The Royal Albert Hall's archive has been saved from flooding and preserved in a £1m rescue operation.

The South Kensington venue's collection includes a trumpet from the opening ceremony 152 years ago and a programme designed by Pablo Picasso.

The archive spans the venue's history since its inception in the 1850s and consists of tens of thousands of items.

Chief executive James Ainscough said the collection brought "extraordinary events to life".

"This famous building has been a crucible of debate, a place of cultural and social transformation, and a prism through which to see a changing Britain," he said.

"No other venue on earth has played host to the Suffragettes, Albert Einstein and Muhammed Ali, as well as Ella Fitzgerald, The Beatles and Adele."

The archive had been stored in four different locations across the building, with the basement store repeatedly flooding and threatening to destroy some of the artefacts.

The collection is now housed in a fireproof climate-controlled studio in the building with a new reading room, and is open to historians, researchers and the public by appointment. 

It will allow the Royal Albert Hall's archivists to conduct tours of its contents for the first time.

You can read more in an article written by Jess Warren and published in the BBC web site at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-67099592 

DNA is the key to a person’s most sacred hidden links.

Through a tiny sample of saliva you can unlock the door to one’s genetic traits, health risks, familial relationships and even ancestral roots. This most confidential information is now at risk of no longer being confidential after hackers stole genetic data from millions through popular DNA testing firm 23andMe. 

About 1 in 5 adults in America have taken at-home genetic tests. Companies that offer these tests such as 23andMe, AncestryDNA, MyHeritage and others blew up in popularity in 2017 after successful advertising campaigns and end-of-the-year price cuts made them even more accessible to consumers. The popularity of at-home DNA tests has remained ever since.

However, privacy concerns have recently come to light after 23andMe, one of the first companies to offer direct-to-consumer genetic testing, had a data breachearlier this month. Hackers performed a credential stuffing attack where cyber criminals use stolen usernames and passwords from a previous hack to gain access to accounts in the system. 

Data from profiles — which included DNA ancestry and other personal information — was compromised in the 23andMe data breach. The information was put up for sale by hackers, raising concerns and questions as to why on earth would hackers be interested in obtaining information pulled from DNA samples.

Apparently DNA data is a hot commodity on the black market, and here are a few reasons why it can be valuable to malicious actors.

However, privacy concerns have recently come to light after 23andMe, one of the first companies to offer direct-to-consumer genetic testing, had a data breach earlier this month. Hackers performed a credential stuffing attack where cyber criminals use stolen usernames and passwords from a previous hack to gain access to accounts in the system. 

Data from profiles — which included DNA ancestry and other personal information — was compromised in the 23andMe data breach. The information was put up for sale by hackers, raising concerns and questions as to why on earth would hackers be interested in obtaining information pulled from DNA samples.

You can read more, including information on how hackers can use the stolen DNA information, in an article by U-Jin Lee published in thestreet web site at: https://www.thestreet.com/technology/hackers-could-use-your-stolen-dna-data-as-a-weapon. 

The Aeolian Islands are a group of seven islands situated north of Sicily. These  include the islands of  Lipari, Salina and Stromboli. From the late 19th century there was large migration from this archipelago  to USA, Australia and other parts of the world. 

The seminar is being run both in person and online from Melbourne, Australia. 

Last year people from many countries attended live by Zoom. 

Recordings are available (for a limited time) for  those who cannot attend live.

The cost of AUD $45 is approximately $US 29.

A flyer for the Seminar/Webinar with further details may be found at: https://tinyurl.com/y2r5939k

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I believe it contains information of interest to every owner of a computer:

Good software is the basis of all PC use, but many professional programs are too expensive for private use. This is where the free software-based applications step in, which, including their source code, are available free of charge on the internet. 

This immediately raises the question of quality and functionality. Don’t worry, open source software is often a real competitor to professional products. 

In this guide, we present the best open source tools for typical areas of application — from Office, to media editing, to file management and backup.

