Nu? What's New? Vol. 21 No. 09

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

Do Not Colorize Your Old Photos Until You Have Read This

With all the excitement about the ability to colorize old photographs at no charge at the My Heritage website, we asked Ava Cohn, an expert in analyzing old photographs if there is a downside to this proves. Cohn refers to herself as Sherlock Cohn. She considers herself an expert in photo dating and interpretation. Her website is at http://sherlockcohn.com/.

Cohn states:
Accurately dating photographs after colorization can be problematic. To pinpoint the date of a photo, the photographic technology used, the color of cards or tintypes, the printing out paper and the original color whether black and white, sepia tone or other contribute to solidifying a date. Since colorization focuses on the image itself, details such as framing and photographer’s information are removed. The ink color of a photographer’s name and address can help to identify the correct year but is lost when colorization focuses on the image only. Relying on clothing styles can be misleading and if colors are not thoroughly researched before colorization, they will be historically inaccurate. Colorization made from copies can add stray tones that are not present in the original.

Before attempting colorization, photographs should be properly dated, well researched and restored to correct fading, remove scratches, stains and artifacts that could show up as unwanted colors in a computer-generated colorization. This is usually not a problem with individual colorization by an experienced artist.

Finally, the original photograph should be retained in case future analysis is required.

Ancestry Adds 36M U.S. World War II Draft Cards

Ancestry has added an index and images of all available U.S. World War II draft cards. They represent 36 million men who were born between 1898 and 1929 from for all states with the exception of Maine. The draft cards from the state of Maine were destroyed before they could be digitized. Each card shows name, serial number, address and/or mailing address, telephone, age, place of birth, country of citizenship, employer’s name, place of employment (address), name and address of person who will always know registrant’s address, relationship to registrant, description: race, eyes, weight, complexion, hair.

Future plans. In 2020, Ancestry will also be releasing New York City Certificate Indexes for Birth, Marriage, and Death records (over 14M records from 1862–1949). There are also nine state-wide digitization projects and they are unveiling new naturalization records from six U.S. states. On an international level, this year more than 100M new records will be added from national collections in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, and Norway, including more than 6M Mexico Catholic records and more than 50M France census and birth, marriage and death records.

The draft registration database can be found at https://www.ancestry.com/search/ collections/2238/. A report of Ancestry’s recent accomplishments and plans for 2020 can be found at https://tinyurl.com/AncestryBlogWhatsNew.

MyHeritage Adds Historical U.S. City Directories to Collection

MyHeritage has announced the addition of U.S. city directories to their collection. The collection was produced from 25,000 public directories published between 1860 and 1960. It comprises 545M aggregated records that have been automatically consolidated from 1.3B records. This addition grows the total size of MyHeritage’s historical record database to 11.9B records.

The announcement can be found at https://tinyurl.com/MHUSDirectories.

FindMyPast Plans to Expand Its Newspaper Collection

FindMyPast states they have the largest online collection of historic British and Irish newspapers. They now plan to branch out to newspapers from other countries including Barbados, Canada, India, Jamaica and Pakistan. FindMyPast’s newspaper collection now contains more than 36 million pages from over 1000 titles covering England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and beyond.

The full announcement can be found at https://tinyurl.com/EOGNNewspapers.

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RootsTech Returns to London in 2020

With RootsTech (USA) just completed, FamilySearch has announced that RootsTech will return to London in 2020. The three-day event will be held on November 5–7 at the ExCeL London Convention Centre. In 2019, the first RootsTech-London attracted nearly 10,000 attendees from 42 countries with another 1,300 people tuning in remotely online. More than 60 exhibitors demonstrated their products and services in the exhibition hall.

The announcement can be found at https://tinyurl.com/RootsTech2020London.

FamilySearch Adds More Than 750K Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, 750K index records, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch022420. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. Index records have been added for American Samoa, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, England, Finland, France, Jamaica, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Spain and the United States.

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.

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 collections.

New Collections
UK, Imperial Yeomanry Records, 1899–1902
Canada, Immigrants Approved in Orders in Council, 1929–1960
Georgia, Catholic Diocese of Savannah Cemetery Records, 1853–1975
York, Index to Birth Certificates, 1866–1909
York, Index to Marriage Licenses, 1908–1910, 1938–1940
York, Index to Death Certificates, 1862–1948
Rhône, France, Birth, Marriages and Death Registers, 1793–1917

Updated Collections
Jersey, Death Index, 1901–2017
Find A Grave Index
U.S. WWII Draft Cards Young Men, 1940–1947

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