I found an interesting story by Tom Teicholz and published in the Forbes web site:

Given current events, Jewish identity and Jewish history are very much existential issues occurring in real time.

However, documentary films such as Fioretta, directed by Israeli-American Matthew Mishory about Randol Schoenberg (known familiarly as Randy) and his 18-year-old son Joey’s travels to uncover their family history remind us of the perseverance and the flourishing of Jewish life before and after periods of destruction and upheaval.

If the name Schoenberg sounds familiar – there is good reason. Randy’s grandfather (Joey’s great-grandfather) was the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg who came to Los Angeles following the Nazi takeover of Germany.

Randy himself, a graduate of Princeton and USC Law School, achieved no small measure of fame himself as the attorney who won the “Woman in Gold” Klimt painting Holocaust restitution case, which was the basis for the movie of that name starring Ryan Reynolds as Randy and Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann, the rightful owner of the painting.

Randy is also well known in his native Los Angeles for his philanthropy and for having served as the executive director of Holocaust Museum Los Angeles. He is also a curator for the Jewish genealogy website Geni.com, where he focuses on the family trees of Holocaust survivors and their families.

As is evident, as the documentary opens, Randy is genealogy obsessed. Joey, not so much. However, together they embark on a journey that takes them to Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and Italy in search of their ancestors.

No ordinary journey, no ordinary adventurers makes for no ordinary documentary – it is poignant, and at moments funny, and always personal and intimate. We meet the people they encounter on their journey, related or not, genealogy obsessed as Randy (or not).

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/59efcs2x.

Today is the first day of the month. That is a good time to back up your genealogy files. Then test your backups!

Your backups aren't worth much unless you make a quick test by restoring a small file or two after the backup is completed.

Actually, you can make backups at any time. However, it is easier and safer if you have a specific schedule. The first day of the month is easy to remember, so I would suggest you back up your genealogy files at least on the first day of every month, if not more often. (My computers automatically make off-site backups of all new files every few minutes.)

Given the events of the past few months with genealogy websites laying off employees and cutting back on services, you now need backup copies of everything more than ever. What happens if the company that holds your online data either goes off line or simply deletes the service where your data is held? If you have copies of everything stored either in your own computer, what happens if you have a hard drive crash or other disaster? If you have one or more recent backup copies, such a loss would be inconvenient but not a disaster.

Of course, you might want to back up more than your genealogy files. Family photographs, your checkbook register, all sorts of word processing documents, email messages, and much more need to be backed up regularly. Why not do that on the first day of each month? or even more often?

SaveOr is an easy-to-use Software Platform to document and manage the ownership, transfer, and history of your family's tangible personal property for estate planning purposes.  

Are you worried about what will happen to your parents' beloved possessions when they pass away? SaveOr is here to help. Our company was born from a personal experience when our founder's grandmother passed away without a clear plan for her belongings. It caused chaos within the family as everyone struggled to decide who would inherit what. 

We don't want anyone else to go through the same experience, which is why we created SaveOr. Our mission is to make it easy for families to document their favorite belongings and collaborate with each other to ensure that each item goes to the person who cherishes it the most. By using our product, you can preserve the memories behind each item and ensure that your loved one's wishes are fulfilled.

Do you find it difficult to bring up the topic of inheritance with your parents? Are there items you want but feel too uncomfortable to ask about? Or perhaps your parents have been pressuring you to take on their estate? We understand these challenges all too well, so we're here to help. Using SaveOr is an easier way to start this process and facilitate these difficult conversations. 

With SaveOr, you can plan in advance and focus on the positive memories of a well-lived life. Don't wait until it's too late – try SaveOr today and ensure your family's legacy is preserved for generations to come.

You can find SaveOr at: https://www.saveor.com.

Here is another article that is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it caught my eye. I learned Morse Code when I was 12 years old. While that was many years ago, I can still copy Morse Code at rather high speeds.

Despite modern communication methods, the art of Morse code remains a timeless and valuable skill. Fortunately, the Internet offers many accessible resources that can help anyone learn Morse code from the comfort of their own home. If you’re ready to begin mastering this skill, check out our recommendations for the best websites to learn Morse code.