You can read the full article written by Jörn-Erik Burkert and published in the PCWorld web site at: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2091349/the-best-open-source-tools-at-a-glance.html 

A new project is underway to examine one of the British Library’s oldest and most important collections. The Cotton charters and rolls are being catalogued as part of the Library’s Hidden Collections initiative. Begun by the antiquarian and politician Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), and augmented by his son and grandson, the Cotton collection was the first library to be presented to the nation, in 1702, and it has been part of the British Library and its predecessor, the British Museum Library, since the latter’s foundation in 1753. The Cotton manuscripts, which include some of the most famous volumes to survive from medieval Britain, from Beowulf to the Lindisfarne Gospels, are described already on the British Library’s Archives and Manuscripts online catalogue. The whole collection was entered on the UNESCO Memory of the World UK Register in 2018.

You can read more in an article in the British Library’s web site at: https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2023/10/cataloguing-the-cotton-charters.html. 

BYU professor Jill N. Crandell, associate professor of history and director for the Center for Family History and Genealogy, was recently awarded the Ellen Hardin Walworth Medal for Patriotism by The Daughters of the American Revolution.

According to Crandell, she was given the award in recognition of her work with the Center for Family History and Genealogy in support of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Washington D.C.

Crandell explained the mission of the DPAA is “to achieve the fullest possible accounting for missing and unaccounted-for U.S. personnel to their families and the nation.”

BYU’s Center for Family History and Genealogy has been partnering with the DPAA to help with the identification of World War II army service members who did not return from the war. The DPAA works to contact the next living kin of service members who are able to be identified. Crandell’s genealogical work helps locate family members who could receive the remains of identified service members and arrange for a burial.

Upon receiving the email that notified Crandell of the award, she said she remembers feeling deeply honored by the recognition.

“I have always had a great love for my country, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to work on this project and assist our military families,” Crandell said.

For Crandell, this project provides her and the students she works with the opportunity to give back to those who lost their lives serving their country.

Along with identifying remains, Crandell and her team also conduct research to identify DNA donors so the DPAA can build a database of samples to compare newly discovered remains.

Professor Lenore Carrier has worked with Crandell for the past eight years and has been impressed by Crandell’s ability to manage her many responsibilities as director of the Center for Family History and Genealogy.

“Professor Crandell has many important responsibilities that pull her in a variety of different directions every day, but no matter how busy she is, and she is really busy, she always feels and demonstrates that mentoring students is her highest priority,” Carrier said.

Crandell’s colleague, BYU history professor Jay Buckley, praised Crandell’s work and shared he believes she is very deserving of the recognition. Buckley was also a keynote speaker at the annual convention for the Daughters of the American Revolution where Crandell received her award.

“Receiving the Ellen Hardin Walworth Medal for Patriotism is a great honor, and Crandell and her BYU team of collaborators and student researchers should be proud of their contributions to this important project,” Buckley said.

Crandell has supervised and mentored hundreds of students in historical and genealogical research and always emphasizes solid research and high genealogical standards, Carrier said.

“I overwhelmingly agreed that Professor Crandell was deserving of this prestigious award. As a DPAA research partner fellow, I know firsthand that she personally reads and edits each and every genealogy report that is submitted to DPAA,” Carrier said.

Carrier believes Professor Crandell’s work with the DPAA Repatriation Project is unparalleled; she explained her participation in that project is only a small part of what she has accomplished throughout her career.

“Professor Crandell has too many achievements to list, but the breadth of her degree of service to the industry is significant and impressive,” Carrier said.

Buckley also expressed admiration for his colleague and said everyone who meets Crandell can not help but be impressed with all she is able to accomplish.

“Her only deficiency is that she has not been able to clone herself,” Buckley said.

In addition to her work with the DPAA Repatriation Project, Crandell is also currently researching the early residents of Nauvoo and compiling a list of all who served in the Mormon Battalion.

