A newsletter reader sent me a link to an online article that made me shudder when I read it. The article claims:

“Do you have an old book or important document that has been passed down from generation to generation? These books and documents break down over time due to oxygen, moisture, and other hazards. By sealing it, you’re also giving it added protection in the event of a flood, fire (smoke), or accidental damage.”

I am no expert in preservation, but I believe the last thing you want to do to a valuable old book or photo or other document is to seal it in an airtight plastic bag, especially a bag that is not labeled "archival quality." Sealing in a cheap plastic bag can cause more damage than it prevents!

Paper, photographs, film, and tape are all made from materials that change over time. When these materials change, they will leach chemicals or give off gases that will loop back and inflict self damage if they are “sealed in their own juices.” Your books, photographs, and documents will last much longer if they are exposed to the air, where the chemicals and gases can dissipate. Storage temperatures between 60 and 75 degrees and humidity levels between 50 and 60 percent are ideal.

Archival plastic enclosures can be made from polyester, polypropylene, or polyethylene. Don't use any plastic that is not one of these three, and don't use anything that is not labeled "archival quality." Also, never seal it.

You can read advice written by Sherelyn Ogden, Head of Conservation for the Minnesota Historical Society, at Storage Enclosures for Books and Artifacts on Paper at https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/4.-storage-and-handling/4.4-storage-enclosures-for-books-and-artifacts-on-paper.

The following announcement was written by the organizers of The Family History Show Online:

The Family History Show Online is just two weeks away on Saturday 18th February 2023 and the subjects of the expert talks have been announced for this year’s virtual event.

Featuring All New Talks for the show!

The Restless Spy: the Secret Life of Ernest Oldham

Nick Barratt - Historian, Author and Professional Genealogist

Exploring how to research and write your family history to publication standard using a real case study.

Walking in the footsteps of our ancestors

Keith Gregson - Professional Researcher & Social Historian

This talk explores how with research and the right tools you can step back in time looking at where your ancestors lived, worked and spent their leisure time. Follow the routes they may have taken on old maps and look at the views they may have seen.

The Techniques of Building a DNA Research Tree

Donna Rutherford - DNA Expert

Learn how to build out your tree for doing DNA research, with a look at different methods and ideas.

Understanding and Dating Photographs

Stephen Gill - Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society

Learn how to investigate and date your old photographs.

Professionally presented and recorded, these lectures are not just streamed screen shares, and each talk will be available for 72 hours, so don't worry if you're in another time zone. These presentations will cover a wide variety of family history topics from multiple speakers and will be available throughout the day.

The Family History Show Online, organised by Discover Your Ancestors magazine, is a great opportunity for you to put your research questions to an expert, watch free talks and to speak to family history societies, archives and genealogical suppliers by text, audio, video chat or email from the comfort of your own home.

Make a date in your diary and snap up an early bird ticket now for only £7! You'll also get a downloadable goody bag worth over £10.

Save the date in your diary and snap up an early bird ticket now for only £7! You'll also get a downloadable goody bag worth over £10.

Societies, Archives and Companies

Visit exhibitors, societies, archives and companies in our virtual exhibition hall. Here there will be the opportunity to talk to some of the stallholders by text, audio or video from the comfort of your own home.

Show Partners

SoG, AGRA, TheGenealogist, GenFair, S&N Genealogy Supplies

Early Bird Ticket Offer

Buy your tickets in advance and save - tickets to attend The Family History Show Online are available from the website at just £7.00 each. You will also get a FREE virtual goody bag on the day worth over £10. https://thefamilyhistoryshow.com/online/tickets/

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

The International German Genealogy Partnership 2023 conference is one of the few occasions in which you will hear from and connect with people focused on German genealogy, and only German genealogy. Attendees will enjoy a weekend of programs and activities that highlight the diversity of the German-speaking genealogy community.

