A press release from FamilySearch offers a valuable new service:

The FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, has opened a new, free service where guests can bring their personal and family records and artifacts and convert them to digital formats for easier sharing and long-term keeping. The feature is called The Family Memories Preservation Center, or Memory Lane. Visitors can convert family documents, home movies, slides, negatives, video and audio tapes, and other media to digital formats to better preserve them against loss and to make them more readily accessible to other family members or friends.

“Every family probably has photo albums or boxes of photos or old video tapes and reel-to-reel films they have produced or acquired through the years. The Memory Lane service is a great opportunity to ensure those family memories will be preserved and available for future generations,” said Debbie Gurtler, FamilySearch assistant library director.

The machines and technology available to convert old media to digital are surprisingly fast. “I brought a box of family photos and did 150 in about an hour and a half or so. You can put them all into a stack without worrying about the different sizes, place them on one of the self-feeding photo scanners, and they just automatically feed through. It’s hard to imagine how quick it can be with the high-speed scanners,” added Gurtler.

How The Family Memories Preservation Center Works

Instructions are available with each device, and volunteers and library staff are available to help visitors learn how to use any of the equipment if needed. Thumb (portable USB) drives are available for free but may not have sufficient memory for large projects. Visitors with films, videos, and large quantities of things to digitize are encouraged to bring their own flash drives or portable hard drives. Files can also be loaded directly to a patron’s personal online storage location like Google Drive and iCloud.

If applicable, digitized files can also be attached to people on the FamilySearch Family Tree via FamilySearch Memories. In Memories, they can be organized by topic, preserved as a slideshow or album, or used as sources for life sketches.

Why Old Media Should Be Transferred to Digital

Some people may not be aware that CD-ROMs and DVDs do not have permanent shelf life, showing notable signs of degradation after a just a few years if not stored properly. Not to mention technology needed to view these media types will eventually become obsolete. Once converted, digital files can be transferred quite easily to a home computer or other storage media of choice.

The FamilySearch Library is a popular tourist destination for people seeking to make family discoveries and personal connections. FamilySearch and its predecessors have been helping preserve and provide access to the world’s genealogical records since 1894. The FamilySearch Library Memory Lane service is a free extension of these services for individuals and families to preserve and share their own family memories for generations to come.

One guest recently transferred her grandfather’s self-recorded life story from tapes to a digital file. Time had rendered four of the dozen tapes inoperable, but she was able to successfully digitize the rest. She said her cousins and family members are waiting for this—to hear his voice with his distinctive Cockney accent sharing memories. He was born in London and moved to Bountiful, Utah, but he retained his accent, she shared with a smile.

Walk-ins are welcome, but a reservation is recommended to be sure the needed equipment will be available. For more details about the types of equipment available and how to make optimum use of the facility, go to FamilySearch Memories Preservation Center.

About FamilySearch

FamilySearch International is the largest genealogy organization in the world. We are a nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Millions of people use our 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 125 years. People access our services and resources free online at FamilySearch.org or through over 5,000 FamilySearch centers in 129 countries, including the main FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

From an article by Eddie Penney published in the Yahoo News web site:

On Friday, July 14, the National Museum of Ireland, in collaboration with RIFNET (Reconstituting the Irish Family Network) unveiled a new digital exhibition entitled ReCollecting the Irish Family. The exhibition consists of items donated from five LGBTQ+ families throughout Ireland. Interviews with the families accompany the pieces, challenging the listener to examine their notions of what “the Irish family” truly means.

Representations of a variety of family structures are important to foster an inclusive society, particularly considering that about a third of Irish families deviate from the traditional family model of two married people who are both in their first marriage.

RIFNET co-leaders and researchers Dr Leanne Calvert and Dr Maeve O’Riordan aim to showcase the diversity of LGBTQ+ and non-traditional families across Ireland that may not be visible in popular culture and media.

Commenting on the importance of the project, Dr O’Riordan added that “it is essential to record the history of LGBTQ+ families so that future generations will know that they too have a history, and that LGBTQ+ experiences are part of Irish history, and the history of the Irish family”.

You can read more at: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/digital-exhibition-celebrates-lgbtq-families-135613632.html. 

NOTE: This is an update to an article I published several years ago. I have since changed hardware (and purchased a new house) and have updated my procedures. This article reflects those changes.

I keep my computers and genealogy material in a small room in my house. I am sure the folks who built the house intended this room to be a child's bedroom, but there are no children in the house these days, so I have converted it into something I call "my office." I bet many people reading this article have done the same with a spare room in their homes.

