The following is an announcement from Findmypast:

Findmypast have just added thousands of baptism and marriage records from Essex and Kent to their ever expanding collection of British family history records.

Unlock the power of parish records with these latest Findmypast Friday new releases. Here are all the details on what's new.

Essex Baptisms

In partnership with the Family History Federation, Findmypast have added over 38,000 new records to this collection. These new records cover 16 Anglican churches and span over 380 years of Essex history. This update includes records from:

• • Blackmore, St Laurence
  • Bobbingworth, St Germain
  • Chipping Ongar, St Martin of Tours
  • Epping Upland, All Saints
  • Great Bromley, St George
  • Harlow, St John the Baptist
  • Hatfield Broad Oak, St Mary the Virgin
  • High Laver, All Saints
  • High Ongar, St Mary the Virgin
  • High Roding, All Saints
  • Latton, St Mary at Latton
  • Little Laver, St Mary the Virgin
  • Magdalen Laver, St Mary Magdalen
  • Moreton, St Mary the Virgin
  • South Weald, St Peter
  • Waltham Holy Cross, St Lawrence & Holy Cross

Findmypast’s Essex parish list includes details on the entire collection including year coverage and the number of records from each church.

Kent Baptisms

Was your ancestor christened in Kent? Over 10,000 new records from two parishes have joined the collection.

These latest additions cover the parishes of Chelsfield, St Martin of Tours and Greenwich, St Alphege and stretch from 1640-1910. The Kent parish list includes all the churches in this extensive collection.

Kent Marriages

Continue tracing Kent family milestones with over 9,000 new marriage records from three churches, covering 1750-1936.

The newest arrivals come from Lewisham, Westerham and Eltham. Use them to enrich the Kent branches of your family tree with essential details.

Newspapers

Findmypast have published 12 brand new newspapers and added thousands more pages to 12 existing titles. Does your family’s local paper feature? Brand new this week are:

• • Barrow Herald and Furness Advertiser covering 1881-1890
  • East Riding Telegraph covering 1895-1896, 1899 and 1901-1903
  • Halifax Comet covering 1892 and 1894
  • Pontypridd District Herald covering 1880 and 1891-1894
  • Ripon Observer covering 1890-1895, 1898-1901, 1904-1916 and 1919-1922
  • Seren Cymru covering 1875 and 1877-1883
  • South Wales Daily Telegram covering 1870-1874, 1876-1887, 1889 and 1891
  • Southport Visiter covering 1865, 1869-1870, 1873-1875, 1877, 1886, 1889, 1891-1893, 1897 and 1911-1912
  • Warwickshire Herald covering 1884-1896 and 1899
  • Weymouth Telegram covering 1900
  • Y Llan covering 1881 and 1884-1909
  • Y Tyst covering 1877, 1879-1880, 1882-1883 and 1885-1889

To celebrate St David's Day this week, Findmypast’s latest releases also include five publications from Wales, three of them published in the native Welsh language.

Meanwhile, the following titles have been supplemented with extra pages:

• • Blandford Weekly News from 1886
  • Chelsea News and General Advertiser from 1974
  • Civil & Military Gazette (Lahore) from 1899
  • Cotton Factory Times from 1889 and 1912
  • Lancaster Standard and County Advertiser from 1898
  • Liverpool Weekly Courier from 1902
  • Maidstone Telegraph from 1916-1918 and 1920
  • Nelson Chronicle, Colne Observer and Clitheroe Division News from 1897 and 1899-1904
  • North Cumberland Reformer from 1896
  • Northern Weekly Gazette from 1895
  • Penistone, Stocksbridge and Hoyland Express from 1919, 1923, 1925, 1927-1928 and 1932-1940
  • Runcorn Examiner from 1880 and 1889-1890

Here is the announcement:

IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy
Set for Virtual and In-person in Philadelphia Aug. 2-5, 2021

Registration now open

The 41st Annual IAJGS (International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies) International Conference on Jewish Genealogy will take place in historic Philadelphia, PA, Aug. 2- 5, 2021, with a virtual component as well.

The conference will feature more than 100 speakers, with more than 250 sessions covering virtually every aspect of Jewish genealogy.

“Based on the successful full virtual format last year, there will again be a virtual component,” said Judi Missel, lead co-chair. “We are also planning our usual in-person conference with all its benefits, dependent on the situation with COVID.” Judi is a long-standing IAJGS Conference Administrative Manager and its 2019 Volunteer of the Year.

“We are excited to host this year’s Conference in Philadelphia, a city with a vibrant Jewish community and an abundance of historical attractions and genealogical resources,” said local co-chair Fred Blum, a past president of the Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Greater Philadelphia, the local co-host with IAJGS.

