Heredis is a genealogy program that is very popular around the world. I don’t hear much about it in the U.S. but also know that it is one of the most popular genealogy programs in the world. It is available in several different languages which probably explains much of its popularity.

Heredis is also one of the easier-to-use genealogy programs available today. I have it installed on my computer and am very impressed with it.

Now the Heredis producers (in France) have announced a major update of the program. Here is the announcement:

MONTPELLIER, FRANCE – SEPTEMBER 22, 2020 – Besides a colorful and exciting new design to try to brighten the special times we are going through, Heredis 2021 offers great new features AND boasts a multitude of long requested improvements.

DYNAMIC ANCESTORS WHEEL
The genealogist can from now on visualize a 360° representation of his family tree!! This wheel shape chart can be colored by generation, gender, quarter, by marked or “complete” persons, thus highlighting the most relevant data in his genealogy file. This representation allows the genealogist to quickly visualize if any ancestor is missing in any branch without leaving the navigation tab.

Ancestors Wheel

The wheel chart can include up to 12 generations. It can be exported to PDF and then be printed: this is a great-looking ancestors wheel chart to share with his relatives.

Another version of the Ancestors Wheel

DEAD ENDS
A father or mother can’t seem to be found? It is not uncommon to come across abandoned children or children born with unknown fathers when doing genealogical research. In most cases, chances of finding out who the parents were are quite slim. The genealogist can now categorizes such “dead ends” in a quick and easy manner by checking the Untraceable Father and Untraceable Mother boxes. At any moment, he may thus declare these persons as Complete so he can move on and focus on more fruitful researches without wasting additional time in the genealogical endeavors. Thanks to this new label, the genealogist will see right away whether any ancestor needs to be searched for or not. Navigate the family tree while keeping an eye on such information, which is worth taking into consideration as the genealogist moves forward in his researches. In the end, the research follow-up becomes more reliable when measuring the progress of searches. This information can be found in the sheets or even in your GEDCOM file.

Searching for Dead Ends

PERSON AS COMPLETE

Does the genealogist know full well that he won’t find any additional information on a given person in his genealogy? He may now indicate that this person is “complete” thanks to the “Declare as complete” label in the Personal Data tab. A huge time saver!

IMPORT INDEXES
From now on, the genealogist can retrieve indexes created by fellow genealogists or in other Heredis genealogy files. Retrieve his or her entire work on the places, including media, place descriptions, etc. Available for Surnames, Given Names, Occupations, Places and Sources!

IMPROVEMENTS
Heredis 2021 is also the result of a long work process between our hands-on users and our development team operating in the background to continuously improve the software. And, even more remarkably, this work was in part processed during the lockdown period when each of our developers was working remotely, yet still keeping in touch with users. Here are some of this new version’s improvements, which you will find both familiar and different at the same time:

• Smart Search: take advantage of the option to process an entire selection of events, facts, or do searches within the note of a media; you may also perform searches on Ahnentafel numbers, implexes, or between one generation and another, • Custom reports: -additional fields: “creation date” and “change date” of a person; -a new option in the Places report: grouping a place name and its variants,
• Merging assistant: alerts during merges have been added to encourage users to merge parents first and thus avoid mistakes…,
• Swap parents easily: do so if one of your ancestor’s father or mother were inverted by mistake. The correction will be applied to all siblings,
• Hide empty boxes in the ancestors’ tree chart from now on and get a better view of all available or missing data (Family tab > Ancestors),
• Add a filter to Search Tracking to display treetops only: a real time saver that will let you see what is left to do and what to start with! Improvements galore to make a real difference in the genealogist everyday use of Heredis.

AVAILABILITY
Heredis 2021 for Windows and for Mac have been made available to all genealogists since September 22, 2020 on heredis.com and on the App Store.

The following announcement was written by the State Archives of North Carolina:

After several years of digitizing the Division of Negro Education records from the Department of Public Instruction record group, the African American Education digitization project is now completely online!

This digital collection covers the day by day interactions of the Division of Negro Education with the African American community. The collection ranges from the early to mid 20^th century and includes correspondence, articles, speeches, reports, newspaper clippings and more. You can read about previous additions to this collection in Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of this blog series. The last addition to the collection is the Director’s Office: Newspaper Clippings series. It contains newspaper clippings largely covering racial segregation in education throughout the Southern United States during the 1950’s.

The following series are now online:

• • General Correspondence of the Director series
  • High School Principal Annual Reports series
  • Files of the State Supervisor of Elementary Education
  • Division of Cooperation in Education and Race Relations: Correspondence of the Director, Reports, and Minutes
  • Special Subject Files
  • Articles and Speeches by Nathan Carter Newbold
  • Correspondence of the Supervisor, Rosenwald Fund
  • Director’s Office: Newspaper Clippings

For more information on African American education, check out these NCpedia pages:

• Public Education
• Jeanes Fund
• Rosenwald Fund
• North Carolina’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
• Nathan Carter Newbold
• Charlotte Hawkins Brown
• Brown vs Board of Education

The following is a message posted to the IAJGS (International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies) Public Records Access Alert mailing list:

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been sued over its recent permanent regulations on application fees, which raises application fees for many essential immigration benefits by 30 to 200 percent, and eliminates most fee waivers for qualifying low income immigrants.

The regulation covers more than the genealogy records, as it also increased the fees for immigration services. On August 20, 2020,  The American Immigration Lawyers Association and eight other organizations filed the law suit to block the regulation due to the exceeding large increase in filing fees across the board. To read the law suit filing see:   https://www.aila.org/infonet/aila-partners-sue-uscis-fee-rule

The focus of the litigation is that fees for low income applicants making it very difficult for them to apply for naturalization. It also challenges the rule issued under an acting Secretary of Homeland Security and there states the persons, Chad Wolf and Kevin McAleenan do not have constitutional or statutory authority to issue the regulations. The litigation also challenges the abandonment of the practice of “ability to pay” model and adoption of “beneficiary pays” model. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern district of California- San Francisco as that is where Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s principal place of business is in San Francisco, California, and East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s principal place of business is in Berkeley, California. Other plaintiff’s are also located in California.

The suit does not address the genealogy fees, rather its focus is on the immigrant application fees. Depending on the courts determine this case the genealogy fees may be changed from what goes into effect this October 2.

If you are planning to order any records from USCIS at the current $65.00 rate for the index search and another $65.00 for the copy make certain your request is postmarked before October 2. The forms may be found at: https://www.uscis.gov/genealogy

To see previous postings about the USCIS and the fee increases,  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:

The FamilySearch Family History Library’s October 2020 free webinars will focus on German family history research. Selections include five progressive sessions on German Handwriting, Resources for German Research (beginner level), German Historical Geography, researching in German Historical Newspapers, and one class on the Württemberg Family Books.  Other classes include Using the FamilySearch Catalog, Adding Memories to Family Tree, and Finding Your Irish Ancestor’s Home.

No registration is required for these online webinars. See the table of classes below for more details.

If you cannot attend a live event, most sessions are recorded and can be viewed later online at your convenience at Family History Library classes and webinars.

All class times are in Mountain Daylight Time (MDT).

Visit our website for more Classes and Online Webinars.

About FamilySearch

FamilySearch International is the largest genealogy organization in the world. FamilySearch is a nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Millions of people use FamilySearch records, resources, and services to learn more about their family history. To help in this great pursuit, FamilySearch and its predecessors have been actively gathering, preserving, and sharing genealogical records worldwide for over 100 years. Patrons may access FamilySearch services and resources free online at FamilySearch.org or through over 5,000 family history centers in 129 countries, including the main Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

After several years of digitizing the Division of Negro Education records from the Department of Public Instruction record group, the African American Education digitization project is now completely online!

This digital collection covers the day by day interactions of the Division of Negro Education with the African American community. The collection ranges from the early to mid 20th century and includes correspondence, articles, speeches, reports, newspaper clippings and more. You can read about previous additions to this collection in Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of this blog series. The last addition to the collection is the Director’s Office: Newspaper Clippings series. It contains newspaper clippings largely covering racial segregation in education throughout the Southern United States during the 1950’s.

The following series are now online:

• • General Correspondence of the Director series
  • High School Principal Annual Reports series
  • Files of the State Supervisor of Elementary Education
  • Division of Cooperation in Education and Race Relations: Correspondence of the Director, Reports, and Minutes
  • Special Subject Files
  • Articles and Speeches by Nathan Carter Newbold
  • Correspondence of the Supervisor, Rosenwald Fund
  • Director’s Office: Newspaper Clippings

For more information on African American education, check out these NCpedia pages:

The following announcement was written by Family History Hosting:

Narragansett, Rhode Island, September 29, 2020 - Family History Hosting is pleased to announce the release of ORA version 1.10. ORA is the "Online Repository Assistant", a web browser extension combined with a Windows program to help you extract data from the web pages of your favorite online repositories and capture the information in your preferred genealogy program. ORA has several features that will save time, reduce errors, and increase the consistency of your data entry.

Originally released in June with support for four popular repositories, ORA now supports twelve repositories:

• Ancestry
• Fold3
• Australian Cemeteries Index
• FreeReg
• BillionGraves
• General Register Office, UK
• FamilySearch
• Newspapers.com
• Find a Grave
• Nova Scotia Genealogy
• Findmypast
• Trove

ORA users depend on it to save them time and effort:

* "After weeks of using ORA to create source definitions for newspaper clippings and obituaries on Newspapers.com, I came across an obit I wanted [to cite] in the student newspaper of a college, found on the college's digital repository. ORA doesn't work there! What, write an obit source definition manually?? Can I remember how? It made me really appreciate how much work ORA has eliminated." - Terry

* "I have made more progress in my research in the past two months that I've used ORA than in the two years prior." - Saul

For more information about ORA, see its Introduction slideshow. The Introduction includes several videos that show ORA in action.

