Nu? What's New? Vol. 21 No. 2

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

Yet Another Unusual Use of DNA Testing

I am in the process of reading and formatting the Winter issue of AVOTAYNU and, of course, there is yet another story how DNA matching affected people’s lives. But this one is truly unusual. Every time I think I have heard the most amazing new way DNA testing is affecting our society, I hear of yet another amazing account. This time it has to do with sperm donors. In the Winter 2017 issue of AVOTAYNU, there was an article by a woman who exists today because her mother was implanted with sperm from an anonymous donor. She was able to identify the donor who, unfortunately, had died in the interim.

You would think that was the end of the story, but in the Winter issue this same woman writes that she extended her quest. Realizing that this man’s sperm was probably implanted in other women, she went in search for half-siblings and found four of them. The AVOTAYNU story relates the events.

Risks of Uploading your DNA Data to Third Parties

For everything good in this world, there are individuals who will tell you its bad side. For example, some years ago the “Wall Street Journal” published an article about the risks of using professional genealogists. Such risks included the possibility the professional would take your money and not perform, and the documents provided may be interpreted inaccurately. The genealogical community was in an uproar.

Now the DNA testing service, 23andMe, has published an article about the risks of uploading your DNA data to third party services. 23andMe notes at the beginning of the article that the company does not support the upload of DNA data obtained from other testing services. This means you must pay to use their services.

Some of the risks they note are:
• (For their users) 23andMe cannot vouch for the scientific validity or accuracy, or clarity in communication of results of any such third-party services.
• Uploading your raw DNA data to a third-party service can also put your data privacy at risk.
• [They] do not recommend the use of third-party services that claim to interpret raw DNA data to provide health information.
• Uploading crime-scene DNA data into the 23andMe environment is not possible because they do not support the upload of DNA data that has been processed by a third-party laboratory.

There are numerous other considerations noted in the article which is located at https://blog.23andme.com/news/how-to-be-careful-with-your-raw-dna-data/.

Bronx and Queens Naturalization Records to Be Digitized

Brooke Schreier Ganz of Reclaim The Records reports that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) just awarded a grant in their latest cycle to digitize all the Bronx and Queens naturalization records through 1952. Other boroughs of New York City and some other areas of New York already have these naturalizations online.

The NARA announcement can be found at https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/ 2020/nr19-22.

FamilySearch Announces Plans for 2020

FamilySearch has published a list of goals they hope to achieve in 2020. They can be found at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/whats-new-in-familysearch-2020/.

Among them are:
• Add more than 500 million new viewable digital images and searchable records online.
• Translate core user experiences into additional languages: Albanian, Bulgarian, Khmer, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Mongolian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Samoan, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Tongan and Vietnamese.
• A new tool for viewing recently digitized record images. This feature will help to more easily find images that aren’t yet indexed (or text searchable).
• Significant improvements to the merging experience in the FamilyTree.
• FamilyTree users will also be able to share their ancestors’ personal pages on social media websites such as WhatsApp and Facebook.
• Other FamilyTree improvements.

Set Your Genealogical Research Goals for the New Year

Are you the type of person who likes to write down goals for the new year? If so, and you want to define your goals in family history research, Geni has created a report that identifies ten goals to achieve in the next twelve months. The first four are:
• Create research plans
• Take a DNA test and get others to take one too
• Learn something new
• Attend a genealogy conference

The balance can be found at https://www.geni.com/blog/genealogy-goals-for-the-new-year- 3105111.html. It includes a detailed explanation of each goal.

New Society: Jewish Genealogy Society of Central New York

Nolan Altman, IAJGS Membership Development Chair, has announced that a new society, Jewish Genealogy Society of Central New York, will hold its next meeting at on February 9 at 1:30 pm at the Jewish Community Center, 5655 Thompson Road, Dewitt, New York. For information about the group, contact the group’s chairperson, Mike Fixler, at jgscny@gmail.com.

The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) was formed in 1988 as a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. IAJGS is an umbrella group of organizations which provides a common voice for issues of significance to its members, to advocate for and educate about our genealogical avocation, and to coordinate items such as the annual International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. For more information on IAJGS, see their website at http://www.iajgs.org/ or contact Altman at membership@iajgs.org.

