Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Nothing Lives Forever, Especially Newspapers

I always assumed that newspaper articles had an infinite lifetime. Anything printed in today's newspaper would be stored for some time in the newspaper's archives department as well as at local libraries. Eventually, those papers would be microfilmed and therefore preserved forever. Well, I once thought it was forever.

The world is changing.

Preventing Identity Theft with the SSDI

Identity theft is a major concern these days, as it should be. Many legislators seem to think that the problem can be solved by locking up all the birth, marriage, and death records, which, of course, has an impact on genealogists. The legislators apparently have never checked with the security experts who deal with identity theft every day, however. The security experts report that public domain records of birth, marriage, and death are rarely used by identity thieves. Instead, the thieves have easier methods.

First, most ID theft begins at home. A high percentage of identity theft is perpetrated by someone who is personally acquainted with the victim and often is related to the victim. The Better Business Bureau found half of identity thieves caught in 2004 were family members, friends, in-home employees, or neighbors of their victims.

Next, almost no identity theft occurs because of Internet searches. In fact, frequent use of the Internet by consumers can REDUCE identity theft. Javelin Strategy & Research conducted a study by interviewing identity theft victims. The company found that most instances of identity fraud occur through traditional channels and are paper-based, not Internet-based.

Historic Burial Ground in Connecticut Gets New Life

It may be more than a hundred years after their deaths, but the founding families in Easton, Connecticut are getting renewed attention. The names read like a who's who from the town's early history: Bradley, Wakeman, Fanton, Hill, Wheeler, Nichols, Burr and many, many more. Those are the names etched on marble, granite and other stones marking the graves of these longtime families in the 1.25-acre Center Street Cemetery, which dates back to the 19th century, on Black Rock Turnpike.

TGN (Ancestry.com) Partners With MyLife.com

The Generations Network (TGN) is the parent company of Ancestry.com and several other web sites. The company has now partnered with MyLife.com, an online "people search" service. The announcement is full of highly-positive, "forward looking" statements but I was interested in the words "enhance the people search experience for consumers." It sounds like some new services will soon be available for Ancestry.com subscribers. I do assume that MyLife finds living people, not deceased ancestors.

Perhaps the most telling was the last paragraph that describes some of TGN's "numbers," especially: "Ancestry.com users have created 10 million family trees containing 1 billion profiles and 20 million photographs and stories."

Here is the announcement in full:

Index of Hubbard County, Minnesota's Oldest, Largest Cemetery is Now Complete

Indexing of Park Rapids’ Greenwood Cemetery’s headstones – from 1892 to the present – is now complete and the information accessible on a Web site. Greenwood Cemetery is the culmination of a countywide cataloging project that began in 1990, Marion Town spearheading the initiative. (Lakeport Cemetery’s index is complete, but is yet to be added to the site.)

Genealogist Darryl Hensel began work on the Greenwood project in 2000 and last year, Beth Waller and Rod Nordberg volunteered time for its completion.

US Cities May Be Bulldozed in Order to Survive

This radical proposal may have a huge impact on historic landmarks and other sites. The Telegraph reports that dozens of US cities may have entire neighborhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered to tackle economic decline.

The government is looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, Michigan, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent in Flint and the total population has almost halved to 110,000. Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

FBI Seeks Owners Of Stolen Artwork

I have written several times about William M.V. Kingsland, a well-known New York City genealogist. You can read my earlier articles here,  here and here. It seems that Mr. Kingsland was more than a genealogist; he was also an art thief. Now the FBI is trying to find the rightful owners.

William Kingsland was not even his given name — he was born Melvyn Kohn and spent his early years in the Bronx before legally changing his name to Kingsland. He thought it had a more literary sound to it and would help him gain acceptance among Manhattan's upper crust.

On a bizarre side note, a mover hired by the public administrator's office to transport the contents of Kingsland's apartment to a warehouse was charged with stealing two Picasso sketches, each valued at approximately $30,000. And, it turns out that was not the first time those two sketches had been stolen…sometime before they ended up in Kingsland's collection they were stolen from a New York art gallery around 1967.

Ontario's Archives Relocated to a Safe Place

Ontario's provincial archive, which was deteriorating because of poor storage conditions downtown, is now safe in a state-of-the-art facility at York University. The long-awaited facility, which officially opened yesterday, is being leased by the province for $5.3 million a year and will house a $400 million treasure that dates back to 1729.

