.

For many people who are looking into their lineage, though, there's usually more than a little hope that they may uncover one of the ultimate prizes of a family tree; being related to someone rich, royal or famous - or even better, all three!

What could be more exciting to learn that you have links to a famous movie star, sports legend, historical figure or world leader? Or perhaps you'd prefer to uncover a long-lost relative that just happened to accumulate a fortune and then die with no heirs to share it with. Or maybe you're a history lover or you're obsessed with The Crown and would love nothing more than to learn that you have blue blood running through your family history.

It's amazing how often people do find these types of connections when exploring their family tree, if they go back far enough. After all, rich, royal and famous people all have families who also have families - they've got to be related to some people!

Ancient Royalty & Modern Celebs

It's not just us mere mortals who love to explore our ancestry and lineage in the hopes that we're related to a distant king or queen. Even celebrities love to find out more about their family tree, and who wouldn't be delighted to find a link to a noble Baron or a famous French monarch?

The popularity of shows like Who Do You Think You Are and Hello Magazine articles about celebrities with royal links show just how captivated this investigation can be. It's even more exciting when celebs discover that they do in fact have a family tie to someone they admire or a notable figure from history.

For example, did you know that Beyoncé, Angelina Jolie and Hilary Duff can all claim a connection to the royal houses of Europe? Whether it's a distant cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, or an ancestral link to the royal court of Versailles, these types of royal connections make for great conversations, so who can blame today's celebrity royalty for wanting to join the fun?

If you'd like to see just what exciting finds might be waiting for you in your family tree, you can start learning more by getting one of the many specialist apps that are available. Or if you're really keen, you could hire an expert who is particularly skilled at sleuthing out these ancestral links.

You can read more at: https://newswire.net/newsroom/blog-post/00255138-could-there-be-a-royal-title-in-your-family-tree.html.

The Genealogical Society of New Jersey (GSNJ) will be celebrating DNA Day at our 2023 Spring Conference in West Windsor on Saturday, April 22nd. The event features two nationally known speakers – Blaine Bettinger, world-renowned Genetic Genealogy expert, and Sydney F. Cruice, an expert in Mid-Atlantic genealogy. The dual-track event features four sessions on Genetic Genealogy/DNA along with four sessions on military records, probate records, church & cemetery records and land platting.

Registration includes catered breakfast and buffet lunch, syllabus and door prizes. The GSNJ Bookstore will be open.

PROGRAM INFORMATION & REGISTRATION: https://www.gsnj.org/gsnj-2023-spring-conference/

You can download a conference flyer here. 

Multi-year project includes every city and town in New Hampshire.

The UNH Library recently wrapped up a massive multi-year project that digitized and organized all known annual reports for every town in New Hampshire, an undertaking that essentially reached every municipality, past and present, throughout the state.

The New Hampshire City and Town Annual Reports Collection now boasts 35,491 volumes, including more than 20,000 added during the most recent blitz that began in 2021 thanks in part to a grant from the New Hampshire State Library.

When that portion of the project began, 20 of the 234 New Hampshire cities and towns were not represented in the digital collection. All 20 of those towns were added during the recent push, as was content from an additional eight village precincts and two extinct towns.

Given the reach throughout the entire state the project aligns perfectly with Embrace New Hampshire, one of four strategic priorities UNH President Jim Dean outlined for the university in January of 2019.

“We have touched every town in the state, including some towns that don’t even exist anymore, and that is going to have some really lasting impacts on our reputation as an institution that reaches out to New Hampshire,” Eleta Exline, scholarly communication librarian and the principal investigator on the project, says.

You can read more in an article by Keith Testa published in the unh.edu web site.

Comment by Dick Eastman: I want to read the 1976 to 1980 annual reports for Lebanon, New Hampshire. That is one of the several times in lived in New Hampshire. I read those reports when I lived there but I wasn't smart enough to save them.

From an article by Hallie Levine published in the LiveStrong web site:

If you go on Amazon or any other consumer shopping website, you'll most likely find hundreds of different direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests that promise to reveal everything from your family heritage to whether or not you have the ability to carry a tune or have a preference for sweet or salty.

These tests are everywhere these days: In fact, the use of DNA testing kits such as AncestryDNA, 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA has soared over the past decade, and about 100 million people had taken one by the end of 2021, according to the American Medical Association.

You can read a lot more at: https://www.livestrong.com/article/13776354-facts-about-dna-testing-kits/.

University of Arizona faculty and community partners have created a public archive of interviews with asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants incarcerated in Arizona.

A group of University of Arizona faculty members and their community partners are preparing to launch a public archive containing the stories of asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants incarcerated in Arizona.

