Queen Elizabeth II is looking for a new hire to be trusted with "bringing centuries of history into the digital age". The Royal Household has shared a new job advert for the position of Digitisation Technician.

A "help wanted" ad has been posted by the Royal Household of Queen Elizabeth II. The ideal candidate should be experienced at archival work. I suspect some genealogists in England may be very interested in this position.

The new hire would join a team of experts at the Queen's Berkshire home to work between February 2022 and March 2023.

During this time, the perfect candidate will tackle the challenge to "digitise material held by the Royal Archives and the Royal Collection, producing valuable content for high profile public access."

The job specification read: "You'll capture and produce high quality images of documentary items, before transferring them to permanent storage.

The help wanted advert warns, "However, it warned the "deadlines and standard of work" will be testing."

You can read more at: https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1541337/queen-news-queen-elizabeth-ii-hiring-windsor-castle-royal-household-royal-family-update

According to an announcement in the Digital North Carolina Blog :

“Thanks to funding from the State Library of North Carolina’s LSTA Grant and our partner, Johnston County Heritage Center, over five hundred issues from 1911 to 1925 of The Smithfield Herald are now available on our website. These issues expand DigitalNC’s previously digitized issues from 1901 all the way to 1925.”

You can check it out at: https://www.digitalnc.org/blog/additional-smithfield-herald-issues-now-available/

This is a quick note to let you know that I am back from my travels over the Christmas holidays. I went to Maine to spend a few days with family members.

You may have read about all the disruption in the airlines with cancelled and/or delayed flights. While I went to Maine last week without difficulty, the trip back yesterday was not as smooth. My first flight of the day was cancelled. The airline then re-routed me via a different route. There were some mix-ups along the way but I eventually made it home, although somewhat later than originally planned.

More than 2,500 flights were canceled Monday as Covid cases surge across the globe. Of the more than 2,500 canceled flights, nearly 1,000 were within, into or out of the United States, according to FlightAware. Almost 8,000 flights are delayed.

My difficulties seem rather minor compared to what many other people encountered.

Digital Curator Dr Mia Ridge writes, In case you need a break from whatever combination of weather, people and news is around you, here are some ways you can entertain yourself (or the kids!) while helping make collections of the British Library more findable, or help researchers understand our past. You might even learn something or make new discoveries along the way!

Mia Ridge writes: Living with Machines is a collaboration between the British Library and the Alan Turing Institute with partner universities. Help us understand the 'machine age' through the eyes of ordinary people who lived through it. Our refreshed task builds on our previous work, and includes fresh newspaper titles, such as the Cotton Factory Times.

Your contributions will not only help researchers - they'll also go on display in our exhibition! 

You can read more at: https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2021/12/crowdsourcing-opportunities-with-the-british-library-.html 

From an article by Vera Miller published in the LostRussianFamily web site:

For years, I have heard my grandmother’s brother was named after a brother who died as a baby. No one could tell me when this child was born, except he was born before 1927.

On Christmas morning, I discovered a new database from the City of Kyiv archives. The archives has indexed more than 190,000 birth records for 1919-1936 here. Yes, it is in Ukrainian but it is a very simple database. (See below for directions on using this database without knowing Ukrainian.)

I searched for my great-grandfather’s surname to see how many people would appear for Trunov. Only a mere 16 results appeared for this common Russian surname.

Only two people have the same full name as my grand uncle and his brother in this database. One person has been confirmed as the grand uncle I knew so I am confident the other boy born in 1923 is my other grand uncle. I have already found my grand uncle’s scanned birth record from Kyiv on another database. It would be shocking if the baby born in 1923 is not my grand uncle.

My mother remembers that her mother told her that the child died before he turned two years old. Besides requesting the 1927 birth record, I will request a search of death records to completely close the story on this grand uncle.

You can read the remainder of the story, including details on how you can use this new Ukrainian Database, at: https://bit.ly/3pq0LFA.

The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:

Nicka Sewell-Smith offers some great ideas for adding more data to your family tree. You can find her article at https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/how-to-trace-your-family-history-on-a-heritage-trip-according-to-a-genealogist/ar-AAS3NO6?li=BBnbklE

Analysis of ancient DNA from one of the best-preserved Neolithic tombs in Britain has revealed that most of the people buried there were from five continuous generations of a single extended family.

By analyzing DNA extracted from the bones and teeth of 35 individuals entombed at Hazleton North long cairn in the Cotswolds-Severn region, the research team was able to detect that 27 of them were close biological relatives. The group lived approximately 5700 years ago—around 3700-3600 BC—around 100 years after farming had been introduced to Britain.

Published in Nature, it is the first study to reveal in such detail how prehistoric families were structured, and the international team of archaeologists and geneticists say that the results provide new insights into kinship and burial practices in Neolithic times.

You can read the full story at https://phys.org/news/2021-12-ancient-dna-reveals-world-oldest.html.

My thanks to newsletter reader Dean McLeod for telling me bout this story.

Two other newsletter readers also sent links to a DIFFERENT and more comprehensive article that describes (partially) the above story at https://phys.org/news/2021-12-harvard-geneticists-ancient-britain-insights.html

The following is an announcement written by TheGenealogist:

Travel back in time and locate an ancestor’s address from the 1911 England and Wales census using contemporary and georeferenced maps on TheGenealogist.co.uk’s Map Explorer™.

1911 census records identified on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™

This groundbreaking feature allows you to pin down your ancestors to properties on a contemporary map at the time of the census in 1911. With this feature family historians are able to walk the streets where their ancestors lived as not only can it be accessed on a computer but also on the move on a mobile phone!

This is an invaluable tool for house historians making it easier than ever to link census records to properties and complementing the already rich georeferenced Lloyd George Domesday Survey and Tithe records that are already available on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer™.

For the first time the properties recorded in the 1911 census can now be matched with georeferenced mapping to show where our English or Welsh ancestors had lived at the time of the census taken on the night of the 2nd April 1911. The majority of London can be seen all the way down to property level, while the rest of the country will identify down to the parish, road or street.

With this new release, viewing a household record from the 1911 census will now show a map, pinpointing your ancestors house. Clicking this map loads the location in Map Explorer™, enabling you to explore the area and see the records of neighbouring properties.

Discover the neighbourhoods in which your ancestors lived, and gain an insight into their lives from local churches to employment prospects in the area and the roads, rail or water links that were available.

Read TheGenealogist’s article: Where did they live? – Mapping Your Ancestors home in 1911: https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2021/where-did-they-live--mapping-your-ancestors-home-in-1911-1513/