Obama's Records to be Measured in Petabytes

And you think YOU have record keeping problems!

Paul Bedard, writing in Washington Whispers, notes that the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration has to copy, sort, file, and organize a huge collection of presidential records, most of which are electronic.

Nine Years of Genealogy Grants

Nine years ago -- back in May 2000 -- Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak started the Honoring Our Ancestors Grants Program.  It's a modest program run and funded by Megan with the help of her good-natured husband, Brian.  The only requirement is that the grants be for some sort of genealogically-oriented initiative.

NARA Proposed Rule Changes Published Today

In the June 12, 2009, Federal Register on page 27956, the National Archives and Records Administration has published a proposed rule to change the hours open to the public for the Kansas City, Missouri, and New York City regional archives.

U.S. Immigration Files Will Get New Home

The U.S. government was prepared to destroy millions of files documenting every person who immigrated to this country, or tried to, over the last century.

Instead, those records will be saved and the vast majority of them will be kept in the Kansas City area, providing invaluable information to historians, genealogists and the merely curious. They’re called A-files, as in alien registration files. They are the paperwork of the wretched refuse and the huddled masses and everyone else who yearned for a better life in America.

New Fromelles Cemetery Begins to Take Shape

Work has started on the new cemetery at Fromelles, in northern France, which will provide a final resting place for around 400 British and Australian soldiers.

The troops died during the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916, with the bodies buried in a number of pits by the German army in the hours after the battle. In May 2008, after several years of painstaking research and investigation, five burial pits dating from the First World War were identified at Pheasant Wood, near Fromelles in northern France.  The pits, which have lain undisturbed for more than 90 years, are believed to contain the remains of between 250 and 400 British and Australian soldiers, buried behind German lines after the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916.

1911 census.co.uk Finds Tom Jones is English

This will be a shock for some of Tom Jones' fans: the world famous singer hailed as a Welsh icon, is actually three-quarters English.

The shocking news arrived with the launch of the Welsh 1911 census records earlier this week. The Times, The Mirror, the Daily Star, the Daily Express, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph and Hello! magazine were quick to publish the story, announcing three of Jones’s grandparents hail from the West Country, not Wales.

2010 Census Possibly Not Accurate?

An editorial in the New York Times questions the accuracy of the U.S. census to be conducted next year. With little more than six months before the start of the next count, the Census Bureau still doesn’t have a director. And now the bureau’s budget faces a crucial vote by House appropriators who must resist the temptation to shortchange the agency yet again.

Changes at The National Archives at Kew?

The National Archives (in Great Britain, not the one in the U.S.) has issued a rather mysterious notice. An online announcement refers to "a number of proposed changes at The National Archives" but gives no details.

The announcement states:

Columbiana County, Ohio Old Court Records Occupying New Home

Columbiana County court files gathering dust for more than 200 years now have a place to call home where genealogists with a penchant for the past can dig to their heart's content. Known as the Columbiana County Archives & Research Center, the location at 129 S. Market St., Lisbon, Ohio has been four years in the making, but the information stored there dates back to at least 1805.

The Columbiana County Archives & Research Center incorporated in April 2005 as a non-profit corporation whose aim was to preserve and collect old genealogical records pertinent to Columbiana County, both public and private, and make them available to people researching their family histories. They've been promised numerous files held by the Clerk of Courts for Common Pleas Court and already have a lot of those files in the research center.

A Virtual Tour of City Creek Center in Salt Lake City

Planning a trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City? If you haven't been there for a while, you might not be aware that the area near the Family History Library is under construction.

City Creek Center is becoming a sustainably designed, walkable urban community of residences, offices and retail stores that will rise over the next four years on approximately 20 acres across three blocks near the Family History Library. Upon project completion in 2012, the city will be one of few in the nation with a vibrant, mixed-use development at its core.

U.S. Government Records Go Online in Volume

The U.S. government plans to make more than 100,000 data sources available by the end of next week on its data.gov site, in what may be the real start of government's effort to share its vast database with the world.

Data.gov has been open for business for about two weeks but with fewer than 100 data sources available it's now just a teaser of a site.

Follow-Up: NARA Loses Clinton-era Hard Drive

I wrote about the loss of a hard drive at the National Archives and Records Administration about two weeks ago at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/05/nara-loses-clintonera-hard-drive.html. Now NARA is offering a $50,000 reward for the hard drive's return.

The following announcement was written by the National Archives and Records Administration: