Nu? What's New? Vol. 22 No. 3

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

Ancestry Terminates Its Health DNA Testing

Ancestry.com has discontinued its AncestryHealth service and will instead focus on its family tree business. The service advised consumers of their health risks based on DNA analysis. Bloomberg News notes that initial consumer interest in DNA testing has appeared to level off. At the start of last year, both Ancestry and 23andMe cut approximately 100 jobs, and smaller firms shuttered among sluggish sales.

Ancestry has more than 3.6M paying subscribers to its family history service and more than 18M people in its DNA matching network.

Additional information can be found at https://tinyurl.com/AncestryHealthDNA.

Best Free Sites for Online Newspaper Research for Genealogy

The Ancestor Hunt has an article that describes what they consider the best free sites for online newspaper research for genealogy. They are:
• Elephind – more than 200 million items
• Library of Congress - Chronicling America – more than 17.6 million pages
• Old Fulton NY Post Cards - 50 million pages of New York State (and other states)
• Advantage Archives Collections - 735 collections from 44 states
• Trove - more than 23.8 million pages from Australia
• Google News Archive – more than 2,500 newspapers from the U.S. and Canada

Read the article, which has links to the named sites, at https://tinyurl.com/AHTopNewspaperSites.

European Union Updates its ePrivacy Regulation

Jan Meisels Allen, Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee, reports that on January 5 the European Council released a new draft of the ePrivacy regulation. This is intended to replace the current ePrivacy Directive draft released in January 2017. This is the 14th version in the past 14 years.

If approved it will regulate electronic communications service providers who process data of individuals residing in the European Union. This would include cookies, collecting location-related data and unsolicited emails or text messages and interception of communications. The ePrivacy regulation would complete the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Additional information is at https://tinyurl.com/EUNewPrivacyRegulation.

Finding Your Roots Seventh Season Starts January 19

Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. will start it seventh season on January 19 at 8pm ET on local PBS stations. The programs will explore the ancestries of 20 different celebrities. Among them are actors Glenn Close, John Lithgow, Jane Lynch, Audra MacDonald, Christopher Meloni, Mandy Patinkin and Tony Shalhoub; musicians Clint Black, Rosanne Cash and Pharrell Williams; directors Kasi Lemmons and John Waters; journalists Gretchen Carlson, Don Lemon and Nina Totenberg; comedians Lewis Black, Jim Gaffigan and Roy Wood Jr. more to be announced.

Which celebrities will appear on which dates can be found at https://www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/watch/tv-schedule.

Leo Baeck Institute to Celebrate 1,700 years of Jewish Life in Germanic Lands

The year 2021 marks the 1700th anniversary of the earliest evidence in the historical record confirming the presence of Jews in what became German-speaking lands. Leo Baeck Institute has created a “Shared History Project” that will tell the story of Jews in Central Europe through 58 objects presented chronologically to create a multifaceted historical narrative.

From the earliest evidence of a Jewish presence in the Roman provinces of the Rhineland to contemporary Germany and Austria, the project tells the story of the complex coexistence of Jews and non-Jews in German-speaking lands over 1,700 years. Each object will illustrate the ways in which Jewish history and everyday life was and still is deeply interwoven with the peoples, regions, and countries of Central Europe.

The project began at the beginning of the year. This past week featured an oil lamp showing a menorah from fourth century Trier. Also included was an essay, “How the Menorah Traveled from Palestine to Europe Over the Centuries,” by Dr. Korana Deppmeyer of the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Trier.

The project can be found at https://sharedhistoryproject.org.

1941 Slovak Jewish Census Online at JewishGen

A database of 18,126 Jews living in various Slovak cities and towns in 1941 is now online on JewishGen. This forced registration was done by the Slovak government before the Jews were deported to concentration camps in Poland.

The fields in this database are page/record number, surname, given name, birth date, birth place, residence, survey place, citizenship, remark/occupation, comment and source.

The database is located at https://tinyurl.com/JGSlovakCensus1941. [Note: at time of publishing this e-zine, the site is a broken link. Previously it was accessible.]