I have several computers and a 32-inch wide monitor in this room, along with a high-speed fiber optic Internet connection, a wi-fi mesh network router, two printers (inkjet and a color laser), two scanners, several external hard drives used for making backups, oversized hi-fi speakers connected to the computers, and various other pieces of computer hardware. Luckily, these are all rather small, and advancing technology results in smaller and smaller devices appearing every year. I occasionally replace aging hardware, and the newer devices are almost always smaller than the old ones. However, I have a huge space problem: books and magazines. They don’t seem to be getting any smaller. My older books still take up as much room today as they did years ago.

"My office" has two bookcases that are each six feet tall and four feet wide, along with two smaller bookcases and a four-drawer filing cabinet. 

I don't want to count how many books I have purchased over the years, but I am sure it must be several hundred volumes. I don't want to even think about the bottom-line price. I only have space in my four bookcases to store a tiny fraction of them; the rest are stored in boxes in the basement of the older house but when I upgraded to a new house I obtained one (in a different state) that doesn’t have a basement. I was faced with a new problem: what to do with all those books that were in the basement of the earlier house? 

Out-of-sight books are books that I rarely use. "Out of sight, out of mind." I probably wasted my money by purchasing all those books as I rarely use most of them. I may have looked at them once, but I rarely go back to them again and again.

While four bookcases sounds like a lot of storage space, I filled them all years ago with books, magazines, software boxes, and stacks of CD-ROM disks. I don't have room for any new purchases unless I first remove some of the items I already have and move them to boxes in a storage facility someplace. 

My newly-purchased books and all the genealogy magazines I receive used to end up being stacked on the floor, on my desk, and in most any other nook or cranny I can find. The place was out of control, and I realized that I needed to find a solution. 

"I used to have a desk, and I am certain that it is still here... someplace. I think I saw it last year."

In the past few years, I have learned a few lessons. Since there is no space left for storage, I now prefer to obtain all new magazines in electronic format. Not only are they easier to store, but they are also easier to search. 

I might want to look something up in the future. Of course, my computer can find words inside electronic files much faster than my fingers and eyeballs can find anything in the printed pages of hundreds of magazines. Many times I have said to myself, "I read an article about that a few years ago. Now, where was that article?" A search on a hard drive will find the information within seconds, but a manual search of books stored in boxes is rarely successful. Depending on the file format used, I can often find specific words or phrases inside a few thousand files within seconds. Try doing that with printed books!

However, those magazines are the smaller problem. My biggest problem is books, hundreds of them. I cannot afford to go back and repurchase all of the books again in electronic format. What should I do?

I mulled that question over for quite a while before I realized that there were only two possible solutions:

1. Get a larger house

    or    

2. Digitize the existing books and all future acquisitions, then get rid of the printed material

Actually, I did both. However, for this article I will focus on the second option: “Digitize the existing books and all future acquisitions, then get rid of the printed material.”

The decision became easier when I purchased a scanner.

I am now in the slow and tedious process of cutting apart every book and magazine that I own and scanning every one of them. I am performing this task on a "time available" basis. I try to scan 50 or more pages a day, but I must admit that I haven't been able to do that every day. In the past year, I have only managed to digitize about twenty books and maybe 100 old magazines. At the rate I am going, the project will take many years to accomplish. However, I feel that I have no choice. 

I don't want to think about "downsizing" in my retirement years by moving into smaller living quarters. If I don't start solving this problem now, I will face a far larger problem within a very few years.

A few years ago, I moved into a Winnebago motor home full time and lived there for two years. During that time, I learned a lot about downsizing! 

I later sold the motor home and purchased a second (stick-built) home in the sunbelt where I can spend my time without shoveling snow or worrying about falling on ice and breaking a hip, such as a friend of mine did last winter. Life is great in the sunshine!

However, this move  creates two new problems. The first is a repeat of the problem I mentioned earlier: I still don’t have room for hundreds of books and magazines. The second problem is an even bigger one, however: there is no way I can duplicate everything on paper and keep duplicate copies in my new home!

The primary reasons that I have not yet been able to scan many books and magazines are: (1.) time required and (2.) the speed of the scanner. The first scanner I purchased is a great device, but it was never designed for speed. It can only scan one side of one page at a time. I need something faster and something that has an input tray that will accept a stack of pages and will scan both sides of each page automatically. 

To address this problem, I went out and purchased a sheet-feed scanner. I can insert up to 50 pages at a time, push a button, and relax for about a minute while the scanner digitizes both sides of every page and then deposits all the pages in an output tray and the digital files of data on the hard drive of my computer. I check the electronic scan to make sure it worked properly, and then I throw away the paper.

(GASP!)

