The following announcement was written by the folks at Findmypast:

Herefordshire Baptisms  

With 231,270 new baptism transcripts added to this existing collection, it’s never been easier to research Herefordshire roots. Spanning from 1433 to 1950, the new additions may reveal an ancestor’s name, date and place of baptism, and names of parents.  

Herefordshire Marriages 

86,782 new marriages have been added to this collection, covering 1433 to 1949. The details can vary, but you’ll typically find the names of both parties alongside the place and date of the marriage. In some cases, you may spot ages and names of their fathers.  

Herefordshire Burials 

Wrapping up the new Herefordshire records are an impressive 300,517 new burial records, spanning 1459 to 1959. You can normally glean facts such a name, date and place of burial. Some will also include your ancestor’s age too.   

Newspapers 

Three new Welsh language papers, updates to a further six, and over 75,244 new pages make up this week’s newspaper release. This also takes the newspaper archive’s total pages to over 70 million. 

New titles: 

Updated titles: 

The following announcement was written by  Gopher Records:

A new free web site, BetterSoldiersAndSailors.com, provides a dramatic improvement over the popular “Soldiers and Sailors” site offered by the National Park Service (NPS).  The old NPS system has a weak search engine and it fails to address many limitations of the data itself.  The resulting failed searches and unorganized search results lead researchers to many false conclusions.

The new site uses the same databases as the NPS system (soldiers, sailors, regiments, and prisoners) but overcomes those limitations, searches additional databases at the same time, and actually helps you to get copies of the soldiers’ military records.

The Problem:

The limitations of the NPS system are numerous but largely stem from the fact that you have to match the spelling of the name precisely.  Any discrepancy in the spelling, punctuation, or spacing within the name will cause the search to fail.  So, for instance…

• A search for “Denison Butler Baldwin” won’t find that soldier because his first and middle names happen to be abbreviated to just one letter in the database. Nearly HALF of the soldiers have their given or middle name abbreviated in this way. (In fact, in this case, a search for “D. B. Baldwin” or “Baldwin, D. B.” won’t find him either because his name happens to be saved in the database as “D.B. Baldwin” with no space after the first period!)
• Conversely, a search for “Jose A. Sanches” won’t find the soldier by that name because his middle name of Antonio is spelled out in the database;
• A search for “George Washington” won’t find a soldier whose name happens to be recorded as “Geo. Washington” ” like the one who served in the 64^th NY Infantry. There are nearly 100,000 records with abbreviated names like Geo., Wm., Robt., Jno., Benj., Sam’l, etc.
• A search for “John Smith” won’t find “John Smyth” or “John Smythe” unless those spelling variations have been explicitly saved as alternate names in the record;
• A search for “McDonald” won’t find “MacDonald”; “Van Able” won’t find “Vanable”, “de la Croix” won’t find “Delacroix”, and “Saint John” won’t find “St. John”, among many other examples.
• And perhaps worst of all … a search for a name like “Robert J. York” won’t find him unless you think to scroll past dozens of soldiers like Robert J. Shamburg who happened to serve in a New YORK regiment.

As you can imagine, the requirement that you guess the exact way that a soldier’s name is spelled and/or abbreviated in the database may produce thousands of false negatives. You’ll never know what you didn’t find. At the same time, the peculiarities of the NPS search engine could cause your soldier to be lost in a sea of false positives.

The Solution:

BetterSoldiersAndSailors.com resolves those problems and adds many additional features that greatly improve and prioritize your search results, including:

• Phonetic Searches so “Canon” finds Caenan, Keynon, Canon, Cannon, etc.;
• Wildcard Searches so “M?N*HAN” finds Mennehan, Managhan, Monaghan, Mynihan, etc.;
• Automatic matches on abbreviations – when the first and/or middle name is recorded by only the first letter;
• Automatic recognition of common abbreviations like Geo., Wm., Robt., Jno., Benj., Sam’l, etc.;
• Search results are sorted according to how closely they match the search terms.

And while the new search site includes the same databases of Soldiers, African-American Sailors, Prisoners, and Regimental Histories, you can also search some databases that are not included in the NPS system:

• more than 200,000 Court Martial records;
• more than 700,000 burial records in more than 16,000 cemeteries around the country;
• more than 1,000 ships of the Union Navy with their histories.