Early Bird registration is now open and will continue until May 31. Due to social distancing restrictions, attendance to the Conference will be limited; therefore, a Wait List will be created. Registration for all meals and computer labs is expected to open soon. Registration and conference program details are posted on the conference website: www.iajgs2021.org. Ongoing information and questions will also be posted on the IAJGS Conference Discussion Facebook page at www.facebook.com/groups/IAJGS.

The special Conference tracks are: Early Jewish Settlers of the Americas, Innovative Methodology, Keepers of the Shoah Memory, Beginners, DNA Insights for Genealogy, and Heritage and Cultural Material.

Programs at the Conference will be geared from first-timers to conference veterans, and will include lectures, lunches, computer labs, and networking through Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Birds of a Feather (BOFs). An Exhibitor Hall and Resource Library will include genealogy experts, mentors and archivists for a one-stop research experience at the conference site.

Keynote speaker will be Michael Hoberman, professor of American Literature at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts and author of the books New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America and A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literature.

The IAJGS is an umbrella organization of more than 93 Jewish genealogical societies worldwide. It coordinates and organizes activities such as its annual International Conference on Jewish Genealogy and provides a unified voice as the spokesperson on behalf of its members.

The IAJGS’s vision is of a worldwide network of Jewish genealogical research organizations and partners working together as one coherent, effective and respected community, enabling people to succeed in researching Jewish ancestry and heritage. Find the IAJGS at: www.iajgs.org and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/iajgsjewishgenealogy.

Did you suffer losses in the Cookeville, Tennessee tornado last year? If so, did some of those losses include family photographs that "disappeared" from your home as the tornado did its damage? If so, you should know that many pictures of graduations, weddings, and newborn photoshoots are now sitting in boxes for safekeeping at Tennessee Technology University.

If one or more of these photos are yours, you can reclaim them, thanks to the work of archivist Megan Atkinson. She has organized the pictures alphabetically in boxes. They are memories that were once in a photo album or hanging on a wall.

You do not have to travel to campus to see the pictures. Atkinson has a Flicker page with the photographs cataloged.

You can read the details in an article by Abby Kousouris in the WVLT website at: http://bit.ly/3beSwoE.

More than a Million people attended last week's RootsTech Connect virtual conference!

Following last week’s first virtual-only RootsTech Connect, organizers have counted more than 1.1 million participants from over 240 countries and territories — by far the largest global gathering in the conference’s 10-year history.

Last year’s event only drew about 130,000 (in person and online attendance).

For Elder Kevin S. Hamilton, a General Authority Seventy and executive director of the Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Steve Rockwood, CEO of FamilySearch International, this is only the beginning.

You can read the details in an article by Trent Toone in the DeseretNews web site at: http://bit.ly/3bgcVtt.

WARNING: This is a "soapbox article" in which I rant and rave a little.

A newsletter reader wrote to me a while ago expressing unhappiness with all the erroneous information found in online family trees. The bogus information is usually found in family tree information submitted by other users of whatever online family tree service is being used at the moment.

My belief is that this newsletter reader wasn’t spending much time looking at online images of census, birth, marriage, and death records or at other online documents of value to genealogists: old newspapers, military pension files, and such things.

I decided to share my response publicly in this newsletter so that others could either benefit from or reject my ideas and suggestions.

Instead of spending your time looking at other people's fairy tales, I suggest you look at original records and newspapers (or digital images of original records and newspapers). That's the manner that experienced genealogists have used for decades, and it has always worked well.

Luckily, millions of such records are available online today, unlike the days when I started doing genealogy in the 1980s. In "the old days," I often had to go to the locations where the records were kept. I spent a lot of money on travel and on photocopying machines. However, the expense was worth it. I got accurate results most of the time.

Back in the 1980s, we also had thousands of self-published books written by other genealogists with claims of their family trees. Those books were just as inaccurate as today's online family trees. Those books often were a mix of facts and conjecture, often accompanied by so-called “family coats of arms” and similar fictitious material.

Sadly, in the 1980s and earlier, thousands of new genealogists did not understand the difference between unsourced information versus documented records. A lot of junk claims were copied, republished, and distributed all over the place.

I will suggest that online databases of genealogy information intermixed with fairy tales hasn't really changed genealogy very much. The only difference today is that computers and online capabilities allow genealogists to publish accurate and inaccurate information alike faster, easier, and at less expense than ever before.

My belief is that the PERCENTAGE of inaccurate genealogy information hasn't changed much in many decades. What has changed is the QUANTITY of both accurate and inaccurate information available today.