This amazing conference will offer more than 100 presentations and more than 25 Connection sessions — the most presentations we have ever offered and the largest number of German genealogy presentations at a genealogical conference in the U.S. 

The conference will be held in-person in Fort Wayne, Indiana, June 9-11. But there is also a robust virtual option, with access to programming in real-time. And a USB drive is available for purchase, allowing all attendees to watch the recorded presentations

Go to iggp.org to learn more and to register.

Look for presentations from speakers in Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Australia, Brazil, Serbia, and Germany. They do not usually present in the U.S. But you can hear from them at the IGGP conference! And, of course, U.S. experts in the field of German genealogy will speak as well.

Here are a few examples of those who will be in-person at the conference:

· Dr. Thomas Aigner from Austria, the man behind the website Matricula

· Viktor Pordzik, archivist at the Bremen State Archives and vice-chair of Die MAUS, the Bremen genealogical society

· Andrea Bentschneider, professional genealogist from Hamburg, with presentations on Mecklenburg and how to research in German archives

· Dr. Michael Lacopo with a brand new presentation about WWII SS records

·  Antje Petty of the Max Kade Institute on hidden resources in German language newspapers

· Katie Schober will lead "Learn to Read Vital Records: A Workshop Experience" — a first for the IGGP conference  

IGGP also will be delivering on two key aspects of its mission statement:

· We'll give attendees the opportunity to CONNECT with others who share their interests. Our Connection sessions bring you together for informal meetings on a variety of topics. A sneak peek at a partial list includes research in historically German-speaking areas of Europe, finding records that aren't online, favorite research databases, using maps in German research, and working with professional genealogists in Germany. Our conference app, Whova, also allows you to post messages and organize your own meetups with others.

· We'll SHARE German genealogical knowledge by sponsoring Librarians Day on Thursday, June 8. If you are a librarian or archivist who needs to answer questions about German genealogy research, our speakers will share their expertise with you.

This is a weekend not to be missed by anyone doing German genealogy research anywhere in the world. The early registration period ends March 3, 2023. Register now and save money. Go to iggp.org to register and to see more presentation titles, Connection topics and additional conference details. Questions may be sent to info@iggp.org.

The following announcement was written by The National Archives of Great Britain:

The Cartographic Branch is pleased to announce that RG 242: Target Dossiers Pertaining to the British Isles, 1938-1945 (NAID 3371016) has now been fully digitized and is available for viewing and download through the National Archives Catalog.

The records in this series are a subset of RG 242: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, 1675-1958. The dossiers, which are aerial photographs and maps of German identified bombing targets, are arranged by country and, thereunder, by location. Other series, not yet digitized, include France, Iceland, Egypt, Yugoslavia, and Iraq just to name a few!

This series relates specifically to the British Isles is made up of over 1,100 images.  Each dossier, in the most basic sense, is composed of three parts: a map, an overprinted aerial photograph, and a site report (in German). However, there are variances in the number of actual documents in each dossier.  Some dossiers have as few as a single document out of the three while others will have dozens of various versions of the documents included.  

Below is an example of a typical dossier from this series. This one focuses on Edinburgh, Scotland.

RG 242: Target Dossiers Pertaining to the British Isles, 1938-1945. Edinburgh, Scotland. Dossier GB-53-88. 1939. NAID 283024728.

RG 242: Target Dossiers Pertaining to the British Isles, 1938-1945. Edinburgh, Scotland. Dossier GB-53-88. 1939. NAID 283024728.

RG 242: Target Dossiers Pertaining to the British Isles, 1938-1945. Edinburgh, Scotland. Dossier GB-53-88. 1939. NAID 283024728.

In addition to the maps and aerial photos being detailed, the dossiers also provide a wealth of other information printed on the individual pages.  Coordinates, scale, date, locations, and dossier number are printed on each and every sheet making this series incredibly easy to work with even if you do not speak German!

Queen Camilla traveled back into the past with a little help from a historian — and had something funny to say about it!