Other handy features allow you to:

• Simultaneous searches of the databases instead of requiring separate searches of soldiers, sailors, prisoners, etc.
• Export up to 300 search results to a database or spreadsheet for further analysis;
• Get a list of all known soldiers in a specific regiment sorted by name or by company;
• Filter regiments for those that participated in a specific engagement (e.g., Gettysburg);
• Get advice on where to find a specific soldier’s records online, when appropriate, including links to the National Archives website (free), FamilySearch.org (free), Ancestry.com ($), and Fold3.com ($);
• Optionally link directly to GopherRecords.com to order copies of a soldier’s records that will arrive much faster and at a much lower price than when ordering directly from the National Archives.

BetterSoldiersAndSailors.com will revolutionize the way that you search for Civil War soldiers.

You can read still more at: https://gopherrecords.com/bss_announcement/.

It’s that time of year again! Legacy Family Tree Webinars is thrilled to host our fourth annual Webtember, a FREE, month-long online genealogy conference. Webtember is a fantastic chance to take your genealogy skills and know-how up a level from the comfort of your home!

Every Friday in September, Legacy Family Tree Webinars will host multiple webinars with expert speakers on a wide variety of family history topics. A total of 25 webinars will take place. You can join live for all five Fridays or just one webinar that strikes your interest. If you can’t join live, no worries: all the recordings will be available and free to view at your convenience through the end of the month.

Register now for any or all of the sessions!

This year’s program boasts a wonderful lineup of speakers and fascinating topics. Don’t miss our Director of Content, Mike Mansfield, speaking about the newly released 1931 Canadian census! The full schedule is below:

Enjoy!

Are you a Mayflower descendant? I don't think I am but it is estimated that 30 Million People Today Are descendants of the 102 passengers on board that tiny ship.  There is a good chance that you are one of them.

Even if you aren't, you've probably met someone who has proudly told you that their ancestors hopped the pond in 1620. Despite being a long-time point of pride—and even class distinction for some New Englanders—the significance is still present in modern-day America. Estimates range as high as 35 million living Mayflower descendants, although the true number may be lower due to intermarriage. What is certain is that pure math is responsible for many humans around the world having famous ancestors, including Mayflower passengers and Genghis Khan.

Now, 21st-century DNA technology has given a scientific gloss to traditional genealogy, allowing scientists and average Americans to trace their lineage. Simple math means each one of us has 64 fourth great-grandparents, and 4,096 10th great-grandparents (barring intermarriage between ancestors). The further back one goes, the direct ancestors increase exponentially. Given 132 were aboard the Mayflower, and only 53 survived the first winter in their “new world,” the starting pool of Mayflower ancestors is rather small. However, over 400 years later and with ever-dropping infant mortality rates, the descendants definitely number in the millions now.

British mathematician Rob Eastaway explained to BBC why the 35 million estimates might be a bit too high. In short, Mayflower descendants likely married other descendants most of the time. This is called pedigree collapse. It tends to happen in all family trees, especially since in the past, marriages were often among smaller, even isolated populations. “My father-in-law discovered that their family is descended from Richard Warren,” Eastaway explains. “But not only that, they think that probably my wife and children are also descended from John Howland. So there's even an example of potential pedigree collapse in my own family.”

You can read a lot more about this in an article by Madeleine Muzdakis  published in the mymodernmet.com web site at: https://mymodernmet.com/descendant-ancestors-mayflower/. 

A collection of photographs taken during World War Two in England have been opened to the public for the first time.

The aerial images were taken by the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) Photographic Reconnaissance units while stationed at bases across England in 1943 and 1944.

The 3,600 photographs offer a birds-eye view of the country as it changed during the war.

This includes bomb damage to towns and cities as well as Old Trafford football stadium in Greater Manchester.

Damage to the main stand of the football ground can be seen in the photo, after it was hit in a bombing raid in March 1941.

The home of Manchester United was not used again for football until 1949.