New Irish Birth, Marriage and Death Records Now Online

The Irish government has announced an update to the online collection of historical registers of births, marriages and deaths. The records are free for the public to access at
http://www.irishgenealogy.ie. Work will continue on the digitization of images for up to 1.5 million death records covering the period from 1864 to 1877, which remain to be released to the public.

The full range of records now available online are:
• Birth records from 1864–1919
• Marriage records from 1845–1944
• Death records from 1878–1969

The announcement can be found at https://www.thejournal.ie/irish-genealogy-records-online- 4957835-Jan2020/.

MyHeritage Adds More Than 820M Records in the Last Two Weeks of December

MyHeritage added more than 820M records in the last two weeks of December, bringing the total number of historical records in MyHeritage SuperSearch to 11 billion records. This update includes more than 600 million records about published authors from the U.S. and around the globe, a Hesse Birth Index and Hesse Marriage Index, a Military Death Index from France, and nine U.S. state newspaper collections.

Complete descriptions as well as links to the individual collections can be founds at https://blog.myheritage.com/2020/01/record-collections-added-in-the-second-half-of-december/.

GenTeam Adds 460,000 Records

The Vienna-based GenTeam has added 460,000 new records to its collection bringing the total records to about 20.5M. Additions include:
• Austro-Hungarian Casualty Lists of World War I now has 1.9M records. • New Collection: Obituaries of “Neues Wiener Tagblatt”
• Vienna: Municipal marriages. The years 1920–1922 have been added.
• Diocese of Passau. 4.4 million records online
• Vienna: Roman Catholic baptisms and burials
• Indices of Roman Catholic church registers for Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Styria, Salzburg, and Bohemia

The site is located at http://www.GenTeam.eu .

FamilySearch Adds More Than 4M Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, more than 4M index records, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch010620. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. More than half are Ecuadorian Catholic church records. They include records from American Samoa, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, England, Haiti, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa and the United States, including GA, HI, LA, MI, MS, NC, SC, TN and MO.

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.

New Collections at Ancestry.com

Ancestry has added/updated the following record groups at their site. The list with links to individual collections can be found at https://www.ancestry.com/cs/recent-collections. Announced collections may not be complete for the dates specified and will be added at some later date. There is also no indication of how many records were added to the updated collections.

New Collections
U.S. WWII Hospital Admission Card Files, 1942–1954. The file is an extraction of information of cards pertaining to some 5.3 million patients, mostly U.S. Army personnel wounded in battle during World War II and the Korean War.

Updated Collections
Essex, England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813–1918
Essex, England, Church of England Marriages, 1754–1935
Canada, Voters Lists, 1935–1980

Some FindMyPast New Entries

A list of FindMyPast additions to their collections can be found at https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/new/new-1939-register-entries-and-military-records. They include:
• 1939 Register Update. More than 85,000 “closed records” have been opened up and are now available to search. The 1939 Register now contains more than 33.9 million searchable records.
• British Armed Forces, First World War Soldiers' Medical Records. More than 21,000 additional records have been added to the collection.
• United States, National Veterans Cemetery Index. More than 1.8 million transcripts covering more than a century of veterans who fought in various conflicts, from the American Civil War and the two World Wars through to the Afghanistan war.

Have You Found Google Awkward to Used Lately?

Have you found the results of using Google awkward lately? Some years ago Google started to place advertisements as the initial search results. They marked each ad with a small icon displaying the word “Ad.” This icon no longer exists making it difficult to determine where the advertisements end and the search results begin.

Many, many years ago Google added a feature which allowed websites to include a Google site-search-only. Avotaynu uses it to allow users to search the “Nu? What’s New?” archives at https://www.avotaynu.com/nu.htm. It no longer works using Firefox. Searching for “Hamburg” in the “Nu? What’s New?” archives produces the identical results as a regular Google search. It works fine with Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

Even when you do a standard Google search for “Hamburg site:Avotaynu.com,” the first five results are advertisements.

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Each year AVOTAYNU publishes more than 300 pages of useful, interesting information about Jewish family history research that can help you in your research. Now in its 35th year, an index to the first 24 volumes is available to all the major articles.

Published quarterly, our contributing editors from 15 countries throughout the world regularly gather important information that appears in our issues. Our publishers, Gary Mokotoff and Sallyann Amdur Sack, are on a first name basis with officials at institutions containing genealogical data throughout the world. Some institutions are U.S. National Archives, U.S. Library of Congress, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Leo Baeck Institute, Yad Vashem and Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People.

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