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.

This is just a quick note to let you know that I will be traveling for the next week. No, this is not a genealogy-related trip. This one is personal. I'll be visiting relatives, attending a reunion, and walking around the small town where I was born and grew up.

I will be traveling witha Macintosh laptop and an Android tablet computer so I should be able to connect online whenever I want. However, traveling always creates some new challenges, such as bulky or non-existant wi-fi connections. Therefore, please do not be surprised if I am absent occasionally.

I should be back home and back to normal on August 23.

Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem announced Sunday that it has started using state-of-the-art AI technology including a new image detection capability to help comb through the world’s largest archive documentation of the Holocaust.

This innovation comes at a time when Holocaust distortion and trivialization are on the rise around the globe.

Over the seven decades since its establishment, Yad Vashem has accumulated 224 million pages of documentation, more than half a million photographs and nearly 135,000 video, audio and written testimonies from the Holocaust.

“A human being could not go over all the material which houses a treasure-trove of material for the world in terms of Holocaust education,” said Esther Fuxbrumer, head of the software development department at Yad Vashem.

She said that to facilitate access to the vast information in its archives, Yad Vashem embarked on an innovative tech project two years ago dubbed “AI in the service of Holocaust remembrance” that has been implemented over the last couple of months.

It includes an image-processing ability to sift through hundreds of thousands of photos in a matter of minutes and a separate Natural Language Processing (NLP) model, specially tuned to Hebrew, which can identify names, dates and places from the millions of sheets of testimony and connect them.

You can read more in an article by Etgar Lefkovits in the J-Wire web site at: https://www.jwire.com.au/yad-vashem-using-ai-to-restore-memory-of-holocaust/.