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Nu?
What's New? Gary Mokotoff, Editor Volume 15, Number 24 | June 22, 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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JewishGen Affected By Ancestry.com Website Down Earlier in Week
 The
Ancestry.com web servers were the victim of a Distributed Denial of
Service (DDoS) attack last Tuesday, which forced it to shut down for
more than 24 hours. A DDoS is the deliberate act of overwhelming a
website with meaningless requests to the point where the website
servers cannot handle any requests including legitimate ones.Most of the functions of Ancestry.com were back in operation by Wednesday, but JewishGen, which uses Ancestry.com servers did not start to come online until late Wednesday. At that time, the web pages were available, but none of its databases were accessible. They became available on Saturday and by Sunday, the Discussion Groups were back in operation. One news account of the attack can be found at http://tinyurl.com/JGAttack. Twisted Twigs  The
attack on the Ancestry.com website made me aware of a delightful
website on Facebook called Twisted-Twigs-On-Gnarled-Branches-Genealogy
at http://tinyurl.com/TwTwigs.
The site consists of cartoons that spoof genealogy researchers. An
example is their reaction to the Ancestry.com attack shown at the right
(click on the image to enlarge). Another example is a thought well
known to veteran researchers: “If the highlight of your recent
vacation was a cemetery visit…you must be a genealogist.”Watch a Preview of “IAJGS LIVE!”  The
conference planners have created a short video of the experience of
watching selected lectures being webcast to people who register for
“IAJGS LIVE!”. More than 60 of the sessions at the IAJGS
conference will be broadcast live over the Internet and will be
available for another 90 days after the conference. At most times, two
different sessions will be broadcasting LIVE!, so registered users can
go back later to watch the other session that was missed or even watch
a session previously viewed.See the preview at http://blog.iajgs2014.org/2014/06/iajgs-live-video. At the end of the video, the list of lectures is presented as a scroll. Hit the Pause button on the video viewer to pause the scrolling so the list can be easily read. Register for LIVE! at http://registration.iajgs2014.org/. Cost is $149. If you are attending the conference you can add LIVE! to your regular conference registration for only $99. Preview Video of Finding Our Roots Identifies New Celebrities The second season of Finding Your Roots, will premier September 23 on U.S. PBS stations. It again features host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. showing family history research done for celebrities. Professor Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. The show patterns itself after the popular Who Do You Think You Are? program. A three-minute preview at http://video.pbs.org/video/2365268752/ discloses 18 of the planned guests. They include Ben Affleck, Khandi Alexander, Angela Bassett, Ken Burns, Tom Colicchio, Anderson Cooper, Derek Jeeter, Ben Jellous, Billy Jean King, Carole King, Stephen King, Tony Kusher, Rebecca Lobo, Nas, Gloria Rueben, Aaron Sanchez, Anna Deavere Smith and Courtney Vance. FamilySearch Additions for the Week 
A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, 4.9 million indexed records and images, can be found at https://www.familysearch.org/node/2550.
This site provides direct links to the individual collections. They
include records from Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico,
Portugal, Switzerland and Venezuela. The only United States collection
is an additional 27,000 World War I Draft Registration indexes. The notable addition for Jewish family history research is more than 2.5 million indexed Costa Rica Civil Registration (1860–1975) records. Why Costa Rica and Jewish family history research? Because after World War II a number of Holocaust survivors fled to this country. The index shows 125 records for persons named Levy, almost all post-WWII records.
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| Nu?
What's New?
is published weekly
by Avotaynu, Inc. Copyright 2014, Avotaynu, Inc. All rights reserved To change an e-mail address, send a request to nuwhatsnew@earthlink.net To subscribe to AVOTAYNU, The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, go to http://www.avotaynu.com/journal.htm To order books from our catalog, go to http://www.avotaynu.com/catalog.htm To contact us by postal mail, write: Avotaynu, Inc.; 794 Edgewood Ave.; New Haven, CT 06515 Telephone (U.S.) : 475-202-6575 |
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