They also captured ancient monuments surrounded by anti-tank defences in West Sussex, such as Cissbury Ring Iron Age hillfort in Worthing where ditches and concrete cubes can be seen laid out to impede an enemy advance.

There is also a low-level photograph showing part of a US Army camp in Wiltshire which shows firing ranges in the foreground while troops play a game of baseball in a recreation field in the top left of the image.

The collection has been made available to the public for the first time in an online, searchable map on the Historic England Archive.

You can read a lot more and see several of the photographs at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-66511918.

Details are available in the  Reclaim the Records web site at: https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/.

In 2004, a baby – just days old – was dropped off inside a bathroom at Richmond University Medical Center on Staten Island.

She was found by a hospital technician named Claudia. On Tuesday, August 15, 2023, Claudia, the baby – now 19 years old – and that baby’s adoptive family gathered just outside that same bathroom.

It wasn’t long before adoptive parents – Angela and Dennis – had a baby girl to join their growing family.  And the parents knew the backstory of how Victoria was found but didn’t tell her until after she had turned 18. But this story takes another incredible turn.

Frank and Victoria recently decided to find out more about their backstory, so they turned to DNA testing.

As it turns out, Frank is not Victoria’s adopted brother, but they are actually 100%, blood siblings. 

You can read the full story by Chris Welch published in the fox5ny.com web site at: https://www.fox5ny.com/news/siblings-reunite-19-years-after-being-abandoned.

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it contains information that I believe every computer user should become familiar with:

Do you remember instant messengers from the late '90s? Back then, techies would reverse engineer protocols of popular messengers to create multi-platform solutions with extended features. That's how I created CenterICQ, a Linux-based IM client tailored to my needs.

Over 20 years later, messengers have changed drastically, but I'm still not happy with what we have on the market. Here's why.

You can read the full article written by Konstantin Klyagin in an article in the Forbes.com web site at: https://tinyurl.com/4y93fzx5 

Patty Taylor has written an article that will interest most genealogists:  Using Google Books. It starts off with the following:

"Google. It’s a noun when we refer to the Google Search engine. It is also a verb when seeking information, but are we limiting our use of how we use Google for genealogy? You might be missing out on valuable resources, most of which are available to us free of charge. And who doesn’t like free? Google Books should be explored when seeking out family history information; it’s basically a public research library right in your own home.

"Utilizing Google Books is very easy. If you already have a Google email account, then you are ahead of the game. If not, it’s easy to sign up for a free Google account. This account will give you access to a Suite of useful applications such as documents, sheets, photos, a meeting room, chat feature and so much more that can be used for your family history projects. One of the best parts is that you can share documents and sheets to review with other family members for real-time collaboration."

You can find the full article in the beaumontenterprise.com web site at: https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/entertainment/article/use-google-books-genealogy-18290704.php

Brown County is in the beginning stages of putting together a new local history and genealogy research center inside its central library in downtown Green Bay.

Part of the effort is absorbing all it can from one of its most trusted resources, so the information is available for generations to come.

Brown County's local history and genealogy department has been inside the downtown library for nearly 50 years and Mary Jane Herber has been there the entire time.

“You just don't know who is going to come and show up and ask questions,” said Herber.

Herber has been answering those questions and adding to what has become quite a collection since 1974.

“To be perfectly honest, I put another bookcase in a year and a half or two years ago, we can't put anymore bookcases in here without taking out tables,” said Herber.

Luckily for Herber and other local historians, the county will be modernizing what it has and making it more accessible, in a bigger space on the building’s first floor. It's something Herber says she has actually been working on for years.

“Some people think all I do is think about stuff from 150 years ago or 100 years ago, but what I have to do is think about what's being produced today that we need to make sure we have a copy of for you 50 years from now,” said Herber.

“We'll be crafting a sensible, smart workplan to be able to put into place these research elements in a space that is really going to meet the needs of our community,” said Sarah Sugden, the library director for Brown County.

Sugden says more than $161,000 is already set aside to bring in outside help to sort through all the information and make it more accessible for both serious historians and casual ones.

You can read more in an article by Ben Krumholz in the fox11online web site at https://tinyurl.com/yc6p7ns7.