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Nu?
What's New? Gary Mokotoff, Editor Volume 16, Number 8 | February 22, 2015 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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Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.
Israel State Archives to Digitize and Place Its Records Online 
Yaacov Lozowick, Chief Archivist at the Israel State Archives, is in
the process of fulfilling a dream. His dream is to digitize the
complete holdings of the Israel State Archives and place the records on
the Internet (where privacy considerations do not apply). This is the
year we can anticipate results. Lozowick indicates that the first
record group to be available later this year will be either the 80,000
files of requests for citizenship during the British Mandate period, or
the 800,000 files of Israel's first census in 1948. He notes that the
paper document collection at the archives is so huge, it might take 25
years to complete the project. Additional information can be found at http://israelsdocuments.blogspot.co.il/2015/02/google-at- israel-state-archvies.html. The Archives’ website is at http://archives.gov.il/ArchiveGov_Eng/Our+Holdings. New Genealogy-Related TV Program: Long Lost Family 
Further evidence of the appeal of genealogy to U.S. TV audiences is the
announcement that another (fourth) television program will premiere on
the TLC channel on Sunday, March 1 at 10pm ET. Called Long
Lost Family, the program has appeared on British television
for at least four years. The theme of the program is adopted people looking for their birth parents. The program is produced by the same company that produces TLC’s Who Do You Think You Are?. A program with a similar format was on the American Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) in 2011. It wascalled Searching for... (see Nu? What's New? article). Apparently only one show is planned. If there is sufficient viewer interest, additional programs will appear. Information about the U.S. version of Long Lost Family can be found at http://starcasm.net/archives/307159. FDA Eases Access to DNA Screening for Inherited Diseases 
In 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the DNA
service 23andme from claiming they offered health-related
information stating “...you are marketing the 23andMe Saliva
Collection Kit and Personal Genome Service (PGS) without marketing
clearance or approval in violation of the Federal Food, Drug and
Cosmetic Act (the FD&C Act).” (See Nu? What's New? article.) Now the FDA has
reevaluated the situation and says they are easing access to DNA tests
used to screen people for devastating genetic disorders that can be
passed on to their children. The Associated Press states,
“This announcement offers a path forward for the
Google-backed genetic testing firm 23andMe, which previously clashed
with regulators over its direct-to-consumer technology.”The recently published Winter issue of AVOTAYNU describes how a woman used the 23andme service before the ban, which lead to the discovery that she had a genetic propensity for breast cancer (BRCA2 gene). An MRI proved she had the early stage of the disease. The complete AP report is at http://tinyurl.com/APGeneticTesting. GenealogyIndexer Adds Automated Hebrew, Yiddish Transliteration System Logan Kleinwaks has hundred of scanned directories at his website, http://genealogyindexer.org. It includes, to date, 129 yizkor books, most of which are written in Yiddish and Hebrew. To search these books previously required that you use Hebrew/Yiddish characters to search the site. Kleinwaks has now added a new way to search Hebrew and Yiddish sources. There now is an option for automated transliteration, so the search term can be typed in Latin letters and the system will find matches in Hebrew and Yiddish. To enable this option, change the pull-down menu, "Add Latin -> Cyrillic," to "Add Latin -> Cyrillic + Hebrew" or "Only Latin -> Hebrew." The transliteration only works with single-word search terms and the Regular Match option (not D-M Soundex or OCR-Adjusted). It is limited by the accuracy of the OCR software used to convert scanned documents to (Hebrew, Yiddish) text. Unfortunately for me, the surname Mokotov is phonetically similar to the Hebrew word for “letter” (the written document), so I received hundreds of results. The scheme worked quite well for the surname “Finkelstein.” A complete description of the new feature with suggestions as to its use can be found at http://www.genealogyindexer.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4840. IIJG Looking for Volunteers for Its Jacobi Project 
The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and Paul Jacobi Center
(IIJG) initiated last year a project to publish the late Paul Jacobi's
114 typewritten genealogical studies (monographs) of European
rabbinical and other prominent Jewish families. They are now looking
for volunteers to perform proofreading of the text. IIJG states that
the work requires a high level knowledge of the English language,
responsibility and fidelity. The work will be spread out over the next
ten months. Contact Ami Elyasaf, IIJG Executive Director, at
director@iijg.org.Information about the Jacobi collection can be found at http://iijg.org/resources/jacobi-papers. It includes a list of the names of the 114 families that Jacobi documented at http://iijg.org/main-2/jacobimonographs. FamilySearch Additions for the Week 
A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, 1.1 million indexed records
and images, can be found at http://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch022015. This
site provides direct links to the individual collections. They include
records from Brazil, Japan, Russia and the U.S. states of California,
Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania. The primary
addition is a new collection of nearly 750,000 index records for New
York Naturalization Index (1792–1906).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. FamilySearch Records for Belgium. FamilySearch now has hundreds of thousands of civil registration (birth, marriage, death) records for Belgium. They can be found at https://familysearch.org/search/collection/location/1927071. In addition there are Antwerp Police Immigration Records (1840–1930) at https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1477769. Belgium was a haven for German Jews fleeing the persecution of the Nazi regime. Unfortunately this migration did not occur until 1933 and later. MyHeritage Adds Millions of Scandinavian Records 
MyHeritage has added the 1930 Danish census (3.5 million records) to
its collection. In cooperation with the National Archives of Denmark,
they also have plans to index and digitize more than 120 million
records including all available Danish census records from
1787–1930 and parish records from 1646–1915. These
record groups will start to be available sometime this year and
completed by 2016. MyHeritage will also add Swedish Household Examination Rolls from 1880–1920, that include 54 million records with 5 million color images, of which 22 million records are already available online. The remaining records are scheduled to go online before the end of June. Additional information about all these records can be found at http://tinyurl.com/MyHeritageScandd. San Mateo County Obituaries The San Mateo County Genealogical Society of California has added online more than 57,000 indexed and scanned obituaries from the region. The obituaries come from a variety of local newspapers. The society has previously produced a number of other valuable indexes including San Mateo County Marriage Index (1853–1948) and San Mateo County Birth Index (1866–1965). The databases are PDF files, which means they can be dowloaded and searched at leisure. A complete list of databases is at http://www.smcgs.org/research/databases. San Mateo is the area just south of San Francisco to the northern end of Silicon Valley.  Reminder:
Resubscribe to AVOTAYNUIf you are a subscriber to our journal, AVOTAYNU, and received a yellow renewal notice with the Winter issue, March 1 is the deadline to resubscribe at discounted prices. The deadline is March 15 for non-U.S. subscribers. Also there will be a drawing where the winner will receive a copy of any book published by Avotaynu. Renew for three years and get three opportunities to win. You can renew at http://avotaynu.com/renew.htm.
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