You can read more of this article at: https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-websites-learn-morse-code/. 

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A new era of medical discoveries, treatments and cures is on the horizon, researchers say, following the announcement that an unprecedented trove of genetic information is to be made available to scientists. Health researchers from around the world can now apply to study the whole genomes of half a million people enrolled in UK Biobank, a biomedical research project that has compiled detailed health and lifestyle records on individuals since it began 20 years ago. The move on Thursday amounts to the largest number of whole-genome sequences ever released for medical research. The sequences will be used with UK Biobank's records and other data to delve deeply into the genetics of everything -- from people's risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other conditions, to individuals' sleep and exercise patterns.

Researchers believe the new data will allow them to calculate people's individual risk scores for a raft of cancers and other diseases, and so work out who could benefit most from early screening. They should also gain a deeper understanding of serious genetic conditions such as Huntington's and motor neurone disease, which have often been studied in small numbers of severely affected patients. Health experts from academia, the government, industry and charities can apply for access though they have to be approved and study the genomes through a protected database stripped of identifying details such as names, addresses, birth dates, and GP information.

With that number of whole genomes in hand, researchers will be able to find much rarer genes which drive diseases, including those that behave like switches and turn other genes on and off.

You can read more at: https://tinyurl.com/7acxn4cd.

Here is another article that is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I suspect it will interest anyone who has a need or at least an interest in low-cost, but powerful, Windows computers.

An article by Joe Humphrey published in the chromeunboxed.com web site caught my eye. It describes a new offering that will soon be available from Microsoft. In short, it describes a (future) service from Microsoft that will allow your low-cost Chromebook (and other) computers to access full-powered Windows computers in the cloud. 

The article states:

Microsoft has announced the launch of what they are calling “Windows app,” a new service designed to stream the full Windows desktop operating system from the cloud to various devices, including Chromebooks. This new offering from Microsoft signifies a major shift in how the company thinks users will be using Windows in the future and is clearly a response to the “Chromebook threat.”

Let’s first dive into what this new service entails exactly. The Windows App is essentially a new remote desktop hub that enables users to stream Windows Cloud PC and remote desktop services on a range of devices. This includes not only other Windows machines but also iPhones, iPads, Macs, and any device equipped with a desktop browser, i.e. Chromebooks. Android devices are currently not supported. You can view a preview version of the app here.

Microsoft describes the Windows App as a “gateway” to several key services: Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, and Remote Desktop Services.

If you are interested, you can read the full article at: https://tinyurl.com/48fn35ht.

Over the past few days, quite a few Google Drive users have noticed files go missing, and now Google is confirming that it is looking into the issue, which is caused by the desktop app.

To summarize the ongoing situation, Google Drive users have noticed that, suddenly, months or even years of files have gone missing. The issue simply eliminates the data from the account, almost reverting the account back to before that data was made. In some cases, spreadsheet data would be missing from recent weeks, months, or years – but present from a former date.

Obviously, it’s a concerning problem, especially for business users.

In a brief post on its Community forums, Google formally acknowledged the missing file issue and confirmed that the problem stems from the Drive for Desktop app.

While there’s no explanation for the bug, Google says that a “limited subset of Drive for desktop users” are seeing the problem and that it is related to versions 84.0.0.0 through 84.0.4.0, which recently rolled out. Google is still “investigating” the problem, so there’s no word on a fix just yet.

Google further tells users to avoid disconnecting their Google account from the Drive for desktop app and that they should not delete or move data from the “DriveFS” folder on their machines, located under AppData\Local\Google\DriveFS on Windows and Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS on macOS. Google does recommend making a copy of this folder, though, if there is enough space on the system.

I have been scanning genealogy books for several reasons. Finding information in digitized books is much easier and faster than manually searching through thousands of printed pages. However, the biggest reason is for a word that still gives me shivers. It is a word dreaded by almost every soon-to-be retiree:

DOWNSIZING

A few years ago, I became a “snowbird.” That is, I moved south for the winter and nand stayed there for the next 10 years. I now spend my winters and even my summers in Florida where the weather is much more pleasant than where I have lived most of my life in the “snowbelt.” 