Yes, I throw away the paper. Even books. As a long-time genealogist, I am used to saving every scrap of paper. However, I soon realized that this was no longer necessary when I had a duplicate copy of everything, a copy that is easier to search than paper. Once digitized, almost all the printed and even hand-written pages go into the trash bin or into the shredder.

Copyrights

I certainly am not a lawyer but I do believe there are no copyright issues involved, even with the newly-published material. I am making copies solely for my personal use and have no plans to ever share any of the newer books and magazines in digital format with anyone else. Current U.S. copyright laws allow for making copies for one's personal use, and I think most other countries have similar provisions. I can legally share electronic copies of very old out-of-copyright printed books, but anything that still falls under copyright laws will always be used solely for my own personal use. 

The Process

I must admit that I had emotional difficulties when I first cut the pages out of some of my "valuable" books. That is, those that I felt were valuable, regardless of their actual replacement cost. Cutting pages out of the New England Historic and Genealogical Register or out of that family surname book that I paid $150 to purchase years ago is a gut-wrenching experience. Even tougher is the prospect of throwing the pages out in the trash after they have been scanned. However, I really feel I have no choice: I cannot afford the storage space. The emotions subside after cutting apart the first three or four books.

One trick that I learned recently concerns the many out-of-copyright, reprinted books that I own. Before cutting them apart, I first look on Google Books and at The Internet Archive and then search on Google to see if someone else has already scanned a copy of the same book and made it available online. If so, I simply go to the appropriate web site, find the electronic version of the book, click on DOWNLOAD PDF, and save the entire book to my hard drive. Then I simply throw away the printed book that I have. If someone else has already scanned the book, there is no need for me to duplicate the other person's effort!

Local libraries don't seem to want these cut-apart books; they already have space problems of their own and are already throwing away lesser-used books by the hundreds. The last thing they want is more old books, especially if the book is already available in electronic format. Major genealogy libraries typically don't want the books either as they usually already have copies of the books that I am digitizing.

So far, about half of the out-of-copyright books that I have checked have been found in The Internet Archive, in Google Books, or in at least one of the other online web sites specializing in out-of-copyright books.

There are a handful of books that I will never cut apart: the family Bible printed in 1828, the signed autobiography of Lorenzo Dow published in 1838, my high school yearbook, and a very few others. However, the remainder of them are being sliced. I don't hesitate to slice reprinted books or magazines. I have an Exacto knife for the purpose. I refer to this process as "meeting the guillotine."

Magazines

I have converted most of my magazine subscriptions to e-subscriptions. Don’t send me paper! For the few subscriptions that are not available in electronic format, I now read the printed magazine for the first time WHILE I am cutting the pages apart and feeding them into the scanner. 

Which scanner should I use?

For a while I thought about purchasing a bunch of scanners and evaluating them in a side-by-side comparison article in this newsletter. I soon gave up on that idea because (1.) there are a lot of scanners available, and comparing would be both expensive and time consuming. Also, (2.) it’s already been done!

If you are thinking about purchasing a new scanner, I would suggest you first look at The Best Scanners of 2023 in the PCMag web site. It is a great comparison of most of the leading scanners of today.

However, I purchased a scanner that is not listed in PCMag: the Raven Scanner. It is designed for anyone who wants to go paperless. See https://www.raven.com/ for all the details.

Preservation

Obviously, I also have to make sure these documents are well preserved in their digital format. Can you imagine the emotions if I spent hundreds of hours scanning several hundred old books and then threw the originals away, only to have a hard drive crash?

In fact, I keep a MINIMUM of four copies: the original copy is kept on the Macintosh's hard drive; a backup copy is kept on an eight-terabyte external hard drive that plugs into the Mac's USB connector; a second backup copy is kept on various USB “flash drives" and a third backup copy is kept on an off-site backup service “in the cloud” on the Internet that automatically backs up any new files or newly-changed files from the Mac's hard drive once every fifteen minutes. 

Right now I am also keeping a fourth copy on my laptop computer and a fifth copy on another computer in my office by using a middle-of-the-night process that automatically copies files across my in-home network. 

I also make backups of everything to another USB hard drive and take the new backups to the computers at the other location. I guess that is a sixth copy. I can even carry my entire digital library, along with a suitcase and a few other things, in my 2-seat sports car when driving to genealogy conventions or anyplace else.

If I was to carry my entire library when it was all in print, I would be renting a large U-Haul van several times a year!

I am not sure if I will continue with the fourth, fifth, and sixth copies, however. If those disk drives fill up, I might reconsider the process. A "belt and suspenders" approach is a good idea, but I am not sure that I need three belts and three sets of suspenders! I make fourth, fifth, and sixth copies right now simply because I happen to have the disk space available. 