The reality is that the basics of good genealogy research haven't changed in the past century, even though we certainly have more convenient access today than ever. In short, any genealogy claims you find that are not accompanied by verifiable source citations to original records should be treated as a potential fairy tale.

Please don't get me wrong: I still love the online family trees submitted by other genealogists, and I look at them often. I have thousands of such claims saved in various note files in my computer. I always want to know what someone else thinks is a fact. I want to save those possible fairy tales until I can verify the information myself through independent, well-trusted sources. In most cases, that means looking at an original record, either in person or as an online image.

I still want to know what another person believes is true, even though I have some doubts. Knowing someone else's guesses is still better than knowing nothing at all about an ancestor. There are times when someone else’s guess gives me a clue as to what to look for to see if I can confirm or refute it.

I never, ever enter possible fairy tale information into my primary genealogy database until I have independently verified its accuracy in the original records.

My belief is that your genealogy collection of facts can be better and more accurate today than ever before – if you really care about accuracy.

Anyone who doesn't care about accuracy probably isn't reading this article anyway.

What's in your (possibly bogus) family tree?

Pivotal stories from the grounds of the University of Georgia have been illustrated since 1886 on the pages of UGA’s Pandora yearbooks. As of January 2021, the publications between the years 1965-1974 have been made available for free online access.

You can read more at: http://bit.ly/3reSJOr.

Have you ever wanted to do family history but didn’t know where to start? FamilySearch recently launched a beginner-friendly page to help!

The new Getting Started page provides a variety of simple family history activities and FamilySearch resources that both beginners and genealogy veterans can appreciate. These pages also show how family history is any activity that connects us to our family stories.

Whether you want to learn what FamilySearch knows already knows about your family, how to preserve family memories, or how to build your family tree or search records, the Getting Started page makes it easy to begin exploring your family story.

You can read more in an article by Jessica Grimaud in the FamilySearch Blog at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/new-getting-started-page/ which then adds a bit of "how to get started" info and then points you to many, many other online resources, most of them on the FamilySearch.org web site.

 

The city of Shelby has been awarded a $2,967 grant through the Ohio History Fund to digitize and transcribe approximately 5,800 pages of city council minutes, incorporation records and ordinances dating from 1863 through 1934.

The project sponsored by the city’s Historic Preservation Commission will involve partners Marvin Memorial Library and the Richland County - Shelby Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society. Once scanned, the images will be uploaded to the library’s section of the Ohio Memory Project. Genealogy chapter volunteers will transcribe any handwritten minutes. The entire project will be searchable and freely available to the public.

You can read more in an article published in the Richland Source web site at: http://bit.ly/3bVAebm.

My thanks to newsletter reader Resa Hennings for telling me about this article.

The following announcement was posted to the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies’ Public Records Access Monitoring Committee’s mailing list and is republished here with permission:

A hearing has been scheduled for the bill, LD 601 An Act Regarding Indices of Vital Records, regarding indices to certificates and records of marriage, intentions to marry, domestic partnerships and death including fetal death from 1892 to the present to be open to the public without restrictions. Indices to certificates and records of birth are to be open at the municipal and state levels after 75 years from the date of birth.

The hearing is on Wednesday March 17, 2021 at 10:00 AM. On the current agenda it is the third bill to be heard. IAJGS is supporting the bill while inquiring why birth indices are not being treated the same as the other indices, that is open without any embargo period.

The bill may be read at: http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/bills/getPDF.asp?paper=SP0240&item=1&snum=130

To read the previous postings about the Maine bill and vital records go to the archives of the IAJGS Records Access Alert at: http://lists.iajgs.org/mailman/private/records-access-alerts/. You must be registered to access the archives. To register go to: http://lists.iajgs.org/mailman/listinfo/records-access-alerts and follow the instructions to enter your email address, full name and which genealogical organization with whom you are affiliated You will receive an email response that you have to reply to or the subscription will not be finalized.

Jan Meisels Allen
Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee

The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:

This week on FamilySearch search 2M New York Land Records 1630–1975, Virginia County Marriages 1771–1943, Utah Tooele County (misc.) Records 1771–1956, and US Bureau of Land Management Tract Books 1800–c. 1955, along with expanded US collections for Arizona, California and Illinois. Explore additional records in New Zealand Electoral Rolls 1865–1957, England Cambridgeshire Bishop's Transcripts 1865–1083, and Uruguay Catholic Church Records 1726–2000, plus more for Brazil, Canada, England, Finland, France, Jamaica, Peru, Puerto Rico, and S. Africa.  

The full list of newly-added records is very long, too long to fit here. However, you may find the full list at: https://media.familysearch.org/new-free-historical-records-on-familysearch-week-of-1-march-2020/.