Do you have New York City ancestors or other relatives and you have the street where they lived? Only the streets have changed over the years. A new tool may be able to help you find the original location. New York City’s vast and intricate web of streets, with its rich history, is now accessible through an updated app, NYC Street Map.

The Department of City Planning (DCP) has rolled out an updated version of the NYC Street Map tool, providing users with a record of not just the altered streets but also the original ones dating back to the early 20th century. The tool offers a digital compilation of the entire history of New York City’s 32,000-plus streets.

The tool, praised as an innovation that combines history with practicality, is hoped to benefit a broader audience range, from real estate developers to history enthusiasts.

You can read more at: https://citymonitor.ai/environment/nyc-street-map-historical-streets. 

Boston has created a new database and made it available to the public: what is believed to be first public database of its kind in the country: a city-commissioned record of people who were enslaved in the pre-abolition era in Boston.

The database, which is now posted on the city's website, lists 2,357 Black and Indigenous people enslaved in Boston between 1641 and 1783, the year Massachusetts abolished slavery. And researchers believe that number is only a fraction of what they can ultimately compile.

You can read more in the msn news web site at: https://tinyurl.com/yc8zev55.

The following is a notice written by Reclaim the Records:

Updated public datasets now available for more years of the Missouri Birth Index and Missouri Death Index, including the first pandemic era death files

Hi again from Reclaim The Records! Today we're announcing a big update to two important record sets that we initially put online a few years ago. Big, like about a million records, including the (or one of the) first-ever full state death data files available from a state department of health from the pandemic era.

And as usual, we're releasing it all for FREE use, reuse, downloading, uploading, remixing, and — best of all — for searches on our free websites, including searching by surnames, given names, soundalike names, common nicknames, close spelling variants, wildcard searches, names combined with dates, and even searching by specific date ranges with no name data at all. Yay, open data!

 

But first, the juicy backstory

Between 2016 and 2020, our organization filed, fought, and eventually won (yay!) a huge Missouri Sunshine Law case against the state's Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS). We had asked them for something pretty simple, just lists of people who were born or who had died in the state, which is something that their state law explicitly allows, and which they had given out or sold in more limited fashion to journalists and researchers for decades. We thought such data could also be useful to genealogists and other researchers.

The data was already stored in a big agency database, so they just needed to dump it to a few files, in CSV or even Microsoft Excel format, and send them to us on a USB drive or by file transfer. And under the law, they could only charge us for the actual hours of time needed to fulfill the request and produce the files, and paid at the actual hourly rate of the lowest-paid person on their staff capable of running the export function.

But that's not what happened. What we thought was going to be an easy-peasy public records request for a few weeks and a few hundred dollars turned into one of our most bonkers cases ever, eventually costing the taxpayers of Missouri a low six figures in attorneys fees, four separate fines, and even interest payments. See, Missouri knew that we were going to put the entirety of this public data online for free searches and free downloads and free reuse, and all that good stuff -- because that's what we do! But that would mean that DHSS, the state agency that "owned" it, would probably no longer profit from selling subsets of the data over and over every year, money that usually would have gone right back into their agency budget. They would have lost their (slightly) profitable monopoly on public data.

And so, in 2016, the state of Missouri attempted to charge Reclaim The Records $1.5 million dollars (yes, you read that right!) for two simple database extracts of the basic lists of names and dates in the Missouri Birth Index and Missouri Death index. They were clearly hoping that grotesquely large dollar figure would discourage us, and make those annoying genealogists go away.

Fast forward four years later -- although the process sure didn't seem fast at the time -- and Reclaim The Records kicked their ass in court.

If you want a rundown of the gory details -- which ranged from padding public employee fees with fake "overhead" costs, to sudden attempts to ram a bill through the Missouri State Legislature, to their then-Attorney General now-Senator Josh Hawley getting called out by that year's Pulitzer Prize winning local reporter specifically for his office's mishandling of the case, to citations of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in the legal filings, to the second-highest assessment of fines against a state agency in a Sunshine Law case in state history for knowingly breaking the law, and so on -- we invite you to read some our earlier newsletters all about the case:

And some of the case's press coverage, too:

That last article is especially important, because while we had filed our original Sunshine Law requests in early 2016 for genealogical reasons, the judge's eventual decision in early 2020 also created a strong legal precedent for the state being forced to release death data to the public for public health and government transparency reasons during the coronavirus pandemic.