Passenger Lists: A Gateway to Foreign Lands and a Former Life

The MyHeritage blog has a good overview of the value of passenger lists to find information about your immigrant ancestors. Subsections include:
• Early Immigration Regulation
• Name Changes at Ellis Island: Fact or Fiction?
• How to Locate Passenger Lists for Your Ancestors
• Church Records
• Emigration Permission Records

The article appears at https://tinyurl.com/MHPassengerLists.

RootsTech Will Match Registrants’ Trees

One of the features of previous RootsTech conferences was they would compare registrants’ family trees to demonstrate if two registrants were related to each other. Called “Relatives at RootsTech,” this feature will be offered at the virtual RootsTech conference next month. But instead of matching against a mere 20,000 registrants, the virtual conference will likely have more than 200,000 registrants.

Participation in the project is optional and requires you submit your tree to the RootsTech database. Here is what to do:
• Visit http://familysearch.org/connect.
• Sign in with your FamilySearch account.
• Follow the instructions on the opt-in page for joining the experience and confirming your registration.
• See your results.

The complete announcement is at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/relatives-rootstech/.

FamilySearch Adds 2.2M Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, 2.2M index records, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch011121. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. They include records from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Kiribati, Micronesia, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Samoa, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United States Venezuela and Zambia.

Among the larger additions are:
Indiana Marriages, 1811-2007 176,943 records
Indiana, World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1940-1947 899,360 records
Iowa, Marriage Records, 1941-1951 249,115 records
Maryland, Allegany County, Tax and Voter Records, 1798-1948 106,545 records

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 Army Deserters Pay Cards, 1943–1945
Sumter County, Alabama, U.S., Circuit Court Files, 1840–1950
Delaware Church Deaths, 1750–1886
District of Columbia, Glenwood Cemetery Records, 1854–2013
Maryland, Baltimore, Locks Funeral Home Records, 1936–2007
North Carolina, Historical Records Survey, Cemetery Inscription Card Index, 1700–2018
Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, U.S., Public Library Records, 1848–1980

Updated Collections
Janesville, Rock County, Wisconsin Directory, 1931

The Tale of Max Mokotoff
The new Ancestry collection, “U.S., WWII Army Deserters Pay Cards, 1943–1945,” noted above caught my eye because my father had a first cousin who was the black sheep of the family: Max Mokotoff. Among Max’s claim to fame was that he was married six times; four times consecutively and twice concurrently. One of his missions in life was to marry women and embezzle money from them.

In my research into the Mokotoff family, I was able to get his military records—he was drafted into the Army during WWII. It showed he was dishonorably discharged for embezzling money from his third wife. The Fulton Newspaper Collection shows numerous accountings of Max, mostly for committing fraud. Ron Doctor told me how to get his records while he was incarcerated in Sing Sing prison. On a positive note, I was able to identify who were his three children (by three different women), none of whom knew of the existence of the others. That story is one of the 72 articles in the book, Every Family Has a Story published by Avotaynu.

In conclusion, guess who is in the new Ancestry collection, “U.S., WWII Army Deserters Pay Cards, 1943-1945”? Answer: Max Mokotoff.

FindMyPast Adds Irish Burial Records

FindMyPast has added the following collections to its system:
• Ireland, Londonderry (Derry) City Cemetery Burials 1853–1961
• Ireland, Dublin City Cemetery Burials 1805–2006
• Dorset Burials
For additional information, including links to the collections, see https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/new/irish-burial-records.

There may be no Jews in the collections. None include the surname Cohen.

Every Family Has a Story

72 articles that have appeared in our journal, AVOTAYNU, each story focusing on the human side of genealogy—how genealogists have been personally affected by their research and how the research of genealogists has affected others.

Some stories will make you laugh, others will make you cry. Some will shock you, others will make you feel warm inside.

Addtional informaton, including an annottated Table of Contents plus a sample story, can be found at https://www.avotaynu.com/books/EveryFamily.htm.