The DETAINED: Voices from the Migrant Incarceration System project is a collaborative effort involving UArizona, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project and Salvavision. The Florence Project provides free legal and social services to individuals in immigration detention in Arizona. Salvavision is a Tucson-based organization that provides aid and support to asylum-seekers and migrants displaced in the remote town of Sasabe, in Sonora, Mexico.

The DETAINED archive will be available online Wednesday, and a launch event will be held that night at the Blacklidge Community Collective. The collective, located at 101 E. Ventura St., is a community space that hosts a variety of local projects, events and resources. The event will include stations where people can listen to archived interviews, as well as digital projections of art and memorabilia collected from former detainees.

The archive grew out professor of art David Taylor's decades-long focus on the nature and changing circumstances of the borderlands – an interest he developed after moving from the East Coast and thinking about the tropes that make up society's conception of Western history. A photographer, Taylor said any story he told would not be that of a person who personally crossed the border or someone seeking asylum or work. Instead, he strives to let those people tell their own stories.

"My goal in all of this is to ensure that people's experiences do not disappear. These are people who don't get to write history. They don't usually have their say," Taylor said.

You can read more in an article by Logan Burtch-Buus published in the University of Arizona web site at: https://news.arizona.edu/story/uarizona-helps-launch-archive-sharing-stories-detained-immigrants.

RTÉ Archives could be made more open to the public under proposed new laws.

The current archive is “inaccessible and prohibitive” according to Green TD Patrick Costello.

Members of the public, as well as academics and other broadcasters, must request material which was broadcast on RTÉ television and may even have to pay a fee to obtain the footage or photographs.

However, the operation of the archives may be revamped if the Government decide to support Mr Costello’s bill and open it up to the public.

Academics will also have greater use of the archives to facilitate their research.

The RTÉ Archives website states video footage and photographs, owned by RTÉ, can be made available for broadcasting, research, educational use, private use or for other professional purposes.

For members of the public, the State broadcaster gives “limited access” to the archives through its Archive Sales team.

“Subject to copyright status and availability of resources, RTÉ provides limited access to RTÉ Archives through the RTÉ Archive Sales team. We can also supply photographic images from RTÉ Stills Library collection,” the RTÉ Archives website states.

“Material is made available on the strict understanding that it is for private use only.”

You can read more in an article by Gabija Gataveckaite published in the MSN web site at: https://tinyurl.com/3ax3zkt3.

Got a low-quality photo album that you want to upscale with the power of AI? Upscayl is what you need on your Linux machine.

With the latest generation of phones, we're used to having images automatically sharpened, upscaled, and otherwise polished to perfection by machine learning models and on-device neural nets.

Older photos or those taken without advanced hardware have suffered in comparison. Upscayl runs on your Linux machine and uses AI models to sharpen and upscale low-resolution images into ultra HD.

Camera technology has advanced immensely in the two centuries since the first heliographic engravings, and older images usually don't compare well with photos taken on the latest iPhone.

Most images in 2023 are digital and are viewed on screens where you can zoom in on the tiniest details. In analog photos scanned at even the highest settings available 20 years ago, the details can be unclear, and the pixel count is still lower than those taken by even some budget smartphones.

It's even worse with digital photos from the early 2000s. Those beautiful sunsets and wedding photos may have looked fabulous when 800x600 was the pinnacle of screen resolution, but today, they barely cover a corner of your 4k gaming monitor.

Zooming in or resizing renders the image ugly, and exposes compression artifacts that you don't want to see.

Upscayl Makes Your Old Pictures Look Fantastic

Fortunately, the same kind of machine learning and image enhancement carried out by high-end phones, can be carried out on your Linux PC.

You can read more in an article by David Rutland published in the MakeUseOf web site at: https://www.makeuseof.com/upscale-low-resolution-images-upscayl-linux/.

"Utterly breathtaking" historical documents dating as far back as 1695 may have been lost forever if not for a man who rescued the collection 30 years ago from a skip.  

NOTE: According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a “skip” is a commn word in Ireland and Great Britain meaning "a large metal container into which people put unwanted objects or building or garden waste, and which is brought to and taken away from a place by a special truck when people ask for it."

Limerick historian Dr Paul O’Brien said he is “blown away” by the discovery of the archive spanning most of Munster that he believes will “tell the story of land ownership in Ireland.” 

The Mary Immaculate College lecturer said he’s running out of words to describe its “phenomenal” sheer volume and geographical range. 

“It covers huge swathes of land up the country and just gives a lot of agency to tenant farmers and tenant voices that aren’t generally covered out there,” he said. 

A man found the documents about 30 years ago in a skip outside a house in Limerick but only managed to save 20%, or 28 boxes, out of the collection due to the sheer volume. 

You can read more in an article by Jack White published in the Irish Examiner web site at: https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41073983.html .