The Queen Consort, 75, surprised Adam Simpson-York, who runs the Facebook page Medals Going Home, with a personal thank-you note. Simpson-York had recently mailed Buckingham Palace a photo he found on eBay of Queen Camilla's ancestor, her great-great-grandmother Edrica Faulkner, and he was delighted to receive a reply from the royal.

"Many thanks for the photograph of my great, great-grandmother. It is the first time I have ever seen her picture, I must say she looks a bit sad in it!" the Queen Consort wrote. "With best wishes, Camilla," she signed the note on Clarence House stationery, stamped with her new royal cypher.

Simpson-York said he was thrilled to receive such a genuine reply from the royal after mailing in the picture on Jan. 4.

You can read the full story at https://people.com/royals/queen-camilla-reply-collector-found-ancestor-photo/.

Today is Groundhog Day in the United States

Every February 2nd, residents of the United States turn their attention to the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. A group of men in top hats put a groundhog on a log in front of hundreds of people and wait for it to notice or not notice its own shadow. If Phil the groundhog sees his shadow, we're supposed to have six more weeks of winter. If he doesn't see it, winter is supposed to end earlier.

NOTE: The weather forecast for today for Punxsutawney calls for “mostly cloudy” skies. So what does that mean for how long winter is supposed to last?

A groundhog is also known as a woodchuck. It is a member of the family of rodents known as marmots.

A rodent in Pennsylvania, watched by men in top hats, can tell what the weather will be like for the next several weeks? Sounds strange to me! Actually, it is based upon the traditions of some of our ancestors.

Ancient Pagans celebrated the holiday Imbolc on the midpoint between the solstice and the equinox, which was considered the real beginning of spring. On our modern calendar, that day is February 2. Early Christians celebrated Candlemas on February 2nd, which marked the end of Mary's 40-day purification period after the birth of Jesus.

Celebrating the real beginning of spring makes sense to me but what about the groundhog? It seems that different animals have been used as weather prognosticators in various times throughout history. In much of Europe, the bear was used the predict the weather. If a bear awoke from winter hibernation, it was considered to be an omen that spring would soon be here.

However, Germany used the badger as its prognosticator. An old diary from 1841 shows that German immigrants brought the Candlemas tradition of weather prediction to Pennsylvania but said it was a the groundhog that could predict weather. Perhaps badgers were rare in colonial Pennsylvania.

NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, knows something about weather forecasting. Its web site states:

"The trail of Phil’s history leads back to Clymer H. Freas, city editor of the Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper. Inspired by a group of local groundhog hunters — whom he would dub the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club — Freas declared Phil as America’s official forecasting groundhog in 1887. As he continued to embellish the groundhog's story year after year, other newspapers picked it up, and soon everyone looked to Punxsutawney Phil for the prediction of when spring would return to the country."

In the years following the release of Groundhog Day, a 1993 film starring Bill Murray, crowds numbering as high as 30,000 have visited Gobbler's Knob, a tiny hill in Punxsutawney where the ceremony takes place.

However, I don't think any of those early-morning revelers have any idea of what next week's weather will be.

A new email, notepad, and file space service in the cloud is now available. The best part of Skiff is that everything is automatically encrypted. Skiff gives you the power to take your thoughts and ideas to the next level and to communicate freely.

Nobody spies on your email (are the folks who supply GMail paying attention to this?) If someone attempts to access your files stored in Skiff's cloud-based file storage service, they won't be able to read the files because everything is encrypted.

Best of all, you don’t have to pay a thing to use Skiff for end-to-end encrypted email, file sharing, and collaboration. (That includes limited file storage space. Obtaining addition file storage space requires payment.) It’s also very easy to use, but includes advanced features for the technically inclined.

You probably understand that using a popular free email service like Gmail means you pay by losing a degree of privacy. But have you thought about the risks of using cloud storage or collaboration from the same corporate sources? The developers of Skiff started with an encrypted collaboration solution as a private alternative, then expanded to secure file storage and sharing, and finally added encrypted email.