I downsized. My new home in the south is considerably smaller than where I used to spend my summers. 

Having a smaller home in the sunbelt has several obvious advantages but also more than a few disadvantages. First of all, it seems like every time I want to use something, such as a book full of genealogy information, it is always in “the other place” or in a cardboard box in a storage facility That is a serious disadvantage for any genealogist!

So here are the quandaries:

1. Over the years, I have spent more money than I want to think about for genealogy books and magazines. In addition, I have accumulated a vast array of notes taken during trips, old family photographs, and other miscellaneous items. I now spend my time with no physical access to my lifelong accumulation of reference materials.

2. I suppose I could rent a (large) truck to transport my reference materials to my southern location. However, that is expensive and labor-intensive. Besides, that leads me to quandary #3:

3. My southern home is significantly smaller than my previous northern home! There is no way I can squeeze several hundred books and their associated bookcases, along with magazines and a 4-drawer filing cabinet full of photocopies and hand-written notes into my smaller living quarters in the sunbelt. I don't even have room for the required bookshelves. Also, there is no way I can jam another book into the over-crowded bookshelves I already own.

What to do? 

Well, the answer is easy to say but much more difficult to accomplish: digitize everything. Thousands of books can be stored in a very small computer or even in a tablet computer or a flash drive or a small amount of rented space “in the cloud.”. 

Actually, I have been “chipping away” at this problem for several years. However, my progress to date has been slow. Scanning a book is a tedious process, and I haven't completed the scanning of very many books. 

I even purchased a scanner with a sheet-feeder. It works in a manner somewhat similar to many photocopy machines: place a stack of papers into the input hopper and both sides of each sheet of paper are quickly scanned, digitized, and saved in either my computer or “the cloud” or both simultaneously.

Indeed, the high-speed scanner with a sheet feeder has been a blessing. I use it often for genealogy tasks and for dozens of other reasons. I scan my insurance policies, eyeglass and medical prescriptions, receipts of all sorts, and much, much more. However, for the remainder of this article, I will focus solely on genealogy uses.

Scanning my hand-written notes and photocopies is easy: they are mostly individual sheets of paper. I can insert small stack of papers into the scanner’s sheet feeder, press one button, and VOILA! Everything is digitized within seconds.

The Bigger Problems

The bigger problems are scanning bound books and magazines. Actually, magazines aren’t too much of a problem as I can use a pair of scissors or a sharp knife to cut the bindings. That leaves a stack of loose papers that are easily inserted into the scanner’s sheet feeder and then digitized. I once read about one person who had more than 2,500 books in his (tiny) Tokyo apartment, so he scanned them all into his iPad.

The biggest problem is bound books. A book of perhaps 50 pages to maybe 300 pages or more is very difficult to scan. I cannot cut the bindings off easily with scissors or a knife. I have found heavy-duty cutters that look somewhat like ancient guillotines. But I am not going to purchase one of these guillotine-style cutters because: (1.) at $700+, it is too expensive for my limited use, (2.) it looks ugly, and I have no place to store it in my small home, and (3.) it would be a dangerous tool to have around when the grandchildren come to visit!

NOTE #1: Before going through the effort of cutting bindings and digitizing any book, I first check Google Books, FamilySearch, the Internet Archive at archiove.org, and other repositories of books that have already been digitized and are available, usually free of charge. It is much easier to download and save an already-digitized book than it is to make my own digital copy!

NOTE #2: Before anyone asks, no, I don’t cut bindings off old, valuable books. I will keep old, valuable books in their original condition, regardless of the difficulties that creates. However, only a small percentage of my books qualify as old or valuable. I have no qualms about cutting the binding off a modern reprint of an old book or any book that was published within the last century or so. Probably 95% of my genealogy books do not qualify as old and/or valuable.

There is a Better Solution

One simple rule in my life has served me well: Any time I need to perform a task that is too difficult or too expensive for me to do it myself, I can always hire someone else to do it! In fact, I find that philosophy often saves money as well. Luckily, there are several scanning services that will cut bindings off books and scan them at modest prices.