There is an unexpected side benefit: the flash drives slip into a pocket and are barely noticeable there. When I go to genealogy conferences, to a library, to a courthouse, or to a cousin's home, I am carrying my digitized library with me. My present 2 terabyte flash drive has sufficient space to store tens of thousands of books and magazines. Someday I will have my entire library with me in my pocket. If I want to check a book or magazine that is in my home library, I can pull a flash drive out of my pocket, insert it into my laptop or a friend's computer, and check on it quickly. In contrast, can you imagine carrying around an entire library of printed books and magazines?

If copyright laws allow, I can even provide legal copies of an entire book to a friend by simply clicking and dragging a file onto my friend's computer or by sending it to him or her in e-mail. I can legally do so with the out-of-copyright books that I own.

Summation

Converting one's library to all digital files can be a gut-wrenching task. Admittedly, slicing “valuable” books is an emotional challenge. However, once the available physical storage space is used up, one is left with few choices. 

How do you store your collection of books and magazines? Do you have them all neatly stored and organized? Can you find what you want quickly? Can you grab all of them and move out of the house quickly during an emergency, such as in a fire,  hurricane, or a tornado? How about future purchases? Where will you put those? Can you carry all of them with you on a trip? And what if you move? 

There’s a saying that “you can’t take it with you,” but you might be able to keep your printed resources for as long as you need them – and make them much more useful – if you convert them to digital files.

What was the weather on the day you were born? Other services will charge you money for that information but you can do the same thing free of charge on your computer.

Of course, you can check ANY date, not just the date you were born.

When your Dad talked about going out in that great blizzard, just how bad was it?  Wolfram Alpha has a number of helpful tools to answer your weather questions, including historical data from weather stations located all over the world.

For example, simply enter “weather” into the search bar, and Wolfram Alpha’s geoIP capabilities identify your approximate location and produce the latest records from your nearest weather station. The “Latest recorded weather” feature will display the current temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and conditions, such as clear, thunderstorms, or fog. 

To find historical weather information, simply go to http://www.wolframalpha.com and enter the word WEATHER followed by a date and a location. For instance:

weather September 6, 1978 Hanover, New Hampshire

Wolfram Alpha then returned the following:

The information appears to cover the US, Canada, and the UK. You may not have much luck for dates before the mid-1930s, depending on location.

Warfront papers were newspapers for soldiers on the front. The National Library of Finland has, in cooperation with the library of the National Defence University, digitised a total of 144 warfront papers from 1939–1945 and made them available. 

Official warfront papers were published by the communications companies, and active soldiers on the front published unofficial troop papers. Some papers only had one published issue, and some were published nearly daily for years. Official papers may have been printed, but the papers created on the front were only available as issues of a few copies, or even as hand-written individual issues. 

The warfront paper project combined the collection of papers in the National Defence University with the National Library’s collection. This way, we were able to create a comprehensive, digital collection that sheds light on life on the front. The National Library's collection of warfront papers, which had been lacking in many parts, received a significant addition in 2020 through an agreement with the National Defence University on handing over the warfront papers in their library to the National Library. The warfront papers, previously stored in two separate libraries, are now available in the National Library’s Digital Collections (digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi(opens a new tab)), which will improve the availability of the material and put more eyes on the warfront papers.  

The collection of warfront papers is available at https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/collections?id=841 in Finnish (use Google Translate for a translation). Digitised papers up until the end of 1939 are freely available to the public. More recent papers are available to read at legal deposit workstations as well as for research at universities that have signed the Tutkain agreement. 

There's high demand by Cubans to research their ancestry with help from U.S.-based genealogy buffs. If they can tie it to Spain, it means a way off the island.

The following is extracted from an interview of Lourdes Del Pino, a Cuban American engineer, AND Brian Tosko Bello as conducted by Tim Padgett and Adrian Florido, a host at radio station WLRN in Miami:

INTRO: for Cuban Americans, it's about finding roots on the island, but for Cubans who live there, it's about finding their ticket off.

Lourdes Del Pino: People want us to help them find sacramental records or civil records in Cuba.

Tim Padgett: She's vice president of the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami. In recent years, it's grown to more than 9,000 members.

Lourdes Del Pino: It has exploded. We have members in Australia. We have members all over the world.

Brian Tosko Bello: Del Pino spends a lot of time at Florida International University poring over Cuban archives, helping people like Bryan Tosko Bello find their families' stories. Tosko Bello is a marketing professional in Washington, D.C. He caught the genealogy bug after a beloved Cuban-born grandmother passed away a few years ago in the U.S.