In the years since we won and put the original batches of state birth and death data online, we have gone back to DHSS with several new Sunshine Law requests for more years of data, and we're pleased to report that we haven't had a problem with them since. And these years have included, of course, the first-ever aggregated lists of people who died in Missouri during the pandemic, although of course the statewide basic death index does not show any medical information nor cause of death. Still, this is important data to be available to the public, whether individual genealogists, or journalists, or epidemiologists, or anyone who wants to see better transparency for public taxpayer-funded data. 

Cool. What's in this new data update?

Reclaim The Records is proud to announce the addition of the following data sets to the Missouri Birth Index and Missouri Death Index websites for free searches -- and to the public domain, for use and reuse:

Important note: in both cases, the 2022 data files are legally considered "provisional" releases by the state of Missouri. meaning that they may have some mistakes or missing records. The finalized copies of the 2022 birth data and 2022 death data will likely be released in mid-2024, along with the provisional data sets from 2023. We've added little warning symbols next to any 2022 births and deaths that pop up in the search results to let people know about this.

Another important note: the official 1910-1919 state birth index file is highly incomplete, because the statewide compliance with vital records registration laws was not-great back then. You might be able to find other sources for pre-1920 birth data from towns, cities, or counties that kept their own records, or from churches and religious communities, not all of whom may have reported their information to the state level. And some pre-1910 Missouri birth and death records are available on the Missouri Secretary of State's website.

The Secretary of State's website also hosts scanned copies of all Missouri death certificates that are more than fifty years old (i.e. 1910-1972 at the moment). Over the years, these files have been name-and-date-indexed by volunteers, including indexing for the deceased person's parents' names and spouse's name for the records starting in 1955. And so we have updated our website's search results to indicate when a scanned and online copy might be available for a record in our dataset, and to link to their site, when possible.

The original .CSV data files for the birth and death indices are also available for download, hosted at the Internet Archive, and linked from our websites. Do whatever you like with them, they're public domain. We just kindly ask that you cite us somewhere and link back to our website if you use them in something, please.

And indeed, it's that time in our newsletter when we mention our website again. We like getting public data released to the public. We really, really like it, even if it sometimes involves a multi-year fight with a state (or city, or federal agency, or government archive or library) to get it. This Missouri case was a particularly crazy case, but we have a lot of cases (several we haven't even announced publicly yet!) where the behavior of government agencies has been less-than-awesome, and we could sure use some help fighting them in court, when needed.

And we can only do that with your help. If you like seeing records like these Missouri vital indexes go online for free, for everyone, forever, and you want to see us keep doing this kind of thing, and in more states nationwide, please consider making a donation to help fund our work. We really appreciate your support! You can donate on our website.

Thanks, and we hope you enjoy the new data!

"If we carry on the way we're going, we're going to have to concrete the whole planet just to store the data that we're generating," explains a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in a new video.

Fortunately, "A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," explains a Microsoft Research web page about "Project Silica". (Data is retrieved by a high-speed, computer-controlled microscope from a library of glass disks storing data in three-dimensional pixels called voxels):

Magnetic storage, although prevalent, is problematic. Its limited lifespan necessitates frequent re-copying, increasing energy consumption and operational costs over time. "Magnetic technology has a finite lifetime," says Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineer, Project Silica. "You must keep copying it over to new generations of media. A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years. But once that lifetime is up, you've got to copy it over. And that, frankly, is both difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of all that energy and resource we're using."

Project Silica aims to break this cycle. Developed under the aegis of Microsoft Research, it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years.

You can read more in an article in slashdot.org at: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/10/14/236219/is-glass-the-future-of-storage