Nu? What's New? Vol. 21 No. 15

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

An Internet Passover Seder
Last Wednesday night, my family had a virtual Passover seder using Zoom on the internet. Gathered were my children’s families from Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York. A dear friend of the family living in Belgium also participated. The Haggadah was in PowerPoint!

The only item missing was the afikomen. Had I thought of it days earlier, I could have created a web page at avotaynu.com. Google would have indexed it, and the afikomen could be found by searching for “Mokotoff afikomen!” My internet-oriented grandchildren would have enjoyed it.

Genealogy Matters to Do While Waiting Out the Pandemic

A number of genealogy-related organizations have made suggestions of how to use the internet to productively use your time while waiting out the pandemic.

Avotaynu. Are you aware that all back issues of Nu? What’s New?—except the last six issues—are available on the internet with its own search engine. That’s 20 years of reporting the latest developments in genealogy. I use it to confirm a potential news item has not been reported previously. In writing this edition, I came across what I thought was a new site, https://www.freebmd.org.uk/, that now has an index to nearly 360M indexes to birth, marriages and deaths in the UK. It turns out I had mentioned the existence of the site in a 2005 edition of Nu? What’s New?. Search back issues at https://www.avotaynu.com/nu.htm.

Family History Daily has a new article titled “These Genealogy Sites Are Providing Free Resources During the Pandemic.” It can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FHDPandemic.

FamilySearch has an excellent article titled “Untangling the Centimorgans on Your DNA Test” that describes the significance of that important term in DNA analysis: centimorgan. It not only includes an extensive description of the use of the term but includes an excellent family tree that shows the range of centimorgans that can be found between you and various members of the family from parents and siblings to third cousins. It can be found at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/ en/centimorgan-chart-understanding-dna/.

23andme has an article titled “Could Genetics Play a Role in the Severity of COVID-19?” It can be found at https://tinyurl.com/TTAMCovid.

Finally, the FamilySearch blog discusses “Interesting Facts and Myths About Ellis Island” at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/ellis-island-facts-and-myths/.

FamilySearch Adds 14M Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, 14M index records and images, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch040620. This site provides direct links to the individual collections.

The unusual number of index records include 11M from New York Land Records, 1630–1975, 2M from United States, GenealogyBank Historical Newspaper Obituaries, 1815–2011. Otherwise, they include additions to indexes from American Samoa, Brazil, Chili, England, Jamaica, Netherlands, Peru, Puerto Rico South Africa 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.

New Collections at Ancestry.com

Unless you have New York State criminals in your family (I do), the addition/updates this week at Ancestry will be of no benefit to you. 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
New York State, Extradition Requisition and Mandate Registers, 1857–1938

Updated Collections
New York, Executive Orders for Commutations, Pardons, Restorations, Clemency and Respites, 1845–1931
New York, Discharges of Convicts, 1882–1915

Historical Record Collections Added in March by MyHeritage

Nearly 6M records were added in March by MyHeritage from two collections: death records from Pernambuco, Brazil, and an electoral rolls from New Zealand. These additions bring the total number of historical records on MyHeritage to 11,937,366,053.

The announcement, as well as links to the two collections can be found at https://tinyurl.com/MHMarch2020.

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