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Nu?
What's New? Gary Mokotoff, Editor Volume 15, Number 4 | January 25, 2014 Every
government puts value on preserving its history. That is why we have
national archives. Genealogy preserves history; the history of a
family. It cannot be done without access to records, just as historians
cannot preserve a nation's history without access to records. It is a
greater good than the right to privacy. It is a greater good than the
risk of identity theft.
Past issues of Nu? What's New? are
archived at http://www.avotaynu.com/nu.htm
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Ancestry.com
Expands Collaboration with FamilySearch
 FamilySearch
will provide more than one billion digitized records from 67 countries
to Ancestry.com. These additional records are expected to be available
on Ancestry.com starting in January and fully published over the next
few months. The collections include digitized and indexed records and
more than 200 million images containing birth, marriage, death, census
and church records from Europe, Latin America, South Africa, South
America, Asia and more.The records are an addition to the agreement that the two largest providers of family history resources announced a few months ago to help digitize, index and publish an expected one billion global historical records never before published online from the FamilySearch vault over the next five years. Ancestry.com stated it has committed to investing $100 million to digitize and index new content over the next five years. The company claims to have 2.7 million paying subscribers and more than 12 billion records. The complete announcement can be found at http://ir.ancestry.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=820259 FamilySearch Additions for the Week Include 4 Million Canadian Border Crossings  Recent
additions to FamilySearch, both indexes and browseable images, can be
found at https://www.familysearch.org/node/2504.
This site provides direct links to the individual collections. They
include records from Belgium, England, Germany, Indonesia, Italy,
Mexico, Peru and the U.S. states of Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania and
Vermont.Notable additions are a new set of 4 million images of Canadian Border Crossings, 1895–1924; and 700,000 United States Passport Applications, 1795–1925, added to existing images for a total of 3 million images. The Canadian Border Crossings are in (Russell) soundex order and therefore are searchable. Note that at the website announced collections may not be complete for the dates specified and will be added at some later date. Also note that counts shown in the announcement are the number added, not the total number available in the collection, which can be greater. Ancestry.ca Offers Free Access to Canadian Vital Records Through January 27 Ancestry.ca is offering free access to their collection of more than 30 million Canadian birth, marriage and death records through Monday, January 27. Thereafter it becomes part of their fee-for-service collection. To view these records you will need to register with Ancestry.ca giving your name and email address. Once you have registered, Ancestry.ca will send you a user name and password to access the records. The search facility is located at http://www.ancestry.ca/cdnbmd. Site Identifies Greek Holocaust Survivor Testimonies Arthur Kurzweil notes there is a database of Greek Holocaust survivor testimonies culled from various resources. It is located http://gjst.ha.uth.gr/en. The site identifies data from 1552 visual and oral testimonies of 1091 Greek Jews. Sources are: • USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education • Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies • United States Holocaust Memorial Museum • Yad Vashem Archives • Archive of Oral Testimonies of the Jewish Museum of Greece • Archive of Oral Testimonies of the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly • Centropa Jewish Witness to a European Century ROM-SIG Indexing Vital Records The last issue of Nu? What’s New? noted that Leo Baeck Institute has placed online records in Romanian archives that relate to German-speaking Jewish communities in Southern Bukovina and Southern Transylvania. The database, which includes digital images of records, is located at http://jbat.lbi.org. Bob Wascou of the Romanian Special Interest Group of JewishGen notes that his organization is working on indexing vital records for more than a year and a full listing of what is available online is at http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Romania/BucovinaVRs.htm. He states that at present there are 6,445 births in the database. Write Your Family History and Send It to the Library of Congress  If
you have already published your family history, it is important that
copies be sent to major repositories throughout the world. The U.S.
Library of Congress encourages family historians to send a copy to its
facilities. Compiled genealogies and U.S. local histories are very
important to the international research clientele who frequent the
institution. The Library seeks to collect all published and
self-published works available on these important histories. The Library of Congress has one of the world's premier collections of U.S. and foreign genealogy and local history publications. The Library's genealogy collection began as early as 1815 when Thomas Jefferson's library was purchased. Through generations of international giving, the Library's collections contain more than 50,000 compiled family histories and in excess of 100,000 U.S. local histories. Send you family history to: Library of Congress Local History and Genealogy Collection Development 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540-4660 Additional information can be found at http://www.loc.gov/rr/genealogy/gifts.html. UK National Archives Places Online WWI Military Draft Exemption Applications  The
UK National Archives has added to its online collection case files of
men who applied for exemption from compulsory military service during
WWI. The collection name is “First World War Military Service
Tribunals” and includes 11,000 case files from Middlesex
only,
where people applied to the local tribunal for exemption. These files
can be downloaded free of charge. The Archives uses its shopping cart
system to request the case files (at a price of £0). Case papers for each individual generally include: • Personal details • Grounds for the application • Decision of the local tribunal • Reason for the appeal and sometimes, supporting correspondence and evidence The collection is at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/middlesex-military-service-appeal-tribunal.htm. Beit Hatfutsot Changes Its Translated Name  Something
I did not notice until now is that Beit Hatfutsot has changed its
English-language name from “Museum of the Diaspora”
to
“Museum of the Jewish People.” This change likely
occurred
when the museum changed the transliteration of its name from Hebrew to
Latin characters from Beth Hatefutsoth to a more modern Beit Hatfutsot.
The Hebrew literally means “Museum of the
Diaspora.” Their
website is at http://www.bh.org.il.FindMyPast Announces Improvements to Site  FindMyPast.co.uk
has announced a number of improvements to its website. It will allow
users to search across selected categories of records (for example
census records and military records at the same time) and filter based
on keywords, records sets and country. Searching all censuses at once
will be available for the first time. Improvements have been made to the site that will allow the company to release new records far more frequently. They anticipate there will be new records on the site every month. Finally, they have launched a new family tree builder. This tree will allow users to record all of the details found about each of their ancestors, storing source material, adding facts and events to each relation and seeing a clear timeline of their life. The announcement is at http://www.findmypast.co.uk/new-version-of-fmp-coming-soon? Editorial comment: Don’t all the major genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com and FamilySearc.org allow searching across categories, release new records more than once a month and provide family tree ability as described above? “Jewish Surnames Explained” An article titled “Jewish Surnames Explained” is causing a furor in the Jewish genealogical community because of its large number of inaccuracies. It is located at http://tinyurl.com/JSExplained. Included is the Ellis Island myth that names were changed at this port of immigration. An example of an erroneous interpretation is the name Kagan. The article claims the etymology is “descended from the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking people from Central Asia.” In reality, Kagan is a Russian variant of Cohen (the letter “h” does not appear in the Russian alphabet and is changed to “g”). A response to the article can be found at http://mosaicmagazine.com/tesserae/2014/01/jewish-surnames-supposedly-explained.
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What's New?
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