A quick search online will find many companies that will digitize old books. In fact, for books that are out of copyright or where the author and publisher will give permission, I’d suggest sending the book(s) to the Internet Archive at Archive.org. That non-profit will digitize almost any book (in any language) and put it online for other genealogists to enjoy, as long as it is legal to do so. Start at http://archive.org/contribute.php to learn how to contribute books.

My Favorite Solution

One online service promises to do the job at a modest price: one dollar per 100-pages. The same service will also scan documents, photographs, business cards, and even old greeting cards from relatives that have been saved for years.

1DollarScan has been in business for several years and has a good reputation. Anyone can use 1DollarScan by filling out an online order form and then shipping the books or other materials to 1DollarScan's offices in San Jose, California. The company scans them and converts them into digital files and also (optionally) performs OCR (optical character recognition) to create a text layer behind the images to make the text searchable and selectable. 

The folks at 1DollarScan will cut the spine up to approximately 0.5 inches, then run all the pages through high-speed, high-quality scanners that quickly digitize every page. Then a human examines the output to make sure the scans meet the company's quality standards. 

The newly-digitized files are then placed online in your own private section of 1DollarScan’s web site where you can easily access them and save them, either to your own computer or to your private file storage space in the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, or similar online file storage services). All paper is recycled (disposed off) after 2 weeks unless you submit a request for a re-scan.

The files can easily be read on most any desktop, laptop, or tablet computer. For an example of a book that was scanned and digitized by 1DollarScan, look at http://1dollarscan.com/pricing.php.

1DollarScan also offers a service called Fine Tune, described this way:

Fine Tune is the patented technology that 1dollarscan provides for free to all users in order to optimize user experience for each of their devices: iPhone and iPad, Kindle, NOOK etc. 

Our free Fine Tune service is for all users to use anytime they want. The file will be compressed, reducing it in size, and it will be optimized for the device of your choosing. 

When a better format becomes widely available, conversion programs undoubtedly will be available in many places to easily convert the original files to whatever format becomes popular in the future. 

If you really want to, it is possible to print the entire book on your local printer although doing so strikes me as a wasted effort when the goal is to downsize everything!

Once the materials have been scanned and the electronic files have been made available online, the customer manages all future storage as he or she sees fit. In my case, I make multiple backups and then make sure the backups are stored in several different locations for safe keeping. I will use the L.O.C.K.S.S. method (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.) Luckily, this is easy to do, and the online storage expenses are far cheaper than paying for a larger home and the reuired bookcases to store all the physical books.

Prices for the scanning service seem reasonable and can be found at: https://1dollarscan.com/pricing.html.

Other services are also available upon request. Check the 1DollarScan web site for details.

When the books are received by 1DollarScan, the workers cut the spines off of them. This makes sure the pages of the book lay flat on the scanner, and makes it impossible to resell the hard copy of the book after it’s been scanned. 

1DollarScan also offers scanning of newly printed books sent directly from Amazon.com to 1DollarScan's offices. You can buy a book on Amazon.com and specify it be shipped directly to 1DollarScan. The company will then scan the book, send the electronic version to you, and dispose of the paper copy as you specify.

One question that pops to mind is, “What about legalities?” Indeed, the folks at 1DollarScan have examined the issue closely and have obtained legal advice. The company's managers seem confident that the conversion service does qualify as “fair use” although others, disagree. TThe attorney for 1DollarScan aposition is that making a backup for personal use is a classic fair use of a work you own, similar backing up your CDs to play later on your MP3 music player. The concept of converting music CDs you already own to another format has already been tested in court and has always been deemed to be legal, at least in the United States. 

In short, 1DollarScan does not make copies. The customer gives up the original book in order to obtain a PDF version. I am not an attorney, so I cannot guess at the complex legal issues involved. However, I suspect it will be difficult to convince most judges that 1DollarScan is committing copyright infringement by converting a customer's books and documents from one format to another, then destroying the originals. It should be interesting to watch this issue if it ever does wind its way through the courts.

You can read more in 1DollarScan's Terms and Conditions at http://1dollarscan.com/terms.php. Scroll down to item #9: Intellectual Property Right. 