ORA is sold as a subscription service, $24 USD per year. ORA is not affiliated with any of the repositories it supports. ORA does not do any searching for you; it evaluates pages you visit during your normal use of a repository and makes it faster and easier to extract the information you find. For Ancestry, Findmypast, and other fee-based repositories, you must have an account with that repository.

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

Discover emigrant ancestors and much more this Findmypast Friday.

Swiss Emigrants to the American Colonies, 1734-1744

With newly-created indexes for easy searching, this publication records the details of over 3,000 Swiss immigrants to the New World. Translated and transcribed from an original manuscript held in the State Archive of Zurich, the records can reveal your Swiss ancestors’ names and ages, where they came from, settled and more.

The collection contains large numbers of emigrants who intended to travel to Carolina, as it was the most heavily advertised colony in Switzerland. In many cases, the circumstances around their departure is indicated. Most of these events and pieces of information were submitted by local priests.

Emigrant Ministers To The Americas

Spanning 1690-1811, this collection can be searched by name, year, destination and keywords to discover Church of England clergy working in the American colonies. Many Church of England ministers were given a bounty by the King of England to go and practice their faith in overseas colonies.

This list was compiled largely from records known as Money Books, King’s Warrant Books, Treasury Papers, and Exchequer of Receipt Papers, documenting the funds spent to send missionaries to the New World. However, most of the entries also include where the individual was intending to travel to, specific roles, such as clerk or lawyer, and frequently, additional genealogical information.

Winthrop Fleet Passenger List, 1630

A decade after the Mayflower, the Winthrop Fleet took hundreds more English settlers to America. Search this collection to discover the passengers and their amazing stories. The voyage saw 11 vessels, led by John Winthrop, and between 700 and 1,000 English settlers arrive in the New World.

The fleet included a large group of Puritan families, with a variety of skills, skilled labour, and family groups, to ensure a healthy and robust colony. The fleet itself was funded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These records, originally published in 1930, describe the background, the experience and the motivation for the fleet, as well as listing many of the participants by name with genealogical details.

Newspapers

Runcorn Weekly News (covering 1913-1933 and 1936-1970) and Clare Freeman and Ennis Gazette (covering 1855-1884) are brand new to the site this week.

Plus, more pages have been added to Evening Mail (from 1869-1872, 1874-1885 and 1892-1922) and Cork Daily Herald (from 1897-1899).

The following announcement was written by the (U.S.) National Genealogical Society:

FALLS CHURCH, va, 25 SEPTEMBER 2020—The National Genealogical Society (NGS) announced the results of its 2020 Board of Directors election at its annual meeting on 1 September 2020. The incoming slate includes three new positions to reflect the upcoming merger of NGS and the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) on 1 October 2020. These new board positions are Vice President for Society & Organization Management and two directors at large drawn from FGS ranks.

Outgoing President Benjamin B. Spratling, JD, of Birmingham, Alabama, announced the results of the election and the incoming board members who will be seated on 1 October.

NGS Officers (1 October 2020 – 30 September 2022)

• • President: Kathryn M. Doyle, California
  • Vice President: Ellen Pinckney Balthazar, Texas
  • Vice President of Society & Organization Management: Cheri Hudson Passey, South Carolina
  • Secretary: Ed Donakey, Utah
  • Treasurer: Deborah Lebo Hoskins, Pennsylvania

NGS Directors serve four-year terms that are staggered so that the entire slate does not turn over in one election cycle.

NGS Regional Directors

• • Director of Region 2: Faye Stallings, Texas
  • Director of Region 3: Janet L. Bailey, Virginia
  • Director of Region 4: Bernice Alexander Bennett, Maryland

Directors at Large

• • Janet A. Alpert, South Carolina
  • Colleen Robledo Greene, California
  • Marlis Humphrey, Florida
  • Andre Kearns, Washington, DC
  • David Rencher, Utah

Continuing their terms on the Board of Directors are Angie Bush, MS, Director of Region 1, and Ronald V. Hodges, PhD, Director at Large.

“I congratulate the incoming Board members,” Spratling said, “And I extend my sincere gratitude for their commitment and service to the National Genealogical Society. I also thank the Nominating Committee, including Jordan Jones, chair; Deborah A. Abbott, PhD; B. Darrell Jackson, PhD, CG; Darcie Hind Posz; CG, and D. Joshua Taylor, MA, MLS, for their excellent work.”

The entire 2020 NGS Annual Meeting can be viewed on YouTube. It includes a short video about the upcoming merger of NGS and FGS, which will be finalized on 1 October 2020, and features outgoing President Benjamin B, Spratling, FGS President Faye Stallings who has been newly elected to NGS Board, incoming President Kathryn M. Doyle, and Executive Director Matt Menashes.

Founded in 1903, the National Genealogical Society is dedicated to genealogical education, exemplary standards of research, and the preservation of genealogical records. The Falls Church, Virginia, based nonprofit is the premier national society for everyone, from the beginner to the most advanced family historian, seeking excellence in publications, educational offerings, and guidance in research. It also offers many opportunities to interact with other genealogists.