Nu? What's New? Vol. 21 No. 39

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

Shoah Foundation Index Now Part of JewishGen

USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive index of data from nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies found in the Foundation’s Visual History Archive is now accessible via JewishGen. It is also accessible at Ancestry.com at no charge. (All Holocaust-related collections on Ancestry are available at no charge.)

The index not only includes the name of the interviewee, but also the name of every person mentioned in the interview and relationship to interviewee. Data provided in the interviews contains potentially valuable sources of genealogical and family information, with details that can include: name, place of birth, date of birth and relationship to interviewee. If the individual survived the Holocaust, place of death, and date of death.

This collection can be searched via the JewishGen Holocaust Database (https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/holocaust/) or via the JewishGen Unified Search (https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/all/).

Editorial comment: I have a friend, a child survivor of the Holocaust, who is one of the 50,000 people interviewed. She agreed to be interviewed because the foundation said its purpose was to create a permanent testimony that the Holocaust did exist by having an enormous collection of survivor interviews which gave a detailed accounting of the events surrounding their life during the Holocaust period. She has told me that if she was made aware (in the 1990s) that it was the intent of the Shoah Foundation to make her name available on the internet, as well as the names of her murdered parents, step-parents and other relatives, she would never have agreed to be interviewed.

FamilySearch Hits 8B Searchable Names in Historical Records

FamilySearch has announced they now have 8B free searchable names from its worldwide online historic record collection. Growth is in the roots of FamilySearch. It began 125 years ago as the Genealogical Society of Utah, with a mere 300 hundred books of family records on its shelves. Now FamilySearch has 3.2 billion digital images, 490K digital books, and a Family Tree with more than 1B more user-contributed records available online. It adds more than 1M new records every day.

The announcement can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FH8BRecords.

Russia to Digitize Public Vital Records Back to 1926

Jan Meisels Allen, Chairperson of the IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee, reports that Russia will spend about $22 million (1.7 billion rubles) to digitize and translate all of the Russian public vital records dating back to 1926. As some of the records are not in Russian, they must be translated into Russian before converting them into an electronic document. No information was given as to when this project would be completed.

The announcement can be found at https://tass.com/society/1203195.

Online Mortuary Records

The Ancestor Hunt includes an article about online mortuary records. They note that mortuary and funeral home records are yet another little used resource by genealogy researchers. They are difficult to obtain, especially in hard copy from the original funeral home. You can contact them, but often, mortuaries went out of business or were sold to another company. Furthermore, many of the original records have been lost or destroyed.
Online record collections are available from subscription sites such as Ancestry.com and My Heritage. But there are other state and local collections available as well, and some of them are indexes only (from ledger books), and some are free and available online.
Read the article at https://www.theancestorhunt.com/mortuary-records.html.

TheGenealogist Has Royal Airforce Records Online

Eastman Online Genealogy Newsletter reports that TheGenealogist has released 71 new Air Force lists with more than 2M names, as well as 385 extra War Memorials listing more than 31,000 names. Use these records to:
• Find ancestors who became officers in the Royal Air Force
• Discover their ranks, service numbers and medals awarded
• See which branch they served in and their dates of posting

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

Digital Holocaust Archives Online Discussion
Digital Holocaust Archives will hold an online discussion on the implications of digitization on Holocaust research. Five scholars will be included in the discussion including representatives from Arolsen Archives and the Weiner Holocaust Library. The event will occur on October 1 from 3–5pm British Time.

Additional information, including how to participate, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/DHAWebinar.

Practicing Safe Computing #59: “We Are Holding a Package for You”
Hal Bookbinder’s latest essay in his series on “Practicing Safe Computing” addresses the scam where you receive an email that the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx or UPS is holding a package for you. The scam is used to obtain personal information. You are asked to go to a link where you are requested to provide things such as your full name, mailing address, driver’s license, date of birth and a major credit card “for identification purposes only.”

The article, as well as the previous 58 articles, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/SafeComputingArticles.

FamilySearch Adds 2.5M Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, 2.5M index records, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch092120. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. They include records from Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, England, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Peru, South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States.

Included are nearly 1M records from the Charles R. Hale Collection, Vital Records, 1640–1955 for the State of Connecticut. Searching the web indicates the collection may be limited to cemetery records. There are only 297 records for the surname Cohen suggesting that Jewish cemeteries were overlooked.

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.

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