I'd suggest this is a great service for genealogists and for many others as well. I won't use it for scanning everything I plan to digitize, but I do hope to send most of the "tedious" and difficult scanning to 1DollarScan. I still plan to scan my fragile materials and the more valuable items myself.

You can learn more about 1DollarScan's services at http://1dollarscan.com. Many questions are answered in the FAQs (Frequently-Asked Questions) at http://1dollarscan.com/faq.php.

Comment: I am not compensated in any manner for publishing this article. In fact, I doubt if the folks at 1DollarScan even know who I am. I am simply a satisfied customer and decided to share my experiences with my newsletter readers.

From the reclaimtherecords.org web site:

We at Reclaim The Records are so proud to finally announce one of our largest record acquisitions to date: millions of vital records spanning over one hundred years of history for the state of Maryland.

These records have never previously been publicly available online anywhere else — not on FamilySearch and not on Ancestry and not on MyHeritage and not on [insert some other genealogy website here] — except for some records that had only been available at the Maryland State Archives‘ internal website, if you happened to be sitting in their building in Annapolis and using their in-house computers, or on their external website, but only if those records were more than a hundred years old.

This announcement is groundbreaking for us at RTR. Not only is this an unusually large cache of materials for one of our records projects, but this time, our acquisition was not limited to a basic name and date index — although we did get those, too! — but in addition to the decades of vital records indices, we also got the digital images of the actual birth, marriage, and death certificates for the state of Maryland. Yep, the real certificates. And now we’ve put them online, free!

And this story isn’t a pitch to subscribe to anything, because we don’t sell data, we release it. There isn’t any login or password for these files, and you don’t have to pay a dime to a government facility, nor to a paywalled corporate-run site. These records are all now just plain free. You can browse them, download them, or do whatever you like with them. (Of course, if you’d like say thank you for their new freedom, please skip to the very bottom of this extremely long page for a suggestion about how to do that.)

So, sit back and recover from your Thanksgiving overindulgence, while we tell you all about these amazing new files!

The full announcement is quite long so I will skip it here, You can read the entire announcement at: https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/records-request/31/.

California investigators used genetic genealogy to identify him.

Investigators using genetic genealogy have identified a teen believed murdered 49 years ago by a notorious California serial killer as being from Cedar Rapids, authorities said Tuesday.

Michael Ray Schlicht, 17, of Cedar Rapids, previously known as a “John Doe” homicide victim, was found Sept. 14, 1974, in what is now the city of Aliso Viejo, Calif., northeast of Laguna Beach, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in California. He was estimated to have died three to five days before his body was found by two people who were off-roading and spotted a body over the side of the trail.

John Doe’s death initially was determined to be accidental due to alcohol and diazepam intoxication, a sheriff’s news release stated. At the time, California authorities released information to the media in hopes that someone would come forward with enough information to help them identify the man.

His fingerprints were submitted to the California Criminal Identification and Investigation Division, the Federal Bureau of Identification and Canadian authorities with negative results, according to officials. After those and other efforts were made to identify him, he was buried in an unmarked grave at El Toro Memorial Park in Lake Forest, Calif.

In 1980, Orange County homicide investigators noted there were other deaths in 1978 also due to alcohol and diazepam — sometimes known by brand name Valium — intoxication in Southern California. These deaths were classified as homicides.

Over the years, multiple young men were found dead throughout Southern California, including several within a few miles of where John Doe’s remains were discovered.

In May 1983, Randy Steven Kraft was arrested on murder charges after a California Highway Patrol officer conducted a traffic stop, according to the news release. In the front passenger seat was a dead man, identified as Terry Lee Gambrel. Around his feet were empty beer bottles and an open prescription bottle of lorazepam tablets. In the trunk, authorities found a coded list believed to be of over 67 victims of Kraft’s.

He earned the moniker the “Scorecard Killer” for the morbid catalog of his victims’ names he “scrawled on a white sheet of paper,” according to the Station 18 Blog of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Others called him the “Freeway Killer” because Kraft was known for targeting young male hitchhikers, many times along the freeway.

You can read more in an article by Trish Mehaffey published in the thegazette.com web site at: https://tinyurl.com/2by3uanr.