The Skiff team hopes this combination of secure email, file sharing, and collaboration will be attractive enough to wean users off of Google and other large public entities. Using Skiff's impressive combination of free email encryption, private collaboration, and secure file sharing, you'll make a major step toward taking back your privacy.

Skiff offers apps for Macintosh, Android, and Apple's iOS. The company expects to soon bring out a Linux application. There is no announced plan to ever bring out a version for Windows. 

By default, your secure files and email messages reside on Skiff’s secure servers. Communication between those servers and your local app are end-to-end encrypted. But those who like to live on the cutting edge can opt for storage in the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS)(Opens in a new window), a distributed secure storage system that’s independent of Skiff. Rather than going to a central server, files stored in the IPFS get broken into chunks, encrypted, and pushed out to different nodes in the IPFS system hosted on multiple servers all around the globe. 

The biggest disadvantages of Skiff in my opinion is the lack of a Windows client and the fact that both the email sender and the recipient must be using Skiff in order to send and receive messages.

If you don't want spying eyes to monitor your communications, you might want to check out Skiff.

Other encrypted data services include Proton (Mail, Drive, and VPN), Tutanota, StartMail, Private-Mail, SecureMyMail, PreVeil, Hushmail, CounterMail, Runbox, Mailfence, Posteo, Mailbox, Zoho Mail, and others. 

You can learn more about Skiff at https://skiff.com/ as well as in  series of YouTube videos at: https://youtu.be/tGaIofzrRDc.

The following is a press release written by Stockton University:

The Alliance Heritage Center will use a new grant to create a public digital database of its collection documenting the history of Jewish farming in southern New Jersey.

The New Jersey Historical Commission recently awarded more than $300,000 to 14 organizations to explore under-represented history in the state, including $24,500 to the Alliance Heritage Center at Stockton University.

The goal of the Alliance Heritage Center is to preserve the history of the first successful Jewish farming village in the United States, the Alliance Colony in Pittsgrove Township, Salem County.

The center will use the grant to support a one-year project to create a public digital database to house its collections, said Patricia Chappine, adjunct professor of History.

“We’re very excited to start this project,” said Chappine, who works with the center and its director, Thomas Kinsella. “Adding our collections to Stockton’s online archives will make our holdings more accessible, expand our community connections and help us preserve the stories of Alliance and Jewish agriculture in the area.”

The Alliance Colony was established in 1882 by 43 original Jewish families fleeing persecution from Russia and Eastern Europe. Chappine said the center’s archives include several physical and digital collections, including manuscripts, naturalization papers, newspapers, deeds, maps, land surveys, synagogue records, photographs and oral history interviews. It also includes the bound writings of Rabbi Moses Bayuk, one of the founding members of the Alliance Colony.

“Telling complex, diverse and nuanced histories will continue to be a priority of the New Jersey History Commission, and this funding is an important next step to achieving that essential goal,” said N.J. Secretary of State Tahesha Way.

The funds are part of New Jersey’s Inclusive History Grant Program (IHGP), which was created to help commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

Chappine said the grants will help create a searchable online database and digital museum using the Preservica archival management software that will be open to the public.

“By expanding access to these collections, we will open these holdings to researchers who can make broad and important connections between our resources and the history of immigration and refugee communities in New Jersey,” she said. “This will ultimately alleviate the shortage of secondary sources available on the subject.”

The center also plans to use a portion of the grant to create interactive virtual exhibits with the help of Stockton students.

Two major gifts to the Stockton University Foundation helped establish the center in 2019. A $500,000 gift from an anonymous donor established a fund for the Elizabeth and Samuel Levin Director of the Alliance Heritage Center. A $200,000 gift from Bernard and Shirlee Greenblatt Brown and their children created a research endowment.

Learn more about the Alliance Heritage Center at: https://stockton.edu/alliance-heritage/.