Brian Tosko Bello: In 2019, Tosko Bello did go to Cuba, and as he hunted down his family's past, he discovered treasure troves of data like records from church parishes and cemeteries. Back in the U.S., he partnered with another Cuban American genealogy enthusiast in Miami, historian Richard Denis. They created the website Digital Cuba and digitized all that Cuban cemetery and parish information. They also made a podcast.

Brian Tosko Bello: We are doing our first famous Cuban family tree episode, starting with Mr. Desi Arnaz.

There is a lot more to the interview which you can read on the NPR web site at: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/17/1188181249/cubans-look-to-genealogy-as-a-way-off-the-island.

The expression 'a skeleton in the closet' refers to a secret source of shame, potentially ruinous if exposed, which a person or family makes efforts to conceal. The results of a recent DNA test illustrates this perfectly.

A man has been left devastated after his innocent activity ended up ruining his parents' marriage after 33 years.

Having a keen interest in genealogy at the time, he ordered two DNA kits - one for his dad and the other for himself and was overall excited to learn about his “ancestry composition”.

But things went horribly wrong when he noticed something was 'off'.

Taking to social media platform Reddit, he said: "I ordered myself and my dad a kit when they were on sale and we received our results a couple of days ago.

“My mother has never really been interested in genealogy or DNA stuff so I didn’t tell her about it. The first thing my dad and I did was compare our ancestry composition and I noticed it was a bit... off to say the least.

“He is highly British and Irish (most strongly connected to the UK) with a small bit of French and German. I am mostly Scandinavian (most strongly connected to Sweden) with over a quarter French and German and some Italian.”

The confused dad and his son ended up checking other family members but discovered a horrifying truth - they were not related.

“He didn’t pop up on mine and I didn’t pop up on his," he added. “There was a half sibling (sharing 26.3 per cent) and father match, however. I began freaking out and my dad got so angry.

“My mum came home and he confronted her about it. She lost it and admitted she knew I was some other man’s child all along and would’ve tried to stop us had she known we got the tests. They are now divorcing which sucks. He’s now wondering if my two younger siblings are his or not.”

You can read more in an article by Hannah Kane published in the mirror.co.uk web site at: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/i-dna-test-whim-within-30472626.

Here is a list of all of this week's articles, all of them available here at https://eogn.com:                   

Members of Jewish community are being invited to delve into their ancestral history when genealogists from around the world descend on the UK later this month. 

Dozens of family ancestry experts will be on hand to help members of the community learn to trace their roots at an international conference on Jewish genealogy, which promises to “enhance and spread knowledge and learning” around the topic through  workshops, talks and storytelling.

This is the first time the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, now in its 43rd year, is being staged in London.

The event will run for four days between July 30 and August 3 and will feature more than 100 speakers, and over 200 sessions geared toward everyone from first timers to conference veterans.

The conference is hosted by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies  (IAJGS), an umbrella organisation of nearly 90 Jewish genealogical organisations worldwide, with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain (JGSGB) acting as the co-host.

You can read more in an article by Daniel Ben-David published in The Jewish Chronicle web site at: https://tinyurl.com/46nuafw7.

Do you have home movies or home videos that are, shall we say, less than perfect? Do these have shaky video or unstable camerawork? If so, read on:

Filmmakers may soon be able to stabilize shaky video, change viewpoints and create freeze-frame, zoom and slow-motion effects – without shooting any new footage – thanks to an algorithm developed by researchers at Cornell University and Google Research.

The software, called DynIBar, synthesizes new views using pixel information from the original video, and even works with moving objects and unstable camerawork. The work is a major advance over previous efforts, which yielded only a few seconds of video, and often rendered moving subjects as blurry or glitchy.

The code for this research effort is freely available, though the project is at an early stage and not yet integrated into commercial video editing tools.

“While this research is still in its early days, I’m really excited about potential future applications for both personal and professional use,” said Noah Snavely, a research scientist at Google Research and associate professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

Snavely presented this work, “DynIBaR: Neural Dynamic Image-Based Rendering,” at the 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, on June 20, where it received an honorable mention for the best paper award. Zhengqi Li, Ph.D. ’21, of Google Research was the lead author on the study. 

“Over the last few years, we’ve seen major progress in view synthesis methods – algorithms that can take a collection of images capturing a scene from a discrete set of viewpoints, and can render new views of that scene,” said Snavely. “However, most of these methods fail on scenes with moving people or pets, swaying trees and so on. This is a big problem because many interesting things in the world are things that move.”

You can read more in an article published in the Cornell University web site at: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/07/software-creates-entirely-new-views-existing-video.